A crowd toppled a bronze Confederate statue in front of a county administrative building in Durham, North Carolina, as throngs of "anti-fascist" groups gathered there days after white nationalist-fueled violence turned fatal in Virginia.
Derrick Lewis, a reporter from the local NBC affiliate WNCN, posted a video to Twitter showing the statue crashing to the ground in front of the old Durham County Court House during what organisers billed as an "emergency protest".
With a strap tied around the neck of the statue, protesters spat, kicked and gestured at the mangled figure after its base was ripped from the granite block.
The statue, which depicts a uniformed and armed Confederate soldier, stood atop an engraved pedestal that read, "In memory of 'the boys who wore the grey". It was erected in 1924 and stood 4.5m tall, according to a memorial database. One side of the granite pedestal depicts a Confederate flag.
"The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments," Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said via Twitter. A 2015 state law prohibits the removal of any "object of remembrance" on public property that "commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina's history" without legislative approval.
