US takes hard look at confederate memorials
years,” Ilya Somin, professor of Law at George Mason University who has written on the issue, told HT. “There was also widespread debate about the Confederacy in the 1950s and 1960s (during the Civil Rights movement) and in the decades immediately following the Civil War.”
And as before, there are those who have argued for the memorials to be left alone, as part of the country’s history and heritage, good, bad or ugly. President Donald Trump, whose election in November has unleashed a fresh wave of racial tensions and emboldened white hate groups, is among them, with the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists.
“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!,” the president wrote in multiple posts on Twitter on Thursday, adding, “Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
A statue of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, a wellknown confederate general like Lee, was among the four taken down in Baltimore that night. But George Washington, the first president, and Thomas Jefferson, the third, are both safe, despite the president’s warning.
But others, and that’s a steadily growing tribe, have argued for the need to nation to confront its history. Ordering the removal of the statue of chief justice Taney, Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan said in a statement, “While we cannot hide from our history, nor should we, the time has come to make clear the difference between properly acknowledging our past and glorifying the darkest chapters of our history.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and other extremists, counted 1,503 confederate place names and other symbols in public places in 2015. That included 718 monuments and statues, 109 public schools named for Lee and other confederate icons; 80 counties and cities named for Confederates. There are 10 US military bases named after confederates, including three of the largest military bases in the world – Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, and Fort Benning in Georgia.