Removing Confederate monuments doesn’t mean a rewrite of history
BY STEPHANIE GRACE|
Aug. 10, 2015
I’d never given much thought to Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, let alone P.G.T. Beauregard or the White League instigators of the Battle of Liberty Place, until recently. Maybe that comes with not being a native Southerner, or maybe it’s just that they didn’t seem at all relevant to modern life.
That changed when New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced his desire to declare the four Confederate-themed monuments nuisances, to remove them from the streets because they don’t reflect the city’s values ...
... As Landrieu has said, it’s not about them, it’s about us.
Those statues aren’t there because of who these men were, but because of the historic cause they represented to those who erected them. They’re products not of the Confederate era, but of a time after, when the nostalgia for the old social and economic order built on the horrible stain of slavery was ascendant. All four were erected not immediately after the war but between 1884 and 1913 — a period following Reconstruction, when stirring progress made by African-Americans was being dismantled and Jim Crow firmly established ...
http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/opinion/13142744-123/stephanie-grace-removing-confederate-monumenets
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