# data[].attributes.body
C-May 1,2019/NA
R-DNA/DNA/DNA
A-Brian Mejia/It may be sketchy (.com)

A-No

P-To inform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Virginia judge has ruled that the Confederate statues in Charlottesville are protected by state law because they are war monuments - and will not be taken down while the case is ongoing.

The statues were at the center of shocking violence in the summer of 2017 as neo-Nazis and other white nationalists, marching in support of them staying put in a park in the college town, clashed with anti-rightwing demonstrators in an outbreak that left many injured and one young demonstrator dead.

The ruling on Wednesday by Judge Richard Moore came after a lawsuit was filed against city council members by the Monument Fund, an organization based in Charlottesville that campaigns to preserve such statues, which could yet go to trial.

The suit was filed back in March 2017, alleging that the city council violated state laws when they voted to remove the statues of Confederate generals Robert Lee, and later, the Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson monument from Charlottesville.

Moore cited how the statues depict the men in military uniforms and on horses associated with them during the civil war. Virginia law makes it illegal for local municipalities to remove war monuments without permission from the state.

Moore acknowledged the controversy that has surrounded Confederate statues around the nation in recent years, and said his ruling is limited to the question of whether the Lee and Jackson statues fall under the definition of war memorials in Virginia law.

"While some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy, others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders in a difficult time ... and do not think of white supremacy at all and certainly do not believe in, accept or believe in such. In either event, the statues to them under the undisputed facts of this case still are monuments and memorials to them, as veterans of the civil war," Moore wrote in his ruling.

Before the case goes to trial, Moore must first rule on other pending issues, including the council's motion for immunity from the lawsuit.

Bob Fenwick, a former city councilor who is named in the lawsuit, believes that the council still has a good case for removing the statues, claiming that "It was a lawful act that we did" and that he was "very comfortable" with his vote to remove the statues. "It's based on a flawed law, so the law doesn't make much difference; it was a public process, it was a lawful process, so that's our case," he said.

In an effort to fight against the council's original vote to remove the statues, hundreds of far right members gathered in Charlottesville in August 2017, to protest in what was called a Unite the Right rally. The protest turned deadly when self-avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors killing a woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring nearly three dozen other people. Fields was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison last year.

Other Confederate monuments across the country have been the subject of fierce debate and sometimes clashes. Many have been taken down following the violence in Charlottesville.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Virginia judge rules confederate statues are war monuments and can't be removed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Virginia judge has ruled that the Confederate statues in Charlottesville are protected by state law because they are war monuments - and will not be taken down while the case is ongoing.

# data[].attributes.body
C-August 22, 2019/NA
R-Yes/Yes/No
A-Patrik Jonsson/It could be sketchy (.com)
A-No
P-To Teach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Erected in 1911, Atlanta's Peace Monument depicts a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier, "Cease firing - peace is at hand."

Is that a representation of reconciliation - or oppression? Vandals defaced the monument in 2017 after a violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked nationwide protests.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

This month, Atlanta added an explanatory plaque at the Peace Monument site, saying the monument "should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood," its original intention.

Two years after Charlottesville, many locales continue to struggle with how to properly present Confederate statuary.

In Georgia and other former Confederate states, state laws prohibit monuments from being removed. That's led cities to look for ways to better explain the stone monuments and their role in history.

Atlanta is beginning with a quick approach: plaques. Besides the Peace Monument, it has added signs at the "Lion of the Confederacy," a stone statue in a city cemetery.

Even writing a plaque can be a fraught process. But officials say the important thing is that just addressing the issue can bring history to life.

"These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving," says Sheffield Hale, president of the Atlanta History Center.

Put up in 1911, the Peace Monument in Atlanta's Piedmont Park features a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier: "Cease firing - peace is proclaimed."

At the time, the monument was meant not to glorify the Confederate cause, but to urge reconciliation, a rekindling of a national bond stretching from Atlanta to Boston. It was built to commemorate peacekeeping trips to the North made by members of the Gate City Guard, Georgia's first militia, in previous years.

