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In cities across the U.S., calls to take down monuments to Confederate leaders are growing louder since the deadly events in Charlottesville, Va.

One of the most dramatic monuments to the Confederacy is called Stone Mountain, in northern Georgia. It's sort of a Confederate Mount Rushmore, with Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis carved into a mountainside.

Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and lifelong African-American civil rights activist, says the memorial should stay. Young served as a congressman from Georgia and ambassador to the United Nations. He was with Martin Luther King Jr. the day he was assassinated.

"That is a tremendous carving. And I don't want to see that destroyed. I don't care who it is," he says.

Young is not alone. An NPR/PBS NewsHour poll released this month found that 44 percent of African-Americans believe Confederate memorials should stay, compared with 40 percent who say they should be removed. Nationwide, 6 in 10 Americans say the monuments should remain. Still, Young's comments come as prominent Democratic and African-American activists call for the monuments to be removed or "contextualized," to avoid celebrating the leaders who supported slavery.

Interview Highlights
On how removing Confederate monuments alienates potential civil rights allies
We made progress in the civil rights movement as 12, 13 percent of the population at most. We couldn't have made any change with that. In order to make change we had to build a majority of at least 60 percent. We could build a majority around lunch counters. We could build a majority around jobs.
On the Black Lives Matter activists calling to dismantle Confederate memorials
I'm saying these are kids who grew up free, and they don't realize what still enslaves them - and it's not those monuments.

What worries me is that this country will turn to the right so that it'll - be taking down Martin Luther King's statue next when the racist majority takes over. And I'm saying that a minority can't be provoking a racist majority that is still underemployed, undereducated and dying faster than we are - that the issue is life and death - not some stupid monument.
On adding to - not removing - the Stone Mountain monument
I would only consider adding to it a freedom bell because Martin Luther King said in his speech, "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain [of] Georgia." He named that specifically.

Morning Edition editor Daniella Cheslow and Web producer Heidi Glenn contributed to this story.

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Civil Rights Activist Argues To Keep Confederate Monuments

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In cities across the U.S., calls to take down monuments to Confederate leaders are growing louder since the deadly events in Charlottesville, Va. One of the most dramatic monuments to the Confederacy is called Stone Mountain, in northern Georgia. It's sort of a Confederate Mount Rushmore, with Stonewall Jackson, Robert E.

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Lawrence A. Kuznar is a professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

As an anthropologist who has studied the meaning of monuments and sacred spaces in other cultures, the recent controversy and violence surrounding Confederate monuments has been ethically challenging. I love my country, and part of my professional responsibility is to foster tolerance. I have also worked with our military to help thwart the Islamic State, an organization that instituted slavery in our time. As such, I detest the legacy of division, bigotry and slavery these monuments represent. But I think they should remain.

In the 1980s, I worked as an archaeologist at ancient Mayan ruins in Central America and saw how monuments to their rulers were defaced during the tumultuous fall of their civilization. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten similarly defaced and destroyed statues of earlier Egyptian gods in his religious reform 3,300 years ago, and Spanish conquistadors destroyed Aztec and Inca monuments and statuary in their war on idolatry in the New World.

And there are plenty of examples of the desecration of monuments in the 21st century. The Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001; we aided Iraqis in toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in 2003; and nothing can compare to the scale of destruction of monuments at the hands of the Islamic State.

Simply removing monuments and moving them so they are out of sight is likewise not new, either. The Inca Empire of South America removed icons of conquered peoples' gods and effectively held them hostage in a temple in the Incan capital of Cuzco. In our time, the post-Soviet Russian government removed many statues of Lenin and others, which now reside in Muzeon Arts Park in Moscow.

People effectively act as though destruction of a monument exorcises its power and removal banishes the power from their midst. But these pieces of metal and stone only have the meaning we assign to them, and that meaning can take any form we like. They can be revered or reviled; honored or ridiculed; or co-opted for a new purpose.

