Where statues of Confederate leaders do and don’t belong
Oct 3rd 2015
... Among the monuments that the mayor of New Orleans wants to move, for example, is one to the Battle of Liberty Place, an insurrection by white supremacists nine years after the war ended. The guiding principle in these stand-offs should be that, when public land and resources are used in a way that causes widespread offence, as preserving these state-sponsored tributes does, the authorities should have a good reason for doing so ...
... The civil war and segregation, they say, are part of America’s history and must be remembered. Indeed they must. Yet by propagating a sentimental version of the war that glosses over the South’s belligerence and attachment to slavery, too often these monuments misrepresent the history they purport to embody. Tillman’s statue describes him as a friend “of the common people”, omitting his open advocacy of bloodshed ...
... Many of these monuments went up as the Jim Crow system of segregation became entrenched a century or so ago and even more recently, during the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s: Stone Mountain, a vast, hagiographic carving in Georgia, was completed in 1972. They commemorate 20th-century bigotry as much as wartime heroism.
... It is possible to distinguish between someone whose principal contribution to history was ultimately baleful and someone, such as Washington, whose failings were subordinate to their claim to greatness. Wherever the line is drawn, Confederates and segregationists who once divided their country and now alienate many of its citizens, fall on the wrong side ...
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21669958-where-statues-confederate-leaders-do-and-dont-belong-museum-pieces
