Athens should turn from Confederate past (GA)

[struggle4progress]

By JOSHUA EATON
published Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Earlier this month, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal quietly reclassified Confederate Memorial Day and Robert E. Lee’s birthday as unnamed state holidays on the official state calendar ...

For their part, Confederate apologists have responded with the same argument they always make — that memorializing the Confederacy is about taking pride in Southern heritage, not celebrating a system of chattel slavery and white supremacy ...

Even more striking than what we memorialize is what we ignore. A list of Athens’ slave owners from 1850 includes many names that should be well-known to anyone familiar with our city’s parks and streets — Bishop, Cobb, Clayton, Dougherty, Franklin, Hancock, Lumpkin, Pope. Meanwhile, thousands of slaves lived and died in Clarke County before their emancipation. Where is their memorial? What street is named after John Lee Eberhart, a black man who was seized from the Clarke County Courthouse by a lynch mob in 1921 and burned alive in neighboring Oconee County? ...

... Take down the Confederate monument. Rename those city streets. Memorialize the generations of black Athenians who struggled through slavery and segregation. Turn the double-barrelled cannon toward Richmond.

http://onlineathens.com/opinion/2015-09-02/eaton-athens-should-turn-confederate-past

[NightWatcher]

1. Next outrage, please. Thomas Jefferson had slaves

Are we going to tear down his memorial in DC?

Don't change every road named after anyone from the 1800's. I lived in Athens and couldn't begin to tell you anything about any of those guys' names other than there's a Varsity on Lumpkin and I lived off of Baxter St.

This is an overreach. Sure, please rename the schools and roads named after Klansmen and other monsters, but let's not go crazy.

[struggle4progress]

2. These are discussions that the US needs to have over a rather extended period

When I was growing up, the confederate flag appeared regularly on TV and in magazines, waved by white supremacists with hate-twisted faces, angry about integration and all manner of similar "communist plots"

Years and years of that behavior has left a mark on the national psyche

If I were black, I'd flinch every time I saw some of those confederate symbols, wondering if the person there was just a harmless idiot or a potentially violent threat to life and limb

This is not an abstract issue, and the reaction it inspires is not purely paranoid fantasy

We shouldn't reinforce that. People should be able to walk into courthouses without first confronting monuments to white supremacists on the lawns outside. Children should be able to attend schools without daily confronting on the buildings names of white supremacists who had nothing to do with the place. California doesn't need a Jefferson Davis highway or Robert E Lee elementary schools.

We can commit ourselves to teaching real history, that people can learn from, rather than glorifying the ugly heroes of the confederacy