I understand the affront that Confederate monuments are to those whose ancestors were held as slaves or died preserving our country, and to those who suffer and oppose racism today. However, destroying monuments takes a page out of the playbook of mobs across the centuries, lowering one's self to that moral plane.

Further, removing Confederate statues amounts to whitewashing our history, turning our heads away from the inconvenient truths of our past. We should let them stand and use them to remind ourselves of what we are and are not, the cost our forebears paid for our freedom and to educate our children.

And the facts are plain: The South seceded from the United States over the issue of slavery. Many Americans believed in the superiority of Europeans over Africans at that time. Slave owners used that belief to justify the owning and abuse of millions of human beings. In the late 1800s, the era of Jim Crow disenfranchisement of blacks was ushered in and continued until the 1950s. This period witnessed the greatest spike (especially from 1900 to 1930) in monument building honoring the Confederacy. A smaller spike occurred from 1954 to 1968, in reaction to the civil rights movement.

The Civil War was the single most devastating war our nation ever fought. Nearly as many Americans died in that war than all of our other wars combined. Americans never paid so dearly for their country and what it was to be. With regard to fighting against racist ideology, World War II claimed 400,000 American lives. These two wars may account for 80 percent of the blood spilled for our country.

Civil War monuments bear a constant testimony to all of this history, none of which should be forgotten. The monuments should remain, and we should constantly remind ourselves of what they represent.

When racists revere these monuments, those of us who oppose racism should double our efforts to use these monuments as tools for education. Auschwitz and Dachau stand as mute testimonials to a past that Europeans would never want to forget or repeat. Why not our Confederate monuments?

Destroying or removing monuments is the easy way out of our obligation to understand our past and improve our future. Monuments to our nation's racism can be as much a tool to counter it as they can be a tool to foment it. The choice and obligation is ours.

Read more on this topic:

The Post's View: It's time for a full and fair reckoning with Confederate statues

Tony Horwitz: Is the Confederacy finally about to die for good?

Bree Newsome: Go ahead, topple the monuments to the Confederacy. All of them.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: There's a right way to judge America's past

Dana Milbank: Obama offers the perfect response to the Confederate flag wavers

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Opinion | I detest our Confederate monuments. But they should remain.

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Lawrence A. Kuznar is a professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. As an anthropologist who has studied the meaning of monuments and sacred spaces in other cultures, the recent controversy and violence surrounding Confederate monuments has been ethically challenging. I love my country, and part of my professional responsibility is to foster tolerance.

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The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That's why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen. Has this series exposed you to new ideas? Tell us how. Email us at ourpicks@nytimes.com.

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A statue honoring Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Credit... Matt Eich for The New York Times

* Gracy Olmstead in The Federalist:
"We should also consider which parts of our history we are most proud of, and most eager to uphold. Conservatives believe in preserving and carrying on the best of the past - not its worst."
If the events of the past week prove anything to Ms. Olmstead, "it's that these memorials are splitting us further and further apart." She urges her readers - even those who do not want to see these statues taken down - to "seek to understand and sympathize" with those who support their removal. At the very least, she writes, "we can mitigate their toxic effect" by adding context or erecting new memorials. Read more "

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* Ben Shapiro in The Daily Wire:
"Everyone is trying to use the issue of Confederate monument removal as a club to wield against political opposition, and as a broadening mechanism for their own movements."
For Mr. Shapiro, the issue at hand has nothing to do with Confederate monuments. The reason we're really "talking about statues," he writes, is that they serve as a proxy argument for larger, political fights. The "truth" is that "Confederate statue removal is a local issue, not a national one." Read more "

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* Rod Dreher in The American Conservative:
"He fought for the wrong side and deserved to lose. But notice that after he lost, he called on all defeated Southerners to cease hostilities and to commit themselves to the service of the United States. [...] It mattered that he did not urge bitter resistance, but rather nobly counseled patriotism."
After New Orleans decided to take down its statue of Robert E. Lee in May, Mr. Dreher wrote a response to the controversy. He said he is "not losing sleep" over the removal of other Confederate leaders, but he's troubled by the move to take down a memorial to Lee, a "far more complex man" than many people realize. Read more "

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* Jonathan S. Tobin in The New York Post:
"A generation ago, nobody would have thought Washington or Jefferson controversial. Now it appears that even Mount Rushmore isn't safe, since among its quartet of greats, only Lincoln might be exempt from the iconoclasts."

