There are many famous Lee’s including two from the 2nd Continental Congress, and another hero of the revolutionary war. So a “Lee” all by itself isnt necessarily to honor Robert E.
Richard Henry Lee
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Light-Horse Harry Lee
That reminds me of how King County, Washington, where Seattle is located, decided in recent years to change its namesake from a nineteenth century slaveowner to Martin Luther King, Jr.
There’s a statue of William Sherman in Lancaster, Ohio, which figures because he was born and grew up there. You can visit the Sherman family house in Lancaster which dates to 1811. William Sherman’s brother John became a U.S. senator and a force behind the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Confederate monuments went up in relatively small and steady numbers after the war until the early 20th century, when the number spiked at around the same time Jim Crow laws were going into effect.
Silly aside:
And one from a fried chicken stand that’s far less controversial.
A fifty foot statue of Sherman in each and every town and city in the south would have made a good point.
Yep, that would fire up the locals.
They seem to have convinced themselves of their own oppression even without such a blatant symbol.
What are they going to do - pull them down and “erase history”?
It’s probably apocryphal, but there is a story that goes around about an attempt to rename a Lee school after Bruce Lee. Which would be awesome.
Apparently, Bruce Lee came up pretty frequently as a replacement for Traitor White Supremacist Lee when the casual polls are done:
Jackson, MS should probably rename itself after a different Jackson while we’re at it (IIRC it’s named for Andrew, not Stonewall). I nominate Mahalia. Or possibly Reggie.
We’re just honoring our great generals.
I’m not saying that we should have put a diorama of Atlanta burning to the ground along with every statue. No, we just have one that we put in Gettysburg.
Seriously, though, if they were to object to such a thing based on it being a symbol of oppression, then they would have no leg to stand on when others objected to statues of confederate traitors being symbols of oppression.
Michael.
No. Just…no.
We finally got around to putting a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol. Not enough, but it’s a start.
I’d really really like to see a Freedom Bell atop Stone Mountain, as a monument to Dr. King.
Bit of a hijack, but Gutzon Borglund didn’t carve Stone Mountain. He was hired to do so, and created models, but he clashed with the money people over finances and personality conflicts, and was fired in 1925. In a fit of pique, he destroyed his models, and the partial head of Lee that he carved was blasted off the mountain.
The current carving is the work of two sculptors, Walker Hancock and Roy Faulkner, who finished the carving in 1974. It’s worth noting that the final impetus for completing the carving was Brown v. Board of Education.
I’m not agreeing with them; I think the “Lost Cause”/“War of Northern Aggression” narrative is a disgusting lie, with strong overtones of the same sort of “we are the best, therefore if we lost it is because THEY stabbed us in the back” mentality that brought Hitler to power in interwar Germany. And yeah, statues of Union generals as part of a much more comprehensive (and far longer) Reconstruction period would have done wonders for bringing the South up to the same level of modernity that the rest of the country has achieved. And yes, of course whinjng about statues of General Sherman while praising statues of ANY Confederate traitor is ridiculously hypocritical. I’m just saying, that’s never stopped anyone before.
“I want to say to Gen. Sherman, who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire, that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city.” - Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, 1886.
I’ve lived in Atlanta all of my adult life, and have never heard anyone whining about Sherman. Or talking about Sherman, for that matter. Most residents, I suspect, would react to a statue of him with a resounding “Meh”.
Not saying we don’t have plenty of racists in Georgia; just that they don’t need to reach back to the Civil War to justify or memorialize their bigotry. Erecting a statue of Malcolm X or Jesse Jackson would piss them off a lot more than raising one of W.T. Sherman.
I’d really like to see that damn monument to bigotry, hatre, and stupidity blasted off the mountain.
Sure, but the Freedom Bell actually has a chance of happening.
I agree! But the straight line was just so… compelling.