But 2019 is different historical country than 1911. What seemed progressive then can today strike some as an oppressive symbol. Vandals defaced the monument following the August 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a "Unite the Right" rally clashed with counterprotesters.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

Atlantans suddenly faced some thorny questions, says Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center: "Why is a peace monument a problem? What's wrong with peace?"

This month, the city of Atlanta installed a sign that presents one answer: the memorial's idea of reconciliation excluded African Americans. "This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood; rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights," the sign states.

Two years after the Charlottesville march and its aftermath, states, cities, and citizens all across America continue to struggle with how to handle and interpret the artifacts of the past in the present day.

In that struggle, different narratives clash with modern distributions of power. Conservative Southern state legislatures have passed laws protecting historical monuments, including Confederate statuary. More liberal local jurisdictions are trying to rethink and reframe the meaning of these relics by surrounding them with context, including explanatory material such as signs and plaques.

The result, as in Atlanta, is a riveting and consequential debate that is about where the nation is going as much as where it has been.

"We are in the process toward a dream," says William Ferris, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "These statues are markers along the way of how we address both the past and the future as a people. It is an ongoing conversation that in the 21st century is taking an interesting turn as the country is becoming predominantly nonwhite."

Monumental contested meanings

Richard Straut is one of the Atlanta Peace Monument's sworn protectors. He has a different view of its meaning than that expressed by its new accompanying sign.

The former Atlanta detective spent a career in both the police and military working for and with African Americans. He is a former commandant of the Old Guard of the City Guard, entrusted with the monument's care. The Old Guard's patch - a boar's head with an oak leaf in its mouth - now decorates the state National Guard uniform.

"I'm a soldier in the Old Guard, the precursor to our National Guard," says Mr. Straut in a phone interview. "It is integrated. We are not some white supremacist nonsense."

In 1911 the Old Guard wasn't trying to undermine the government in the United States with a peace monument that referenced a Confederate soldier, according to Mr. Straut.

"It was trying to bring the brotherhood back together again, and we succeeded. We are equal. And all races are involved," he says.

The Peace Monument is far from the only memorial whose meaning is contested today, of course. From small town squares to battlefields, the South is strewn with stone memories.

They range from innocuous cemetery markers to obvious paeans to the Confederate Lost Cause, including 75 "Johnny Reb" statues - most crafted after Reconstruction in Northern forges - that stand in public places, by intent, as sentinels of white power.

As of February 2019, 114 Confederate monuments have been taken down since the 2015 attack on a Charleston, South Carolina, church by white supremacist Dylann Roof, including General Robert E. Lee from Lee Circle in New Orleans and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest from a park in Memphis. Some 1,747 still stand, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Many of these monuments are shielded from removal or extensive alteration by state laws passed in the former Confederate states, including Georgia, according to the SPLC. Some cities in these states are challenging the legality of these restrictions. Norfolk, for instance, has sued Virginia to lift the state's removal ban.

Other localities are focusing on adding context. But that process itself is difficult. What to say? How to say it? What is the context here, after all?

"It doesn't surprise me that communities are struggling to some extent with conceptualization, because the writing of new inscriptions is always extremely contentious," says Kirk Savage, author of "Monument Wars."

For its part, Atlanta has tried to move quickly, adding low-cost, fact-based panels that contextualize memorial presence, and bottom-line their intent.

"It is a process to turn them from public statues to outdoor museum exhibits, from statement to artifact," says Mr. Hale of the Atlanta History Center. "And it is recognition that these are not Civil War monuments. They are Jim Crow monuments."

Similar discussions - sometimes heated, often thoughtful - are taking place across the South as more and more Americans realize the monuments "are connected to what is happening to me in the present day," says Mr. Savage, a University of Pittsburgh art historian.