Mr. Tobin believes the slippery slope reasoning of the president and others is not merely hypothetical - the logical result of the left's attempt to take down offensive statues has already been borne out in real life. He cites as his example an attempt to take down a famous statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of New York's Natural History Museum. Read more "

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The empty pedestal of a statue that was pulled down by protesters in Durham, N.C., on Monday. Credit... Madeline Gray for The New York Times

* Gersh Kuntzman in The New York Daily News:
"Ever wonder why there are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin?"
Mr. Kuntzman argues that Americans should treat their Confederate history the same way that Germany treats its Nazi past. He points out that "monuments are never about history itself" but rather about "what the people putting up the monument think about history." Read more "

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* Tyler Zimmer in Jacobin:
"The Confederate flag lionizes both racists and class traitors - indeed the two are inseparable."
According to Mr. Zimmer, the symbols of the Confederacy are not just about white supremacy, but also, inextricably, about class. Confederate flags and monuments, he writes, signify a "campaign by elites to hoodwink poor whites into throwing their lives away to protect ruling class wealth and privilege." Read more "

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* Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:
"To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield."

Mr. Serwer takes on the "myth of the kindly General Lee," arguing that this was a man "whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country." There's no way, he writes, that one can defend Lee in "good conscience" unless one puts "tribe and race over country." Read more "

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Workers in Baltimore removed a Confederate statue early on Wednesday. Credit... Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Sun, via Associated Press

* Eric Boehm in Reason:
"Baltimore offers a primer on the nonsensical slippery slope argument offered by defenders of the Confederate monuments."
At his news conference, Mr. Trump posed a rhetorical question to the assembled reporters, "Where does it stop?" Mr. Boehm responds by citing the example of the Baltimore City Council, which just this week unanimously passed a resolution to remove the city's Confederate monuments. Writing in the libertarian publication, Reason, Mr. Boehm puts it simply: "It stops....where it stops." Read more "

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* Ilya Somin in The Washington Post:
"The vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery."
There are historical figures that pose a greater moral dilemma than that of Robert E. Lee, posits Mr. Somin. Woodrow Wilson poses one such example. However, he argues, "giving undeserved honor to the evil is at least as grave an error as denying proper recognition to those who merit it." Read more "

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* James M. McPherson in The New York Review of Books:
"The theme of liberty, not slavery, as the cause for which the South fought became a mantra in the writings of old Confederates and has been taken up by neo-Confederates in our own time."

In a 2001 article, Mr. McPherson traces the ways in which Confederate history has been rewritten to excise slavery as the animating issue at the heart of the Civil War and replace it with a "Lost Cause" theory of the conflict. The Lost Cause myth posits that "slavery was merely an incident," and the conflict was in fact all about "a difference of opinion about the Constitution." Read more "

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* Robert E. Lee in 1869 in The Republican Vindicator, via PBS:
"I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered."
How did Lee feel about Confederate statues? Perhaps it's best to refer to his own writing on the matter. Here, in a letter declining an invitation to attend an event memorializing the battle at Gettysburg, he writes about the importance of moving on. Read more "

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* The New York Times in 1865:
"So long as the South has an admiration for the rebellion, so long will the South be rebel at heart. [...] True patriotic devotion should redeem any portion of the Republic from reproach. It should bury forever every memorial calculated to perpetuate dishonor and disparagement."
On Aug. 16, 1865, 152 years before the most recent debate over memorializing Confederate statues, writers for The Times published this article, advocating the preservation of the "memorials of rebel cruelty." Read more "

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Want the Partisan Writing Roundup in your inbox? Sign up for the Have thoughts about this collection? Email feedback to ourpicks@nytimes.com. Morning Briefing Newsletter or the What We're Reading Newsletter.

