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A multi-ethnic democracy requires grappling honestly with the past-and recognizing the symbols of the Confederacy for what they are.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led-white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

But like Lee's soldiers, today's defenders of white supremacy are fighting for a losing cause, a defeat that their violence will only serve to make deeper and more lasting than it otherwise would have been. Across the United States, the statues are starting to topple, the streets renamed, the memorials removed. These visible inscriptions of white supremacy into the American landscape are being erased.

In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu recently hauled down three public monuments to the Confederacy and to white supremacy. "These statues were a part of ... terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone's lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city," he explained. In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington responded to Charlottesville by accelerating his efforts to move statues of two Confederate leaders from the courthouse lawn to a public park. This was the rising tide of change that the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem.

As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone.

And one sits in the center of Charlottesville. It was commissioned exactly 100 years ago, a gift to the city from a local philanthropist, to honor his parents with a physical incarnation of Southern ideals. But the statue was hardly the only contemporary effort to enshrine and defend these ideals. As it was being commissioned, sculpted, and erected, the second Ku Klux Klan was surging through the country. In Charlottesville, the local Klan gave $1,000 to the University of Virginia's Centennial Endowment Fund in 1921, funds it gratefully received; there was a second Klan chapter for the students on campus.

The statue stands 26-feet tall, despite its oddly small pedestal. "Let it stay that way," urged a speaker at its dedication. "The planet as a pedestal would be too small for Robert Edward Lee." It was unveiled in 1924, as the conventions of the Confederate Veterans and Sons of Confederate Veterans met, with "the greatest procession that ever threaded its way through the streets of Charlottesville." The Boy Scouts policed the route; the National Guard and governor marched; the president, board, faculty, and students of the university joined in. The man who introduced the ceremonies praised the "deathless devotion" of the veterans, who had fought "at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg," and now worked "to keep the record of Confederate heroism free from the stain of calumny!"

It was less a dedication than a canonization. The master of ceremonies called Lee "the greatest man who ever lived." The president of Washington and Lee proclaimed him "a Christian saint." Lee, he explained, embodied "the moral greatness of the Old South," with its "unusual combination of manly courage and womanly tenderness, its habitual tenderness toward the weak and helpless." (When three slaves escaped, Lee had them tied to posts and whipped -50 lashes for the men, 20 for the woman-and then had their backs washed with stinging brine.)

His defenders today insist that Lee's heroism lay not least in his laying down his sword when the war was done, deciding to "promote harmony once he recognized defeat." The speakers at the dedication likewise stressed Lee's role as a peacemaker; one went so far as to imagine the statute depicted "not the lurid splendor of the battlefield," but instead, Lee riding to Lexington to begin his tenure as a university president.

Yet this is not what the statue depicts. Not this one, nor the others. Where are the statues of Lee seated at Appomattox, signing the terms of that surrender? Where are the marbles and bronzes of Lee the college president, wearing civilian clothes, ensconced behind a desk piled high with paperwork? Why is this peacemaker always immortalized girded for war?

Perhaps it's because this, too, is largely myth, as my colleague Adam Serwer has so ably documented. Grant excoriated Lee for "setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized." And the reconciliation he offered was between whites-it pointedly excluded those he had held as property, whose freedom the war secured, but whose equality he bitterly contested.

Lee himself, after the war, encouraged a friend to banish the 90 newly freed women, children, and old men working on his plantation. The government could pay for their care, Lee advised; better to replace them with white labor. "I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving." That is the harmony Lee promoted.

But the Lee memorialized in Charlottesville isn't even the conciliator of myth. He's attired in uniform, riding his horse. He's the general who took an invading army north into Pennsylvania in 1863, in defense of a slave society. And not merely in the abstract. Lee's army was ordered to respect white property, but chose to regard the blacks it encountered as contraband-to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. The army seized scores of their fellow Americans as slaves, actions sanctioned at the highest level of command; it took as many as a thousand back to Virginia. Those actions are among the "calumnies" that speakers at the statue's dedication praised the veterans of Gettysburg for contesting.

"Some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along," wrote Rachel Cormany in Chambersburg. "I sat on the front step as they were driven by just as we would drive cattle." Women, children, and infants alike were marched off to slavery. Philip Schaff, a prominent theologian, watched as Lee's army seized neighbors born and raised in the town. "One, Sam Brooks, split many a cord of wood for me." He appealed to the conscience of one of their captors; he insisted he felt "comfortable," because they were merely reclaiming stolen property.

