Statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis falls on a man in Portsmouth protests
A protester has reportedly been left critically injured after a Confederate statue pulled down fell onto his head on Wednesday in Portsmouth.
On Wednesday night protestors tore down a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis along Richmond, Virginia’s famed Monument Avenue. The group had attached ropes around the base of the statue and had been pulling at it for some time until shortly after 11pm the statue ceded and toppled.
According to witnesses, as the statue came down it fell onto a protestor who was left in a critical condition. The man had been standing directly in front of the statue as it fell, striking him in the head.
‘We could see that his skull was actually showing, he was convulsing on the ground and he lost a great amount of blood,’ the president of Black Lives Matter 757 told a local station. ‘We ask everybody to pray for that man right now.’
Demonstrators stopped to commemorate the man with a moment of silence before acquiescing to police demands to leave the area. The man, believed to be in his thirties, was rushed to the hospital and as of Thursday neither his condition nor his identity is known.
A total of four statues were beheaded and pulled down at Portsmouth Confederate Monument as police watched on Wednesday as the protests sparked over the death of George Floyd continued.
Columbus statue was also dismantled
The statue of Christopher Columbus in Richmond’s Byrd Park was torn down by protesters, set on fire and then submerged in a lake on Tuesday. Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492 unleashed centuries of European colonization across the continents, making him a symbol of conquest and violence to Native Americans.