Well, those Confederate statues are apparently hollow. Who knew? Makes sense but for some reason I thought they were solid. That said, while I know a lot of people are applauding the toppling of the Confederate monument in Durham, that’s not the right way to get rid of them for a lot of reasons.
We’re a nation of laws and we can’t accept mob rule. It’s not okay for a small group of people to determine what is acceptable and what’s not. And it’s certainly not okay for them to destroy public property with no consequences.
Besides, these actions are gifts to Republicans. Right now, they don’t have a whole lot of reason to go to the polls in 2018. Trump’s been a disappointment and the GOP-controlled Congress can’t get anything done. But if monuments continue to come down at the hands of mobs, bringing down Confederate statues will turn into a law and order issue both for the GOP base and rank-and-file voters who don’t care so much about monuments as they do about safety. And, almost certainly, the far-left and antifa will try to brand anyone who disagrees with their actions as racist, driving otherwise moderate voters toward Republicans.
The problem is bigger than just the monuments. Too many otherwise peaceful demonstrators are liking and sharing videos of people punching alt-right demonstrators. Antifa anarchists are infiltrating what should be non-violent protests and encouraging people to shut down free speech. If this trend escalates, progressives will lose what moral authority they have when countering white supremacists.
Mark Twain said, “Never argue with a fool, onlookers might not be able to tell the difference.” A corollary to that is, “Never punch a Nazi, people might not know who is who.” Right now, the Nazi, Klan and other white supremacist groups are unnerving people. The more they see and hear white supremacists, the less support these groups get. Shutting them down with intimidation and violence just muddies the waters about who is right and who is wrong.
It’s time for monuments to Confederates to come down or be moved. The people who say they are about heritage, not hate, are wrong. It’s about history and history is shared. For some people, African-Americans from the South in particular, the Confederacy is about a legacy of oppression and violence, otherwise known as hate. Let’s get rid of them, but let’s not lose the moral and political high-ground doing it.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Remember that the Boston Tea Party’s dumping British tea into Boston Harbor was also illegal action by a mob. History has a funny way of identifying winners and losers, and sometimes it takes a while to sort things out. I recommend that the Durham statue be replaced by that of an African-American breaking his chains.
Being a Southerner but one who is not proud of the regions support of slavery, I feel the attempt to remove any references to the Civil War and its history is wrong. It happened. History should be about truth as much as reporting events. And although memorials such as Lee’s statue have been coopted by the “alt right” as heroic … this has only happened in recent times. The original intent was to mark history and its often ugly events. As a nation the Civil War was not our brightest moment. But it happened. By removing all memorials of one side or the other does not serve history at all. Perhaps we need a Civil War national museum or something of that nature to record the history of both sides accurately … without the emotions of todays political atmosphere. But simply tearing down all Confederate statues simply because they were the losers of that unjust war, it is still a part of our rich history and should not be forgotten. Lee is as much a part of our legacy as is Grant. Move the statues to a less prominent exposure to avoid upsetting the part of the population who were harmed most by what Lee represented but do not erase statues such as this one simply because they were on the wrong side of a war. I just do not want my great great granddaughter/grandson asking who Robert E Lee was and what is his significance to their history. That would mean the horrible history of the Civil War has been left to but one side’s version of history … not the entire accurate history. That would be a disservice to all citizens of this country.
Wow. Your comment is incorrect on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.
1. Statues are not history lessons. Statues are monuments to things we revere. That’s why there are no statues to traitors, why there are no statues to the enemy, why statues for battles that the erectors lost tend to focus on the bravery of people in the battle more than the battle itself.
2. These statues were not put up to “mark history and its often ugly events”. These monuments were put up during the Jim Crow era with a clear message of “N****r, know your place”. The vast majority of these statues weren’t put up until the 20th century. (See http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article31123988.html for details.)
3. History classes and museums can and do cover the Civil War in states where there aren’t monuments to the Confederacy (or even the Union). I’m sure we will somehow manage to do the same if our monuments to the Confederacy go away.
4. We don’t cover the British perspective of the Revolution. We don’t even give the British or French perspective of World War II, much less the Nazi German or Fascist Italian perspective. Why would it be a “disservice” to only tell the AMERICAN perspective of the Civil War? Particularly when the Confederate perspective is based on claims that are demonstrably untrue such as the whole “states rights” canard? (If you think the South actually supported states rights, do yourself a favor and check out the South Carolina Declaration of Secession and the Confederate Constitution. The former only mentions “states rights” to complain about the concept; the latter specifically denies states the right to end slavery. Think about that: Could there be any clearer example of the Confederacy’s priorities regarding slavery and states rights than the fact that they specifically denied a state the right to NOT have slavery?)
Anyone here know who Braxton Bragg was? How about Ambrose P. Hill? John Hood? ? I’m sure you’ve heard their last names with the word “Fort” in front of them. All are United States Army installations today. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians pass through their gates on a daily basis of all nationalities and races. All three served as generals in the Confederate States Army after having served as United States Army officers.
