Families don’t oppose removal of statues

The year is 2017, and as the president of the United States vehemently defends monuments to the Confederacy, some descendants of Confederate leaders are calling for them to be taken down.

When an attacker drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a rally of white nationalists and neo-nazis in Charlottesville, Va., the violence fueled a long-standing conflict over whether Confederate monuments — like the statue of Robert E. Lee whose preservation in Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park became a rallying point for white nationalists — belong in public spaces. President Donald Trump, after several days of angry remarks, tweeted on Thursday that he was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”

But the great-great-grandchildren of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, three of the Confederacy’s top military and political leaders, feel differently.

They are not all on exactly the same page. While two of Jackson’s descendants called unequivocally for the removal of Confederate statues in Richmond, Va., three descendants of Lee and Davis said simply that they would not object to moving such monuments to museums. But none of them sided with those Americans, including the president, who argue that removing the statues from their current locations would Family of Stonewall Jackson