Undeterred by the violence over the planned removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, municipal leaders in cities across the US say they will step up efforts to pull such monuments from public spaces. The mayors of Baltimore and Lexington, Kentucky, said they would push ahead with plans to remove statues caught up in a national debate over whether monuments to the US Civil War’s proslavery Confederacy are symbols of heritage or hate. Officials in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jacksonville, Florida, announced new initiatives on Monday aimed at taking down Confederate monuments. Tennessee governor Bill Haslam, a Republican, urged legislators to rid the state’s Capitol of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and early member of the Ku Klux Klan. "This is a time to stand up and speak out," Lexington mayor Jim Gray said in an interview. He had moved up the announcement of his city’s efforts after the Charlottesville violence. The clashes between white sup...

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