Rid some statues without mayhem
Some need to go, but leaders should stand against wanton destruction.
The widespread protests over George Floyd’s death were an understandable and justifiable response to years of racial injustice.
An outgrowth of those protests has been a similarly understandable and justifiable demand to remove statues and monuments honoring Confederates who led a rebellion against the United States in the name of preserving slavery.
That’s morphed into a broader reassessment of statues for historical figures and whether they should have a place in the public square.
Good. Let’s have that debate, as nuanced and complicated as it is.
What we should not have is an indiscriminate, open season on monuments, including those erected for people who fought against slavery.
Statues of abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin, John Greenleaf Whittier and Tadeusz Kosciuszko have been defaced.
Statues of non-Confederate historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Ponce de Leon, Christopher Columbus and Miguel de Cervantes have been torn down or vandalized. Protesters even spray-painted an anti-police acronym on a statue of famed blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
A once legitimate movement to rid the public square of statues that celebrated an unjust rebellion is quickly losing its legitimacy, moving beyond social justice and pursuing a better America to destroying any symbol deemed unworthy.
Want to remove Civil War statues from the public square? Great. We’re all for that.
Tearing down figures like Ulysses Grant? He wasn’t flawless, but did he lead the army that brought an end to the rebellion attempting to preserve slavery in America. That should count for something.
Even if you disagree, there’s a right way and a wrong way to handle these things. The right way played out recently in Lake
County.
Community activists like Mae Hazelton and Mike Watkins persuaded officials in one of Florida’s most conservative counties that it would be an insult to bring a statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith to the county’s historical museum.
The odds were not on their side, but they prevailed through protests, persuasion and pressure, not brute force.
Similarly, Orlando’s “Johnny Reb” statue was quietly moved from Lake Eola to a more fitting site at a cemetery.
The wrong way took place in Madison, Wisconsin, where a mob tore down the statue of a woman on the prow of a Union vessel, honoring the state’s troops who went to war against the rebels.
Another toppled statue honored Union soldier and abolitionist Hans Christian Heg. He died leading his Union brigade against Confederate forces in the Battle of
Chickamauga. For those efforts, the mob decapitated Heg’s statue, dragged it down a street and threw it into Lake Monona.
It’s easy to write off some of these incidents as the acts of historical illiterates releasing pent-up rage, but that understates the scope of the problem.
“The fall of the statues is a huge gain for the movement, though I think that liberal and conservative media outlets will try to represent (it) as senseless violence rather than the strategic political move it really was,” protester Micah Le told the Associated Press.
In other words, instigators might know there’s a difference between Hans Christian Heg and Stonewall Jackson, but they don’t care — the confrontation is by design.
The broad and haphazard movement to topple any old statue has given defenders of indefensible Confederate monuments new political life that their cause didn’t deserve. And it’s put progressive elected officials in the awkward position of remaining silent or angering what they might view as a valuable constituency.
As they grope for a strategy, politicians would be wise to remember the words of a man whose statue is under siege in London’s Parliament Square.
“An appeaser,” Winston Churchill said, “is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
There is no way to placate this element. No historical figure is sinless, though even the one who Christians believe to be without fault also is being targeted.
Shaun King, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist, tweeted last week that depictions of Jesus as white are a form of white supremacy.
“Tear them down,” he said.
The thought of churches having to board up stained-glass windows might seem preposterous. But whoever thought Lincoln would need protection from people protesting racial injustice?
For all its imperfections, millions of immigrants still long to come to America. That’s because the country was uniquely founded on the rule of law. The spreading rule of this brand of lawlessness has brought us to a clarifying moment.
Protesters are wearing T-shirts with the slogan, “Silence is Approval.”
Do our politicians and civic leaders have the spine to take a firm stand against the statue-wrecking spectacle?
Kneeling before it, history has shown, will only get you eaten.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com