The process of contextualization can be fraught. But inaction can have consequences. The failure of the University of North Carolina to heed calls to contextualize its Confederate "Silent Sam" statue on campus may have helped lead to a mob toppling the statue in 2018.

"We started from a premise of some are going to come down, some are going to stay up, but ... what is next is the really important question: How do we start something that is actually more democratic and more representative and more empowering for people than the old monument system, which is an elite-driven system that almost always tends to reflect the power relations on the ground?" says Mr. Savage. "Our political climate has made it a much more urgent issue."

"The statues are no longer static"

Americans seem at a wary impasse over the Confederate monument issue, polls say.

In the South, a majority of white Americans want the monuments to stay, and a majority of black Americans want them removed, according to a Winthrop University poll. Overall, a plurality thinks they should remain. There is little agreement about how, or whether, to contextualize them.

Meanwhile, majorities of both black and white Americans agree that race relations in the U.S. are worsening, according to the Winthrop survey.

That raises the stakes for questions about monuments being pondered in places like Decatur, Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; Norfolk, Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. Richmond's Monument Avenue features famous statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The city's Valentine Museum is currently exhibiting dozens of conceptual drawings of what could be done with the statues, including one idea to bury them to their heads.

"The question for us has become, what does contextualization really mean?" says Bill Martin, the museum's director. "And that becomes a jumping-off point for a conversation that needs to happen."

Two years ago, in Charlottesville, a blue ribbon committee's decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue sparked the "Unite the Right" rally. It devolved into a riot and street fight that left dozens injured and one dead.

The national tragedy at Charlottesville made clear to many Americans that the nation's legacy of white supremacy had burst into the present, and that white supremacists looked at Confederate statues as symbols of their ideology.

As newspaper reporters flocked to the city, religion professor Jalane Schmidt began holding informal tours of the statuary. The tour continues on a monthly basis, drawing upwards of 100 people at a time.

Ms. Schmidt says she didn't realize until after she began researching that over half of the residents of Albemarle County, where Charlottesville is located, were African Americans the year the Lee statue went up. And her research showed that its installation had little to do with commemoration of soldiers, and much to do with a "lost cause mythology" that advocated a national white brotherhood to thwart the political power of black Americans.

"These statues of metal look like mute monuments, but as we found out they are distilled hatred," says Ms. Schmidt. "They are sending a message of complete disregard for the humanity of black people."

Just a few miles from the Peace Monument in Atlanta is "the Lion of the Confederacy," a stone representation of a lion in repose, clutching a Confederate battle flag. The sleeping royal feline guards hundreds of slain Confederates, including an ancestor of Martin O'Toole's.

Mr. O'Toole is a former newspaper editor, an amateur historian, and a spokesman for the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Last week, he made his first visit to the "Lion" monument after a contextual plaque was added.

Armed with a camera to document the changes, he immediately spots what he thinks is a mistake. A title says "Lion of Atlanta." The statue is actually called the "Lion of the Confederacy," Mr. O'Toole says.

He notes that Georgia nearly undermined the Confederacy as its key leaders backed national unity in the 1850s. So what happened? News in the South that church bells had pealed in New England in support of abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry meant that sectional disputes had morphed into "a dangerous moment for Southerners," says Mr. O'Toole. "They were suddenly afraid for their lives. They had to fight."

But even as he quibbles with the Lion's new explainer, he notes, "I'm OK with the panels. They are mostly fact-based and within the law. I just say thanks to the legislature for passing a law to make sure the Lion is still here. Or else it most assuredly would be gone."

Atlanta's confederate statues will stay, at least for now. But all around them, the conversation has shifted, and history, for many, suddenly seems alive - evoking both danger and hope.

"What is important is that these new panels are not permanent," says Mr. Hale, as park-goers gather to read the new panels. "We can change the words. We can add more panels. But that's the point. These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
States are debating how to put Confederate statues in historical context - a reminder their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?Confederate statues in context: The future of America's past?

