A years-old fight to rid Baltimore of its Confederate statues ended early Wednesday morning, with all four of the monuments being carted off on flatbed trucks.

Last night between midnight and 5:30 a.m., crews sent out by Mayor Catherine Pugh’s administration tore down the city’s four monuments to Confederate generals, soldiers and families, and the Supreme Court justice who denied black people a legal escape from the chains of slavery. This morning, empty marble bases were all that remained of the monuments in Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon Place, the Wyman Park Dell and on University Parkway.

At the knoll in Wyman Park near the Baltimore Museum of Art, the base of the Lee-Jackson Monument sat decorated in graffiti, with a statue of artist Pablo Machioli’s “Madre Luz” [“Mother Light”] resting nearby. The Baltimore Department of Public Works sent out an employee to begin removing the graffiti on the marble base at around 10 a.m. The gaze of Machioli’s statue of a pregnant black woman raising her fist, child on her back, loomed as he painted over “Black Lives Matter” and other phrases.

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