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Right and Left on Removal of Confederate Statues (Published 2017)

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The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That's why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen. Has this series exposed you to new ideas?

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Birmingham, Ala., has a complicated relationship with racism. Some of the most notable events from the Civil Rights era took place in the city. Now, there's renewed debate about the fate of the city's Confederate monuments.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

President Trump offered some thoughts today on Confederate monuments. He tweeted this. Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. Since the violence in Charlottesville, some cities have removed their Confederate statues. Birmingham, Ala., has covered up a monument. Esther Ciammachilli from member station WBHM reports.

ESTHER CIAMMACHILLI, BYLINE: Earlier this year, the Alabama Legislature passed a law preventing any local government from removing, relocating or altering any historical monument. This came after a wave of southern cities began to take down Confederate statues following the racially motivated killings at a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015. Birmingham has long wrestled with how to portray its past. In the 1950s and '60s, some of the bloodiest events of the civil rights era happened here. This week, the city's mayor, William Bell, ordered a Civil War monument to be covered up.

WILLIAM BELL: It's a monument to segregation. It's a monument to human bondage. It's a monument to sedition and the breakup of the United States of America.

CIAMMACHILLI: The base of the memorial is now wrapped by a plywood barrier to hide the inscription honoring Confederate soldiers and sailors. Birmingham resident Mark Davis was sitting next to the memorial in Linn Park. He says it should have been removed a long time ago in a respectful way.

MARK DAVIS: Seems like people wanted to take offense at, you know, the heritage and all that thing. But I think this is a whole different question now.

CIAMMACHILLI: LaJoya Sanders and Tonya Jackson were strolling by. They say race is complicated in the South.

TONYA JACKSON: Yeah, we don't see no color. Like, people look at us like we're crazy because I'm white, and she's black, and we're walking together.

LAJOYA SANDERS: And we can't...

JACKSON: We don't see no colors.

SANDERS: ...Move forward as a community, state, city, United States, nothing because of racism. They keep trying to hold us back...

JACKSON: Yep.

SANDERS: ...In the past, but they saying, let's move on. Why hold onto the past?

JACKSON: Can't live in the future living in the past.

SANDERS: Yeah.

CIAMMACHILLI: But this week, Alabama's attorney general, Steve Marshall, sued the city of Birmingham for covering up the Civil War monument. Today, speaking to reporters, he said it's not about living in the future or the past. It's that the mayor broke the law.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

STEVE MARSHALL: This has nothing to do with the Confederacy, nothing to do with the long-term history of this particular monument itself.

CIAMMACHILLI: The private group United Daughters of the Confederacy paid for the monument in 1905. Mayor Bell says he'd like to see the monument moved to a museum where it can be displayed with perspective and context.

BELL: But not give it a place of prominence as something for us to be proud of or waving over someone's head that, oh, we wish the good old days were here when people of my race were subjugated to Jim Crow laws.

CIAMMACHILLI: Bell says this statue has no place in a public park, especially for a city whose majority population is African-American. The mayor welcomes the lawsuit and says it should be up to the city, not the state, to decide how to honor and remember its racial past. For NPR News, I'm Esther Ciammachilli in Birmingham.

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In Birmingham, The Debate Over Confederate Monuments Is Renewed After Charlottesville

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Birmingham, Ala., has a complicated relationship with racism. Some of the most notable events from the Civil Rights era took place in the city. Now, there's renewed debate about the fate of the city's Confederate monuments. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: President Trump offered some thoughts today on Confederate monuments. He tweeted this.

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It's been over 150 years since the last shots were fired in the US Civil War, but a debate still rages over how history will remember the losing side.

