The Hudson’s Bay Company has removed a commemorative plaque dedicated to one of the leaders of the Confederate States from its flagship store in downtown Montreal.
HBC spokesperson Tiffany Bourré told Radio Canada International in an e-mail the plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis, who presided over the Confederate States fighting to preserve slavery during the American Civil War, was taken down Tuesday evening.
The plaque has been removed! pic.twitter.com/fKyGNmx2Pj
— Sarah Leavitt (@sarahleavittcbc) 15 August 2017
Bourré did not say why the company decided to take the plaque down now and what it plans to do with it.
Calls to remove the plaque emerged after a 32-year-old woman was killed in a deadly car attack on anti-racism protesters who were demonstrating against a white nationalist gathering that rallied against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.
“I’m not sure why we would go out of our way to commemorate this dark and horrible thing,” Andrew Papenheim, who had campaigned for the removal of the plaque, told CBC’s Sarah Leavitt.
“Jefferson Davis was not an honourable man, he committed treason in defence of chattel slavery.”
The plaque commemorating Davis, who spent some time in Montreal in 1867 after the end of the Civil War, was placed there in 1957 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The non-profit women’s group was dedicated to propagating a revisionist perspective of Confederate history as a reaction to the growing strength of the Civil Rights Movement both in the U.S. and Canada.
Written in French, it read in part: “To the memory of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, who lived in 1867 in the home of John Lovell, which was once here.”
Based on reporting by Sarah Leavitt of CBC News
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