‘Totems of hate’: Cities doing right thing in removing statues
For more than a year, members of the Baltimore City Council, like officials in many communities across the nation, had drifted indecisively about the fate of the city’s increasingly controversial Confederate monuments. Then, two weeks ago, white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., violently resurrected the frightening ghosts of the Civil War.
That settled the issue in Baltimore: On Monday night, the council voted unanimously to take down the statues. On Tuesday night, in an unannounced, unceremonious action, four statues were torn from their pedestals as the city slept, with no throng of witnesses or protesters in attendance.
“It’s done,” Mayor Catherine Pugh told her city on Wednesday morning. She explained, “With the climate of this nation, that I think it’s very important that we move quickly and quietly.”
That is sound advice. The racist rage in Virginia and President Donald Trump’s shamefully sympathetic response have prompted local and state politicians to encourage community peace by weighing the future of Confederate monuments civilly and unapologetically, even if the president has not.
Trump’s refusal to learn the lessons of Charlottesville deepened his estrangement from two panels of national business leaders enlisted to advise him. As more executives resigned in protest of the president’s equivocations, Trump was forced to disband the groups on Wednesday rather than suffer the humiliation of continuing defections.
“Intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values,” the Strategic and Policy Forum of corporate leaders declared in a parting statement.
The president’s resentment at being expected to denounce the white supremacists who oppose the removal of such monuments has overshadowed the search for reconciliation and closure among state and local politicians. In Dallas, Mayor Mike Rawlings described the city’s Confederate statues as “dangerous totems” and asked the City Council to settle their fate. In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper proposed that the legislature reverse a 2015 law that blocked the removal or relocation of monuments. Civil War history “belongs in textbooks and museums,” the governor said, “not a place of allegiance on our Capitol grounds.”
The shifting mood was epitomized by the Virginia governor, Terry Mcauliffe, who reversed his earlier position and urged local governments to consider taking the statues down because they had become “flashpoints of hatred.” Similar moves were underway in San Antonio, Memphis, Jacksonville, Fla., and Lexington, Ky., where Mayor Jim Gray called for the removal of two Confederate statues near the auction block where African slaves were once bought and sold. “This is the right time,” the mayor said. “We accelerated that because of the events in Charlottesville.”
The bigots who feel so encouraged by Trump — resurgent neo-nazis, white supremacists and anti-semites — claim they are only defending history itself.
If so, they should devote particular attention to Baltimore’s removal of the monument to Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision that fed national divisions before the Civil War. Taney wrote in 1857 that under the Constitution, black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Dred Scott is part of the woeful history that underpins a swaggering modern white supremacy movement that claims an ally in the nation’s president.
This should be morally repulsive to all Americans, most particularly Trump.