Lee's army, retreating in defeat, released some, but most were hauled South to the auction block. For the crime of refusing to cross back to Virginia, one boy was horribly mutilated, doused in turpentine, his genitals sliced off, and left to die in a barn by his Confederate captors. If there is no evidence that Lee, the living embodiment of womanly tenderness, sanctioned such crimes, neither is there evidence he acted to stop them. Nor was the Gettysburg campaign an anomaly; slave raids were a persistent feature of Confederate campaigns out of Virginia. At the Battle of the Crater, Lee's army slaughtered black prisoners; one soldier lamented that some survived because "we could not kill them as fast as they [passed] us." This is what the uniform Lee wore represented; this is what the army he commanded did; this is the pose in which he is immortalized in the center of Charlottesville.

There is a reason why statues of Confederate generals are still powerful political symbols; a reason why a candidate came a hair's breadth from securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Virginia by campaigning to preserve them. The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases-these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.

The white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville saw this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. They understood the stakes of what they were defending. They knew that Lee was honored not for making peace per se, but for defending a society built upon white supremacy-first by taking up arms, and then when the war was lost, by laying them down in such a way as to preserve what he could.

On Saturday, President Trump told Americans they "must be united" and "condemn all that hate stands for." He deplored the "violence on many sides." A century before, such remarks would have been heartily applauded in Charlottesville. At the statue's dedication, the keynote speaker deplored the violence of the Civil War, and praised Lee for his efforts at "reunion and reconciliation," and for forging a nation with "hearts unspoiled by hate."

The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.

But the swift backlash against the president's remarks by leaders of his own party and leading figures of his own administration signaled that the United States of 2017 is not the same nation it was in 1924. Republicans and Democrats alike saw the white nationalists in the streets of Charlottesville for what they were, and rejected their vision of a nation built on white supremacism.

This is why the city council of Charlottesville voted, a century after it was commissioned, to remove the statue of Robert Edward Lee.

And ultimately, it is why the others will come down, too. The statues will be moved, the streets renamed, and the military bases will honor patriots who fought for their country and not against it. Because a century and a half after Reconstruction began, America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.

The white nationalists in Charlottesville hoped to halt this project. Instead, they have simply given it fiercer, redoubled urgency.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Yoni Appelbaum is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Ideas section.

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A multi-ethnic democracy requires grappling honestly with the past-and recognizing the symbols of the Confederacy for what they are. On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led-white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

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Op-Ed Contributor

Credit... Sam's Myth; Photo by Edu Bayer for The New York Times

Charlotte, N.C. - Activists in Durham, N.C., tired of waiting for local leaders to decide what to do about a statue of a Confederate soldier downtown, on Monday literally took matters into their own hands, yanking it off its pedestal and then kicking it, as if trying to beat it into submission. A North Carolina law passed in 2015 prohibits the removal of these monuments, yet the prospect of being prosecuted for doing just that was not a deterrent.

Once again, we're having a national debate about the hundreds of Confederate monuments that stand across the South - inspired, this time, by last weekend's march in Charlottesville, Va., when white supremacists protested the city's plan to move a statue of Robert E. Lee.

White supremacists aren't the only defenders of these monuments. President Trump on Tuesday criticized efforts to take them down. "This week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down," he told a news conference. "I wonder, is it George Washington next week?" Some say they are about heritage and history, not racism; others say we need to keep them in place to remind us of our dark past.

Confederate apologists in the South and around the country have rallied behind such monuments since they first went up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They recast Confederate soldiers as heroes fighting not for the institution of slavery but for the "Lost Cause," the mythology of the Confederacy as a grand patriarchal civilization.

Many of the monuments celebrate figures like Lee, who even today is defended as a critic of slavery who only grudgingly joined the Confederacy. More familiar than the Lee monument in Charlottesville is the one on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. Less familiar is the monument to Lee in the United States Capitol. His figure is also carved into Stone Mountain, alongside Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. He was, and remains, the most iconic of Confederate heroes.

But the Charlottesville march, with its hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists coming out to defend the memory of General Lee, puts the lie to the notion that, as the apologists say, these monuments are about "heritage, not hate."

This is hardly new. Confederate monuments have always been symbols of white supremacy. The heyday of monument building, between 1890 and 1920, was also a time of extreme racial violence, as Southern whites pushed back against what little progress had been made by African-Americans in the decades after the Civil War. As monuments went up, so did the bodies of black men, women and children during a long rash of lynching.

In the civil rights era, segregationists again sought to push back any attempt to challenge white male supremacy. Once again, they rallied under the banner of the Confederate battle flag. But this time, local and state officials from law enforcement and state agencies like the Sovereignty Commission in Mississippi joined them in their effort.

Today, the battle for white male supremacy has expanded in scope. It is nativist, anti-feminist and anti-Semitic. It is also homophobic. As always, it is racist. And it has fully embraced the imagery of Nazism, from Adolf Hitler to swastika flags to the Nazi salute.

