Police prepare for clashing protests in North Carolina

Hundreds of anti-racist demonstrators marched through the streets of a North Carolina city on Friday in response to rumours of a white supremacist march. 

The sheriff in Durham, N.C., had issued a statement that he was investigating the rumours, but no gathering of white supremacists was apparent by midafternoon. However, officers blocked streets and businesses closed. 

Hundreds of others gathered downtown with signs such as "Black Lives Matter" and "We Will Not Be Intimidated." They marched for several blocks and then held an impromptu rally in front of where a Confederate statue was toppled Monday. On Friday, protesters altered an inscription on the statue's base that had read: "In memory of the boys who wore the gray" with the phrase "Death to the Klan." 

The protest was largely peaceful, but two white men and some protesters engaged in a shouting match, and then the men entered a government building.

Willis Brown, who is black, said he came out to support racial unity. He said protesters are "trying to live in harmony." 

Earlier in the week, protesters tore down a Confederate statue in the city.

Efforts to remove many such statues around the country have been stepped up since the Charlottesville rally, called by white nationalists to protest plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

​Midafternoon Friday, the mayor of Charlottesville, Va., called for an emergency meeting of state lawmakers to allow the city to swiftly remove the statue.

Mayor Mike Signer said last week's attack has transformed the monuments from "equestrian statues into lightning rods." He called on Gov. Terry McAuliffe to convene a special session of the General Assembly.

"We can, and we must, respond by denying the Nazis and the KKK and the so-called alt-right the twisted totem they seek," Signer said.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, four people were charged with trying to rip away a plaque honouring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Asheville, N.C., police said the arrests came after officers found a group of protesters around the plaque on the city's main downtown plaza about 8 a.m. Friday. Photos show people using crowbars and an electric hand-drill to yank away the top-right corner of the metal plaque from a granite boulder. The vandals failed to separate the rest of the plaque.

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Meanwhile, hundreds of mourners attended the funeral for a Virginia state trooper who died in a helicopter crash after monitoring a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe and others who gathered at St. Paul's Baptist Church in Richmond on Friday praised Trooper-Pilot Berke Bates as a devoted family man and proud police officer. McAuliffe told colourful stories of Bates from his time spent on the governor's protective unit.

Authorities say Bates was a passenger in a helicopter providing video to police of activities in downtown Charlottesville last Saturday before it broke off to lend support to a motorcade for the governor.

Also Friday, the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman killed during Saturday's protest, said that after Donald Trump's latest comments, she did not want to talk to the president.

"You can't wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying, 'I'm sorry.' I'm not forgiving him for that," Susan Bro told ABC's Good Morning America.

She added she would tell Trump: "Think before you speak."

• Historians say removal not the only way to deal with racist relics