NEW YORK — With little warning, the University of Texas at Austin removed three Confederate monuments from its campus,10 days before classes are set to begin.

Work to remove statues of two Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, and the Confederate Cabinet member John Reagan began late Sunday and continued into early Monday. A statue of James Stephen Hogg, the 20th governor of Texas, was also being removed.

The university’s president, Greg Fenves, explained that the decision had been made after the violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., this month opened his eyes to what the statues represented.

One woman was killed and dozens more injured after white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park.

At a city council meeting Monday night in Charlottesville, its first since the rally and violence, anger boiled over, with some residents screaming and cursing at councilors and calling for their resignations.

Scores of people packed the council’s chambers, and The Daily Progress reported Mayor Mike Signer was interrupted by shouting several times in the first few minutes of the meeting. As tensions escalated, the meeting was halted. After talking with members of the crowd, Councilor Wes Bellamy said the council would drop its agenda and focus on the crowd’s concerns.

Speakers, some yelling and hurling profanities, then took turns addressing the council, expressing frustration that leaders had granted a permit for the Aug. 12 rally that had turned violent. Others criticized the police response to the event, which drew hundreds of white nationalists and other counter-protesters.

In a separate development, dozens of Liberty University alumni said they plan to return their diplomas in protest after the university’s leader, Jerry Falwell Jr., defended President Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally and deadly car attack in Charlottesville.

When Trump declared last Tuesday that there had been “very fine people’’ among the white nationalists and neo- Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville, and suggested a moral equivalency between those groups and what he called the alt-left, he found few prominent allies even among Republicans.

But Falwell — the evangelical leader who became Liberty’s president after his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., died in 2007 — responded glowingly. He said Trump issued a “bold, truthful statement’’ about the clash, and said there was “finally a leader’’ in the White House.

To many alumni, already uneasy because of Falwell’s public statements and their reflection on the university, this was the last straw.

One of them created a private Facebook group called “Return your diploma to LU.’’ Georgia Hamann, one of the organizers, said a conservative estimate was 50 people so far planning to send their diplomas back.

The University of Texas statues were the latest to be removed this year, mostly after the events in Charlottesville.

In April and May, at night and under guard, New Orleans removed four Confederate statues that had been the subject of controversy for years. Last week, Baltimore removed four statues in the middle of the night, in a swift operation similar to the one in Austin.

In a letter to the Texas campus community, Fenves wrote that after the events in Charlottesville, it had become clear to him “that Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.’’

He said the statues’ historical and cultural significance was compromised by what they symbolized.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.