Confederate Monuments: Where Do They Belong?
posted by Misha Thomas | September 13, 2017 | In OpinionThe protest that turned violent August 12 in Charlottesville, VA has brought pressure to politicians and cities around the country, to have confederacy statues removed. It has now become a debate on whether or not history is being removed or the dark past of slavery is being glorified.
I am still unsure why people are surprised with Donald Trump’s response to Charlottesville, but nevertheless America demanded a response and they received one…through a series of tweets, four days after Charlottesville’s riot left Heather Heyer killed by a speeding vehicle and at least 19 others injured.
Trump responded in his tweets: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
Critics of the statues argue they stand for white supremacy and people who rebelled against the U.S. in the name of preserving slavery. When reading about this news and hearing how emotionally angry and fearful people were, I had an impulse to research the Confederacy as well as how my own history is affected.
Within in my research I found that the Southern Poverty Law Center created a timeline of 1500 monuments constructed between the civil war in 1861 to today: https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy. What this timeline shows is that statues like Robert E. Lee exist to commemorate the Confederate cause in preserving the rights of whites over people of color. The timeline reveals that there was not a rise in statues being built until two penial times in history. The first beginning in the 1900s with the enactment of Jim Crow laws and the second were erected during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. During this era, it was more common to name schools in honor of the Confederacy.
I cannot say that I wasn’t surprised, but I cannot say that it wasn’t a coherent strategy. These monuments were set in place to intimidate everyone who was not white. An article written by the Fayetteville Observer revealed that we have two Confederate statues in the city of Fayetteville. One is located only ten minutes from Fayetteville State’s campus, located on Dobbin Avenue at Morganton Road to more precise.
Visiting the statue, myself, my first impression was the location; the statue sits across from a church and a two-lane road. Once I approached it, it was larger than I expected. I don’t think FSU has an historical monument as large as this Confederate statue was. It was grand in size and around the base I found a small plaque reading, “This monument was restored through the generous efforts of concerned citizens and the groups represented here and was rededicated on May 10, 1992. Restoration by Fayetteville Monument Work,”
The question I want to propose is this, if we were to take down the monument down, what would change? What would happen? Perhaps what needs to be removed are the people in power.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.