(BALTIMORE SUN) — Mayor Catherine Pugh was disappointed by the vandalism of the Francis Scott Key monument in Baltimore on Wednesday — and has no plans to remove the monument from Eutaw Place, a spokesman said.
Exactly 203 years after the attorney penned the poem that would later become the national anthem, the city awoke to find the words “Racist Anthem” spray-painted on the Bolton Hill monument and red paint splashed on it.
Baltimore police are investigating, and the city’s Commission on Historic Art Preservation will send a conservator to evaluate how to clean it and what that will cost. But officials don’t have a plan for protecting the monument against future vandalism, Pugh spokesman Anthony McCarthy said.