A World War II monument in Charlotte, North Carolina, was targeted by vandals who spray-painted a hammer and sickle over the names of soldiers who died while fighting overseas.
The vandals carried out their crime on the memorial at Evergreen Cemetery sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning. They also painted the quote: “Glory to the day of heroism June 19, 1986.” The quote references a Communist Party uprising in Peruvian prisons.
Wayne White, a U.S. Air Force veteran, gathered a group of volunteers and began scrubbing the monument clean on Monday morning. He told Fox 46 that he was upset by the vandalism because it covered up the 507 names of people from Mecklenburg County who were “veterans and deserve the honor, respect, and dignity.”
He tells me that the names on this memorial “are veterans and deserve the honor, respect, and the dignity”. That’s why he took the day off and drove from his home in South Carolina to get this graffiti cleaned up. @FOX46News pic.twitter.com/pjYwgeYSum
— Jonathan Monté (@JonMonteFOX46) June 22, 2020
“Dedicated to the memory of the Mecklenburg heroes of World War II who made the supreme sacrifice that you might live in liberty, freedom and peace,” the monument reads.
Similar vandalism honoring the Communist uprising in Peru has been seen over the past few years. The same quote was painted over a war memorial on Memorial Day in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, and on the side of a World War I museum in Kansas City, Missouri, last year.
Police in Charlotte have not identified any suspects in the vandalism.
Several statues and memorials have been defaced as part of nationwide protests against racial injustice following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after a white officer knelt on his neck for several minutes during an arrest in Minneapolis. Demonstrators vandalized the national World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., during protests earlier this month.
