Stolen staff returned to Harriet Tubman statue in Annapolis
BALTIMORE -- A staff stolen from a Harriet Tubman statue on display at an Annapolis museum has been returned after it was taken nearly a month ago.
No one knows if the staff was the target of a mindless attack or a crime of racist aggression. They're just glad they got it back.
"It's just mind-boggling to me," visitor Rich Adams said.
The staff, also known as a veve, now sits in its rightful place.
"I was surprised that on this street in front of a museum that someone would be so brazen to vandalize a statue—just in general," Adams said.
The theft took place in December. That's when vandals snatched the staff from the hands of the statue in front of the Banneker-Douglas Museum in Annapolis.
"When we discovered that the statue was vandalized, we were collectively devastated," Canel Johnson, the executive director of the Banneker-Douglas Museum, said.
It's a disturbing sign more than a century later that the iconic abolitionist is still facing attacks—even in the form of a statue.
"The statue was only here at the Banneker-Douglass Museum for a few months before it was vandalized," Johnson said.
It was on loan to the museum by the Goya Contemporary Gallery in Baltimore.
"With the help of the Annapolis police, the community at large, we were able to recover the veve and return it to its original glory," Johnson said.
