Sounds more like nutpicking. And there are reasons for why that is a former city council.
One should note here also that the report says predominantly, not prominent.
Wow, super clever point! Applause!
But wrong. Not all are racist Nazi apologists. Some of them are straw men. Some of them say things that nobody said in order to refute those things nobody said so they can feel like they’ve made an argument.
Awhile ago, I said that folks who fly the Confederate flag are, without exception, ignorant or racists or assholes. I’ve been thinking about whether a similar principle applies to people who want to maintain the UDC Confederate memorials. Leaning toward thinking monuments are a little more complicated than the flag, due to the added complexity of historiography. Still, I think a lot of the desire to keep the statues is a result of ignorance about their origins and a failure to consider effective history pedagogy.
Just a nit pick of the Tim Tyson quote which I otherwise agree with wholeheartedly. He said, “There are no monuments to the slaves that built our state.”
At UNC, probably less than 100 feet from Silent Sam, there is the Unsung Founders Memorial.
For some reason this sculpture is hated seemingly equally by both those on the left and the right. I rather like it, but I am universally regarded as somewhat of a weird dude.
I’d forgotten about that monument–I’ve admired it several times on my visit to Chapel Hill. Never knew it was reviled.
It’s not like I took a poll or anything, but I’ve never heard anything good about it.
One specific complaint that I heard is that it is dwarfed by the nearby Silent Sam.
On the bright side, it might not be for much longer :).
Surely the legislature will do the right thing.
Sometimes I miss North Carolina sometimes I’m glad I moved to Colorado.
Did you know there’s a Tupelo Honey in Denver?
Woah, I had no idea.
If it weren’t for family here, I’d be making a move. On the one hand I get fighting for the state you love. On the other hand, Jesus it’s exhausting here.
A rebuttal may have been offered but I obviously don’t think it was successful.
When I went to the University of Texas, I stayed at Simkins Dorm. The dorm was named after Law Professor William Stewart Simkins which seemed appropriate since it was near the law school and many law students stayed there. It turns out that Simkins also organized the Florida Klan and had upper level positions in the Texas Klan? Who knew?
I guess they could have looked at the writings of Simkins and sort of noticed things like his 1914 speech Why the Klan? or how he railed against Northern carpetbaggers and fought for the continued segregation of the law school.
The dorm built in 1955 just after Texas was forced to desegregate the law school following the Sweatt v. Painter decision. Coincidence?
Most of these confederate monuments were built long after the actual war. Most of these monuments are to men whose contribution to U.S. history would not get them the fame they would require to have a statue. Most were built during times of civil rights struggles as a way of supporting official segregation policies.
However, I am sometimes wary of renaming or removing these monuments. There’s a reason we Jews insist that the concentration camps stay – they’re reminders of what happened. Simkins Hall is now Eastside Dorm as if this poke in the eye of minority students never happened. I’d prefer to keep the statues. Maybe put on them the number of slaves these guys owned and the number of people they’ve lynched. Put on them all the ugly things they said. Then let everyone know why we actually built memorials for such awful people.
We forget how much slavery was important to the early United States history. We forget that at the signing of the Declaration of Independence all thirteen colonies had legal slavery. Or that much of the reason behind the Electoral College was due to slavery. Or, that for the first fifty years of our republic, it was the slave holding South that had the money and the balance of power in our government. Part of the reason for the Civil War was the decline of Southern Power compared to the industrial North.
“May have”? Please consider reading the rebuttals and responding to them. It’ll obviously make it more difficult to offer the lame unclever analogies you’ve offered so far, but I promise it’ll be worth it :).
octopus agreed in another thread that it’s okay to take down monuments and memorials in some circumstances (Nazi memorials after WWII was the example) – so any disagreement isn’t about whether monuments and memorials can be taken down/moved, but which monuments and memorials should reasonably be taken down or moved.
So, octopus why specifically shouldn’t Confederate memorials and monuments be removed if the elected local or state governments decide to do so? Or why shouldn’t I advocate that they be removed?
Okay, but the analogy here isn’t to statues, but to slave markets. In the US, those aren’t generally well-marked (Charleston is an exception, and boy is it weird how it’s celebrated as a tourist attraction devoid from the slave trade). In my town, where the main square has a monument to an avowed racist who helped lead NC’s struggle against Reconstruction and against the burgeoning Fusion party, there’s talk right now about renaming his monument and about setting a monument at the location of the slave market, a couple hundred feet away.
Back to statues: after WWII ended, most of the Third Reich’s statues were destroyed or hauled away. Some were rediscovered a couple years ago, statues that embodied the Nazi’s ideals. Do you think those should be reinstalled in downtown Berlin?
Because that’s roughly equivalent to what we’re talking about in the US.
And that will do… what?
Will suddenly more blacks go to college? Will black on black crime end? Will black schools suddenly be as good as white schools?
Symbolic gestures wont solve any real problems.
It’ll solve the problem of offensive statues on public land.
I mean, one nice thing is that black people won’t walk by statues put up by white supremacists every day, having that daily reminder of the racist system they’re struggling against. Another nice thing is that white people won’t walk by those reminders every day either. That’ll be nice, right?
Nobody is saying that removing statues is going to cause unicorns to fart rainbows. But it’s an easy, low-bar thing we can do to slightly deshittify our country.
Like I said above, I’m ok with them being moved or sold off. As said before, statues get moved all the time. Consider how in 2012 the statue of Joe Paterno was removed from Penn State.
Now I do have a problem with some mob going crazy anjd just tearing down whatever the hell they want. But if the owners (cities, schools, etc…) want it down, what is the problem?
The presence of the statue is a symbolic gesture. If the locals want it removed, they can breezily note that said statue is a symbolic gesture that solves no real problems.
It’d also be nice to solidify in people’s memories that the South wasn’t glorious, that plantations aren’t just beautiful buildings, and that this country doesn’t have blood in its hands. Will it fix everything in the black community? Not at all. But it may help fix some things in the white community.
“The mob going crazy”? Classy.
What is the problem? Let’s get specific. In North Carolina, the problem is that our legislature is unconstitutionally gerrymandered in a way that deliberately reduces the voting power of African Americans. (This is the court’s interpretation, not mine). Our current legislature was elected in an unconstitutional election; we don’t currently have a legitimate government here. (This is my interpretation).
One of the things this illegitimate government did was to recognize that black people disproportionately live in urban areas in North Carolina, and accordingly they passed a series of laws to weaken city governments, concentrating power in the illegitimate state body where whites held an unconstitutional supermajority.
Among those measures designed to disempower black people was a measure that forbade cities from removing historical monuments without prior permission from the state. The citizens of Durham, in other words, have no redress to their local government to take their statues down; and recourse to state government has been gerrymandered into irrelevancy.
That’s the problem. You see the problem?
Mobs going crazy my ass.