Removed Confederate Monuments in Maryland to Remain Hidden, Despite Trump Executive Order

The statue of Captain John O’Donnell, an 18th century merchant who enslaved dozens of Black people on his Maryland plantation, won’t be returning to its former perch in Baltimore’s Canton Square, despite an executive order last month from President Donald Trump.

Neither will the four Confederate monuments removed from their pedestals in the dead of night in 2017 and later shipped to California to become part of a museum exhibit. Nor will the plaque formerly attached to a wall in the capitol rotunda honoring combatants on both sides of the Civil War.

“Whether or not the plaque qualifies under the president’s executive order, it will not be returning to the State House,” Carter Elliott, senior press spokesperson for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, wrote in a one-sentence email to The Baltimore Sun.

Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” on March 27 requiring the reinstallation of many Confederate monuments that were removed following the nationwide protests sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota while in police custody.

Trump’s directive has raised questions about the fate of more than a dozen statues, plaques and grave markers spread throughout Maryland that honored people once perceived as heroes but now viewed by many as oppressors.

But the executive order is limited only to monuments taken down after Jan. 1, 2020, and only to those under the control of the federal government.

A Sun reporter inquired about the status of 13 monuments previously located in the Free State; a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior confirmed that all were removed from state, municipal or private property.

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The first four monuments were taken down by former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh on June 16, 2017 — or 30 months before the start date specified by Trump’s order {snip}

For the next six years, the monuments were held in an unsecured lot managed by the city Department of Transportation, where they were vandalized, according to an investigation conducted by the city’s Office of the Inspector General. A police report was not filed until six months after the damage was discovered, and the city did not pursue an insurance claim to recoup the loss.

The statues were later shipped to Los Angeles, where they are expected to be part of an exhibit opening in October in that city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

A second wave of monument removals in Maryland took place in 2020 and 2021 in the wake of nationwide protests {snip}

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