Charlottesville isn't the only community dealing with controversial historical statues and symbols. Other southern cities are grappling with the issue too.

But there's a town in Northern California that's removing a statue of President William McKinley from its town center.

The Arcata City Council voted to get rid of the McKinley statue because of the anti-Native American policies of the former president.

McKinley was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan and the Curtis Act, which authorized the seizure and removal of thousands of Native people from their lands.

Sofia Pereira, the mayor of Arcata, says she looked to the events of Charlottesville last summer in making her decision.

"As a community, it's up to us to decide what are the monuments we want to have prominently featured in the heart of our town, so we looked at the conversations that happened across the South and in Charlottesville," she said.


She also said that Arcata and Charlottesville have something in common, in that neither McKinley nor General Robert E. Lee or General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson visited Arcata or Charlottesville. So the question becomes why should the cities have statues to these men on their public grounds.
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