Plaque honouring Confederate president Davis removed from Montreal building

Aug 15, 2017 | 8:15 PM

MONTREAL — A commemorative plaque honouring a former president of the Confederate States of America has been removed from a Hudson’s Bay Co. building in downtown Montreal.

Spokeswoman Tiffany Bourre told The Canadian Press in an email the plaque of Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederate states during the Civil War, was taken down Tuesday evening.

A statue of Davis was removed in Louisiana last May. The Montreal plaque had been there since 1957 and was supplied by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a non-profit organization dedicated to “honouring the memory of its Confederate ancestors.”

Bourre did not specify why it was taken down, but many people had been calling for such a move in the wake of last Saturday’s violence in Virginia where the fate of a statue of Davis’s best-known general — Robert E. Lee — had become a flashpoint.

Hundreds of white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and others converged on Charlottesville, Va., ostensibly in an effort unite right-wing factions in the city.

Rally participants clashed frequently with counter-protesters. A man linked to white nationalist groups has been charged with murder and other counts after a fatal hit-and-run that killed a woman and injured 19 others.

 

The Canadian Press

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version erroneously said the Jefferson Davis plaque had been on the Hudson’s Bay Co. building in Montreal since 1967.