# data[].attributes.body
C-May 7, 2018/NA
R-Yes/No/Yes and No
A- Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff/It may be sketchy (.com)
A-No
P-To persuade

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The idea that once they are taken down, these statues "belong in a museum" doesn't take into account that museums may not want them. Should they?

By Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff

smithsonianmag.com

This article was

originally published on the blog for the Center for the Future of Museums

In the wake of the Charlottesville riots last summer, newspaper headlines throughout the nation were calling for the removal of Confederate war monuments from the American public sphere-and their "safe housing" in museums. " What to do with Confederate monuments? Put them in museums as examples of ugly history, not civic pride," read a Los Angeles Times headline days after the riots. " Confederate Monuments Belong in Museums, Not Public Squares" stated a Weekly Standard headline from last August. " We Need to Move, Not Destroy, Confederate Monuments," was the heading for a thoughtful article by New York Times critic Holland Cotter.

In the subsequent months, dozens of Confederate monuments across the nation have, in fact, been "removed" or toppled, and many have made their way to the "cold storage" of museum collections spaces.

But for many of us who actually work in and interpret museums, the issue of our institutions' rightful role in this debate does not seem to be either straightforward or obvious. Are museums, in fact, the appropriate place for storing these gigantic homages-not even to the Civil War itself-but to the Jim Crow movements that fueled their commissioning and erection on state capitol grounds, university commons, city parks and other places of power in the early decades of the 20th century?

We would argue that the "put them in a museum" response to Confederate memorials reflects a misunderstanding of what museums are for-and an effort to sidestep conversations that we really need to have.

Yes, museums do collect things-savory and unsavory-and, yes, they often put things away and preserve them for a very long time. But 21st century museums are striving hard to expand their reach, shift their focus and repair their popular perception as public warehouses primarily in the cold storage business for art and artifacts. More and more, we aim to surface issues, not hide them-to be places where communities come together to discuss and wrestle with contemporary questions.

There are those who respond that museums should just put Confederate monuments "in context," and by doing so, fulfill the mission of many contemporary museums to serve as sites of civic engagement nimbly poised to investigate, convene and discuss the most contested issues of the day.

Yet putting monuments in context is anything but a simple, declarative act: power dynamics come into play. First, museums are physical spaces that convey authority. Statues remain powerful-and physically imposing-visual forms that will keep speaking even when they are in new settings. They can and certainly will shape social experiences in ways that curators may not be able to anticipate.

A simple label is not enough.

In displaying statues, museums will need to be prepared to contextualize them visually and dramatically, to represent the layers of their history-from the story of their creation to the story of them being taken down and collected.

This is exactly the approach taken by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin when they agreed to house the 8-½-foot-tall, 2,000-pound statue of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, that was removed from the campus grounds in 2015.

The controversial decision to transfer the statue to the history center, rather than store or destroy it, represented one possible solution to the Confederate statue debate. "I think this is the answer," wrote Don Carleton, the center's executive director, in a article that is pointedly titled "When a bronze Confederate needed to retire, the University of Texas found a home." "They are pieces of art; destroying that is like burning books. They need to be preserved and they belong in museums."

He added, "We will not be putting him in our building as some sort of shrine to Jefferson Davis, but as an educational experience and point of discussion." Using old letters, diary entries, and original sketches, the permanent exhibit, titled "From Commemoration to Education," tells the story of how the statue came to be and why it was later moved from the campus' south. The presence of the statue in an educational exhibit, as opposed to a place of honor, underlines that Davis, as well as his ideas and actions, are no longer commemorated by the university, said exhibit curator Ben Wright.

Yet the question still remains whether, by accepting monuments into permanent collections, museums are not continuing to bestow the same value and authority upon them that they "enjoyed" as 'stand-alone' monuments - or even worse, further aggrandizing them. Even if museums contextualize them in more complicated ways, their very monumentality might spark an even fiercer form of physical intimidation when squeezed into the small space of a standard museum building.