While you may believe that statues, memorials, and sculptures are erected for surreptitious means and intents, stroll the battlefield of Gettysburg. It will take you several days. Do take stock of the number of memorials, statues, and structures that stand as mute testament to lives wasted needlessly, for reasons that had no real bearing on the majority who fought there and died there. But there they are remembered in granite and marble and bronze. Many of those monuments were erected in the early 20th century since public funds didn’t pay for them. They were put there in later years as a means by the living to remember the fallen. Not as slave owners, not as defenders of slavery, not as champions of the Union; but as soldiers. They purchased with blood what we many times now hold in contempt by not exercising our liberties and rights. Sadly, we can neither learn from their sacrifice nor understand fully the why of what they did. Only that they did it on the one side and the overreaching reason was wrong and by contemporary standards, evil.
They also serve as a reminder of what can happen when a notion, an idea, a belief, manifests itself as rational but is truly insanity masked as reason. The removal will not change history as several have already stated.
So take them down or leave them up as you will.
I think it would be helpful to reframe this scenario in the context of history and ask ourselves some hard questions. Picture the Civil War happening today and ask: 1) If a group of states decided to secede for the same reasons including slavery, 2) If over 600,000 men were killed, 3) if these states no longer respected the UNITED States nor its Constitution nor its system of laws and were willing to kill to achieve their objectives——–Would we feel inclined to memorialize the leaders of this seditious movement on pedestals in our public parks and buildings?
Would we make heroes of these same leaders and make role models of them for our children?
Instead, some would consider these same men domestic terrorists worthy of a military tribunal.
While I do not condone violence, I can understand the emotions that engender it.
Put these statues in a history museum and use them to teach our children the sin of discrimination and patriotism.
Of course, the proper way to have the statue removed would be for the Durham County Commissioners to vote to have it removed from the Courthouse. But the GOP legislature took this ability away from local governments to assert its dominance over whatever the people in a particular locality might want. In this case, it seems entirely reasonable for citizens to take matters into their own hands.
Precisely. And let us not forget that the legislature that did this is, quite literally, an illegally constituted body. They were elected via districts that have been ruled illegal. They have no legitimacy.
I do not support vigilante action. But when an illegally constituted body denies citizens the right to make their voices heard through legal channels, I find it hard to condemn them when they make their voices heard through channels that are illegal but harm no living creature and likely have the support of a majority of citizens in the affected jurisdiction.
It is too bad we cannot find the space in time for a civil discussion of the complexity of race and history and the South. It can always start with the understanding that all people of good sense and good will should embrace: that slavery is always, in all time, without defense that it was and is evil and that the most important determinant in the decision to secede for most states was the fear of the end of slavery. Yet within the broader discussion we ought to be able to examine the proposition that perhaps many of the non-slave holding soldiers of the Confederacy had some other instinct that led them to serve a cause that was neither noble nor, indeed, sensible in the saner evaluation of history. We ought to be able to ask questions of our African American neighbors to help us understand freed slaves who became slaveholders. What was in their hearts? And we ought to be careful about defining what is the sum of a man’s character and value. Robert E. Lee did serve the institution of slavery by his service to the Confederacy. Tear down his statue on that count; and while doing that still remember his parting words to the soldiers – blue and gray – at Appomattaox; “go now and make your sons brothers.’ And remember that moment in the year after the end of the war when he sat in St. Paul’s in Richmond and a black man stood and walked to the altar to take communion. A stir began to rise until Lee stood, walked to the front and knelt beside the man. Lee had said that “duty is the most noble word in the English language.” Our individual choices as to how to live out that value are not always easy but our thoughtful, even prayerful consideration of such moments may be when we are at our best.
I think that pulling those Confederate Statues down is exactly the right course of action. They are deliberate symbols of white supremacy erected between the late 1890’s and the 1920’s in the wake of the terrorist campaign and armed coup d’etat that took North Carolina from the Fusion Party. They were installed at County Court Houses by an illegal, minority government as a reminder to blacks and poor whites not to vote and that justice was not available to them through the courts, or anywhere. The modern day Nazis (and they are Nazis; swastikas, Sieg Heiling, Nazi slogans, violence) put an enormous amount of symbolic importance on those statues. They’ve shown they’re willing to murder American citizens for those statues. Pulling the statues down would demonstrate how impotent the Nazis really are. But then I’m an American veteran. It offends me to see statues honoring people who killed my brothers and betrayed their oaths.
Thomas, why do you think the people who think Confederate statues are about heritage rather than hate are wrong? Certainly the statues are about our history. We should remind ourselves of where and what we have come from, the bad as well as the good. Focusing on the negative side of history and trying to hide that part of history is not a good thing, not if we want to learn from history. That statue of a Confederate soldier was not the symbol of any white supremacist group. The only hate group rallying around that statue was the group that tore the statue down.
Why not put up more statues, maybe a Martin Luther King, Jr statue as prominently placed as the Confederate soldier statue? Encourage more dialogue in peace, not more violence.
Even if the people who think confederate statues are symbols of heritage rather than hate are wrong, they still have that opinion. Tearing down the statue is an attack against those opinions, stirring up ill will unnecessarily. Maybe public money shouldn’t be spent on Confederate statues. Maybe the statues should be moved to less-prominent locations or sold at auction with the money benefitting the public school system. Definitely the statues should not be torn down by mobs.