Hundreds of statues dedicated to the Confederacy - the southern states which revolted against the US government - exist all throughout the United States, and often serve as an offensive reminder of America's history of slavery and racial oppression.

Recent decisions by local governments to remove those memorials has triggered a backlash from a vocal group of Americans who see their removal as an attempt to subvert US history and southern culture.

President Donald Trump waded into the debate on Thursday, tweeting that the controversial monuments are "beautiful" and bemoaning that their beauty would be "greatly missed" from cities.

When were they erected?

Most Confederate monuments were not built until nearly a generation after the war ended in 1865, mostly due to a lack of funds during the Reconstruction era.

It was not until the turn of the century, as southern states began to enact so-called Jim Crow laws designed to deprive recently freed slaves of equal rights, that the monuments began to go up in public spaces.

The second wave came in the 1950-1960s, as civil rights campaigners demanded desegregation and equal rights for African-Americans.

"The civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists," according to a report by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups and civil rights movements.

To date, there are over 700 monuments to the Confederacy - most, but not all, located in the South.

Who do they depict?

Some memorials are dedicated to the foot soldiers of the Confederacy, and many depict famous generals such as Robert E Lee or Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

Descendents of Jackson on Wednesday called for depictions of their relative to come down in the Virginia state capitol, saying that the white supremacist protest in Charlottesville "showed us unequivocally that Confederate statues offer pre-existing iconography for racists".

The phrase "Monuments Must Go" began trending on Twitter in the US, as users shared the descendants' open letter to Richmond officials.

After the Unite the Right rally, which was comprised of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi supporters, Robert Lee's great-great grandson condemned "the misuse of his memory by those advancing a message of intolerance and hate".

The far-right marchers had nominally come to the university town to protest against the city council's decision to remove a statue of Lee.

Why are they controversial?

Most defenders of Confederate symbols say they are not meant to memorialise slavery, which the South fought to preserve.

They say that the war was fought for "state's rights" and against the federal system, adding that symbols such as the Confederate "battle flag" commemorate the region's history and culture.

But most historians agree it was about slavery. Racial minorities, especially black Americans, feel that their presence in public life is offensive.

Maine Governor Paul LePage said on Thursday that removing them would serve simply to whitewash history.

"How can future generations learn if we're going to erase history? That's disgusting," Mr LePage told WGAN radio, adding that removing them is "just like" removing monuments to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"To me, it's just like going to New York City right now and taking down the monument of those who perished in 9/11. It will come to that," he described.

Mr Trump has also applied this argument, saying that it will only be a matter of time before liberal activists suggest removing monuments to Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, because they owned slaves.

In 2015, only days after the 150th anniversary of the Civil War was commemorated, a white man killed nine parishioners in an African-American church in South Carolina.

Photos of the man posing with Confederate flags changed how many Americans viewed the emblems.

No longer were they considered harmless symbols of culture, commemorating a rebellious spirit.

After the South Carolina government chose to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol, many local governments followed suit by removing their own images.

Now a second wave of removals are happening, sparked by the violent events in Charlottesville.

Just this week, vandals have targeted them in Ohio, North Carolina, and Maryland.

But some states such as North Carolina, where this week angry crowds tore down a bronze statue of a soldier, have laws preventing local governments from removing the monuments without higher approval.

In a Marist poll conducted this week, 62% of Americans believe they should remain "as a historical symbol", and somewhat surprisingly, 44% of African-American respondents agreed.

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It's been over 150 years since the last shots were fired in the US Civil War, but a debate still rages over how history will remember the losing side. Hundreds of statues dedicated to the Confederacy - the southern states which revolted against the US government - exist all throughout the United States, and often serve as an offensive reminder of America's history of slavery and racial oppression.

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2017 charlottesville white nationalist rally

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confederate flag and monuments controversy

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Here are the Confederate memorials that will be removed after Charlottesville | CNN

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Many local government officials are now weighing whether to keep Confederate memorials in their cities and towns. Read a state-by-state breakdown.