More than 25 years ago, the Maryland Historical Society shocked the museum world by inviting artist Fred Wilson to "mine" its collections for the revolutionary "Mining the Museum" project. In that exhibit, Wilson juxtaposed slavery-era documents, objects and texts traditionally consigned to storage along with the comfortable objects of privileged white history. The most dramatic example involved the placement of slave shackles next to a polished collection of silver repoussé vessels of the white Maryland upper class.

Could the lessons learned from "Mining the Museum" exhibit inform a museum's approach to displaying Confederate statues with their not-so-subtle messages of white supremacy? Perhaps, but the broader question still remains: No matter how sensitively we contextualize the artifacts themselves, does their larger-than-life presence mitigate or even parody any interpretive value they might otherwise have in the dwarfing gaze of an enclosed exhibition space?

Our co-author Louis P. Nelson, a University of Virginia professor of architectural history, suggested in a 2017 interview that perhaps one solution is not to try to transfer gigantic statues to museum buildings, but rather to create museums around the statues themselves:

"Such statues cannot stand alone in the middle of a square with azaleas. I have argued that we need to transform these open spaces into open-air museums, where we can learn about the simultaneous histories of lynching, Confederate monuments and Jim Crow policies. These are powerful objects so they will need powerful recontextualization...They need to become catalysts for conversations as objects in a museum might."

Yet even this approach raises critical questions about the nature of these conversations, the particular "stakeholders" who are brought to-or absent from-the table, and the role of "professionals" in the process. Do we really trust that curators and museum personnel have the right stuff to make this happen? Who will be the arbiters and decision-makers in the meaning-making process? And how is this process limited-or framed-by the starting assumption that the monuments must be preserved in the public sphere in the first place?

Another co-author, museum educator Janeen Bryant, born and raised in South Carolina, echoes this apprehension about museum professionals' training-and ability-to both facilitate, and effectively translate, historically marginalized community voices about the embodied outrage and pain of such monuments on the landscape. An informal social media poll she conducted corroborated these concerns about whether museums really have the preparation and capacity to house and display these monuments to our racist national past.

"As a native southerner," she says, "I often consider the monuments (and Confederate flags) as a social marker of claimed territory for white people/whiteness-a visual cue of which town/courthouse/pit-stop is safe and not safe."

For years, the deadening silence from mainstream museums was a frustrating reminder that most staff were unwilling or unable to confront racist monuments, racist artifacts or racism in any form. Fortunately now, museums are beginning to recognize the important role they can and should play in facilitating community engagement and response. Our challenge as professionals is a willingness to create intellectually active spaces wherever we gather-in workshops, in conferences, and in staff break rooms-to grapple with the overt assumptions surrounding monuments.

Ibram Kendi, noted historian and anti-racism educator reflected on his childhood in Manassas, Virginia, home to a Civil War battlefield, during a recent speech at the Smithsonian's symposium on " Mascots, Myths, Monuments and Memory." "In thinking through my comments for today," he said, "I tried to really understand, first and foremost, how it felt for me, how it feels for so many of us to live day in and day out surrounded by so many Confederate monuments.

How does it feel for those people that have to literally watch people cheer for mascots that are a desecration of their people?...

And more importantly, what do these feelings say about our memories and our histories, let alone the memories of the defenders of these monuments and mascots?

How can we use these feelings and memories as a motivation to never stop digging into American history to uncover the graves of racial violence?

And how can we study these graves, the dead, to give us a better sense of the living-the life of racial violence in the United States today?"

As we museum professionals formulate our own approach to the thorny issues of where and whether and how to re-contextualize these toppled monuments to our Jim Crow past, we must recognize our own histories of complicity in the centering of white, male, hetero-normative heritages and the celebration of icons of white supremacy in our centuries of collection and display.

It is no secret that a willful erasure of people of color (and the long histories of racist assaults) exists in museums and the public landscape in this country. This has prompted generations of activism whereby communities of color have tirelessly contested these narratives and fought for their rightful place in history.

