Baltimore’s Confederate monuments are returning to the city. What now?

Nearly nine years later, the splatters of red paint are still visible on Baltimore’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument — a scarlet reminder of the contentious, ongoing debate over the right and wrong ways that America remembers its history.

The statue is one of four city-owned monuments that made national headlines in 2017, when Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered their secret removal as cities around the country confronted statues that critics said glorified slavery and racism.

Since September, Baltimore has loaned the sculptures to “MONUMENTS,” a Los Angeles art exhibit designed to recontextualize what these divisive statues represent in today’s society.

With the exhibition now over, a question remains: What will happen to Baltimore’s controversial monuments upon their return home?

The city is still figuring it out.

As of now, the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), the city-run organization responsible for preserving Baltimore monuments, “is collaborating with other City agencies to transport the monuments back to Baltimore and arrangements for their care upon arrival,” CHAP spokesperson Jasmine Johnson said in an email.

CHAP Chairman Harry Spikes confirmed last week at the agency’s monthly meeting that the next steps for the statues after that are still to be determined.

The L.A. exhibit, co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, also featured Baltimore’s 1887 Roger B. Taney Monument; the 1917 Confederate Women’s Monument; and the 1948 Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument.

For decades, the statues stood in city locations like Wyman Park Dell and Mount Vernon Place. They aimed to honor Confederate generals and soldiers, along with Calvert County native Taney, the chief justice who delivered the Supreme Court ruling that enslaved people were not protected by the U.S. Constitution, a.k.a. the Dred Scott decision.

Then, overnight, they were gone.

Pugh ordered their removal in the middle of the night on Aug. 15, 2017, just days after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, over plans to remove another Lee monument.

The decision was made covertly, Pugh told The Baltimore Sun at the time, to avoid a potential conflict like the one in Virginia, which resulted in the killing of counterprotester Heather Heyer and the deaths of two state troopers.

While the monuments, removed to a storage lot, were out of sight, a larger debate over monumental tributes continued both nationally and locally.

Mayor Brandon Scott, then a city councilman, told NPR at the time that the monuments “should be melted down and repurposed for statues that can show true Baltimoreans and true American, great American history.”

Asked for comment on the future of the monuments in Baltimore, the mayor’s office said in a statement that it has “remained informed” as CHAP and other city agencies figure out the next steps for the statues, per spokesman Silas Woods III.

Historian and Johns Hopkins professor Martha S. Jones pointed to the reckoning over racist violence and injustice that followed the 2015 mass murders of nine Black Americans at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

Since 2015, more than 140 Confederate monuments have been removed from the public, according to The Washington Post, with some toppled by protesters and others taken away at the direction of local officials.

In Baltimore, a monument of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus was ripped down from its Inner Harbor pedestal on July 4, 2020, and dragged into the water. Less than a year later, the city took down a 1980 statue of enslaver and Canton founder Capt. John O’Donnell from the neighborhood’s square after hundreds signed an online petition in support of the removal.

John Ford, co-chair of the Canton Anti-Racism Alliance, said the Confederate monuments should be stored “where they could be useful to historians” but not returned to prominent public spaces in Baltimore.

“If they were to go up again, we may find them vandalized similarly to the way they were in 2020 and 2021,” Ford said. “If it’s in somebody’s interest to keep those monuments safe and valuable for future history, they should probably be in a more controlled environment.”

Last Juneteenth, the Canton Anti-Racism Alliance added a historical marker to O’Donnell Square Park with 48 names of people listed as O’Donnell’s property in probate records. The group, founded in 2020, is working to change the name of the park, said Ford, who is a Banner donor.

In March, the marble-and-resin tribute to Columbus — whose 1492 arrival in the Americas, as vividly described by historian Howard Zinn, led to the enslavement and violent exploitation of the land’s native people — found a new home on White House grounds. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle described its new placement as “well deserved.”

Protesters are still pushing back. A toilet recently appeared on the Baltimore pedestal that formerly housed the Columbus statue, an act claimed by local veteran activist Duane “Shorty” Davis.

“This toilet represents how you treat us,” Davis said in an accompanying Instagram video.

John Pica Jr., president of Italian American Organizations United, which owns the Columbus monument, said the tearing down of the statue and subsequent toilet incident were an “insult to the Italian American community.”

Pica said his group has raised $200,000 to replace the Columbus statue next year with a depiction of an anonymous immigrant Italian family instead, given the controversy associated with the explorer.

“We don’t want to go through that again,” said Pica, who added he does not “see the connection between Columbus and the Confederate statues.”

“Those statues should be discarded,” he said of the latter.

Not everyone agrees. Kate Burgin, CEO of the Walters Art Museum, said in a statement that exhibits like “MONUMENTS” help “illuminate the histories that have shaped our present moment.”

The Walters, she noted, published an expanded museum history in 2021 acknowledging that cofounder William T. Walters commissioned the Taney monument. On March 5, 2026, the Mount Vernon museum hosted a panel discussion about Baltimore’s Confederate monuments with Jones and artist Nekisha Durrett, along with the Brick Director Hamza Walker and curator Hannah Burstein, who worked on the “MONUMENTS” exhibition.

“By revisiting and sharing this history, the Walters aims to foster a more informed dialogue about the legacy of such works and their place in both Baltimore’s landscape and our collective memory,” Burgin said. She said she had no opinion about what should happen next with the statues.

The day after the Walters event, Jones flew to Los Angeles to see “MONUMENTS.” Viewing the decommissioned statues next to contemporary artwork — which highlighted “the gaps and omissions in popular narratives of American history,” according to the exhibit — further convinced her of the statues’ value.

“Put in the right, thoughtful context, they really can be publicly displayed and do meaningful critical work,” Jones said.

Once the monuments return to Baltimore, she hopes the city’s cultural institutions will find ways to present the statues in a new light, like the L.A. exhibit did. Mainly, she wants society to “get smarter about how we memorialize the past.”

“The Confederate monuments taught us that maybe men are just men and not great — at least not great in the sense that they can stand unchallenged,” Jones said.