The successful Take 'Em Down Movement in New Orleans that led to the dismantling of four Confederate monuments, for example, was the direct result of community activism led by black organizers such as Michael Moore. However, most coverage attributed the removals to the open-mindedness and forward thinking of New Orleans' then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu, lauding his speech and unprecedented action, rather than acknowledging the movement and the black leadership that truly and thoughtfully catalyzed these changes.

A broader conversation about museums and monuments must include not only a recognition of the landscapes of oppression that the Confederate statues mark, but also an understanding of the self-determined landscapes of resistance that marginalized communities have created, of necessity, to mark their own histories, in opposition to, but also in spite of these erasures.

Museo Urbano in El Paso, Museum of Chinese in America in New York, Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, Pauli Murray Center in Durham, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, and the now-open, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery are only a handful of examples of "bottom-up" museums that are de-centering white supremacist narratives, centering marginalized histories and social justice, modeling innovative approaches to inclusion and redefining the very idea of what constitutes memorials and monuments.

Mainstream museums have much to learn from the foresight and sophistication of these and other culturally, ethnically and racially specific museums, many of which began to emerge as long as 50 years ago. Museums need to critically examine their own histories before they earn the right to properly contextualize racist memorials.
Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums blog .
As Holland Cotter so correctly noted in his column from last year, in order for museums to name the message of these oversized propaganda monuments for what they are, they "will have to relinquish their pretense of ideological neutrality. They will have to become truth-telling institutions."

The five of us who have jointly authored this blog-museum directors, curators, scholars, educators and architects-will be moderating a roundtable on this topic with the wider museum community this week at the American Alliance of Museum's annual conference in Phoenix. Perhaps an apt point of departure to spark our conversation might be the prophetic words of artist Nayland Blake, who recently stated, "Museums need to decide whether or not they are active participants in the life of their city or if they are just some kind of trophy house."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Are Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff smithsonianmag.com This article was originally published on the blog for the Center for the Future of Museums In the wake of the Charlottesville riots last summer, newspaper headlines throughout the nation were calling for the removal of Confederate war monuments from the American public sphere-and their "safe housing" in museums. " What to do with Confederate monuments?

# data[].attributes.body
C-Aug 22, 2017/NA

R-Yes/Yes and No/Yes and No
A-Fox Business/It may Be Sketchy (.com)
A-DNA
P-To Inform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Should Confederate monuments be taken down?

# data[].attributes.body
C-May 7th, 2018/NA
R-Yes/Yes/No
A-Meghan Trentz/Meghan Trentz's Blog/Could be sketchy (.com)
A-No
P-To persuade

# data[].attributes.body
C-June 22, 2019/NA

R-No/No/No
A- Sarah Mervosh/New York Times/It may be sketchy (.com)
A-No
P-to inform

# data[].attributes.body
C-17.08.2017/NA
R-Different Language
A-Different Language
A-Different Language
P-Different Language

# data[].attributes.body
C-MAY 20, 2017/NA
R-Yes/DNA/DNA
A- TEGAN WENDLAND/NPR News/That it is pretty solid (.org)
A-No
P-To Inform

# data[].attributes.body
C-May 19, 2017/NA
R-Yes/DNA/DNA
A-Fox Ten Phoenix
A-DNA
P-To Inform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WATCH: Confederate-Era Statue of Robert E. Lee Removed in New Orleans (FNN)

# data[].attributes.body
C-2019.10.23/NA
R-Different Language
A-Different Language
A-Different Language
P-Different Language

# data[].attributes.body
C-8.15.17/NA

R-Yes/DNA/DNA
A-Countable/I Don't Know (.us)
A-No
P-To Inform

# data[].attributes.body
C-Aug. 18, 2017/NA
R-Yes and No/Yes and No
A-Anna Dubenko/It may be sketchy (.com)
A-No
P-To Inform

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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.

Image

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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____

* 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 "

_____
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Right and Left on Removal of Confederate Statues (Published 2017)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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?