Confederate "heritage," as a unifying theme for the white South, also obscures the way that white elites use the white working class to do their bidding by pitting them against those with whom they have more in common economically than those in power. The path for the rise of the Southern Democratic Party, known as the "White Man's Party," was paved with racial violence. White elites showed their thanks by erecting Confederate monuments.

This isn't just a Southern problem. The president of the United States has unleashed a new generation of domestic terrorists. During the presidential campaign, and now from the seat of power in the White House, Mr. Trump's talk of building a wall, his denigration of women, his ban on transgender soldiers and his circle of nationalist advisers embolden the very people who showed up in Charlottesville chanting, "Jews will not replace us." Us, of course, are the dispossessed white, heterosexual men who long for a return to an imagined patriarchy where they have a seat at the head of the table, even though, in reality, those seats are reserved for white elites.

And once again, rather than seeing clearly that Confederate monuments stand at the very center of the white-supremacist imagination, too many people are clouding the issue. Some of my fellow historians have naïvely suggested that we need to keep them to teach us the darker lessons of Southern history.

But at what cost? What the events of this past weekend have made clear is that for several generations, the Lee monument and others like it have assisted the cause of white supremacy and the deadly violence that has accompanied it. This is why communities across the region have a moral obligation to take up the cause of removing them. Artifacts of hate will be lost, but their history and meaning will not.

While what happened in Charlottesville is a stain on our nation, we should remain hopeful for the future. Those who gathered in the name of hatred and bigotry did so under the banners of defeated regimes. This does not bode well for their cause. Truly patriotic Americans, of all colors and creeds, can and should stand up to them as they did this past weekend. But we also need leadership at all levels of government to condemn not only their actions but also white supremacy itself.

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Opinion | Why Confederate Monuments Must Fall (Published 2017)

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Op-Ed Contributor Charlotte, N.C. - Activists in Durham, N.C., tired of waiting for local leaders to decide what to do about a statue of a Confederate soldier downtown, on Monday literally took matters into their own hands, yanking it off its pedestal and then kicking it, as if trying to beat it into submission.

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What Monuments Hide About the Civil War―and What Tearing Them Down Won't Solve

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For decades Civil War history was twisted towards Robert E. Lee, but in his memoirs, Grant emerges as the true, complicated hero.

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Graffiti covers a monument to Confederate soldiers in Nashville's Centennial Park on Monday. (Mark Humphrey/AP)

Park officials in Nashville were greeted with a jarring sight Monday morning when they discovered that a century-old Confederate monument had been vandalized.

Blood-red liquid spattered the bronze figure of a Southern private, while letters scrawled across a list of hundreds of Civil War fighters declared, "They were racists."

The vandalism was discovered Monday in Centennial Park, not far from Vanderbilt University. Police spokesman Don Aaron told The Washington Post that the incident was still under investigation and that authorities were reviewing surveillance video to identify a perpetrator.

BREAKING @FOXNashville: Confederate statue vandalized in Centennial Park. "They were racists" written across the front. pic.twitter.com/nWwW3j4AtO
- Sara Small FOX17 (@SaraSmallTV) June 17, 2019

Designed by Hungarian American sculptor George Julian Zolnay, who created other Confederate statues, including a monument to Jefferson Davis, the monument in Centennial Park was dedicated in 1909 in an extravagant ceremony. "Tears came into the eyes of Confederate veterans and Daughters of the Confederacy" as the "magnificent bronze monument to the Confederate private soldier" was unveiled, the Nashville American newspaper reported.

From its plinth, the bronze Confederate soldier watched the coming and going of the Jim Crow era, during which African Americans were barred from using the pool in Centennial Park.

The Centennial Park statue is not the first to be doused with red substances in the past week. Charleston, S.C., police announced Sunday that they had arrested two people accused of throwing paint on the Confederate Defenders of Charleston monument.

Suspects Arrested After Vandalizing Confederate Monument in White Point Gardens#chsnews pic.twitter.com/BhQdXKllka
- Charleston P.D. (@CharlestonPD) June 16, 2019

Other Confederate monuments have been vandalized with red paint and other graffiti as a cultural and political battle continues over whether to let such monuments stand or take them down. Last August, a Richmond monument was covered in a "red paint-like" substance. In April 2018, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill doused a statue in red ink and blood; months later, it was toppled by protesters.

The monuments' defacement comes as calls to remove Confederate symbols from public spaces have grown more urgent in recent years, particularly in the wake of a 2015 mass shooting at a black church in Charleston and the 2017 Charlottesville clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters left one woman dead. Critics of the statues argue that such monuments glorify the country's history of slavery and racism. In 2017, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) decided to remove four such monuments from the city.

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'They were racists': Confederate monument in Nashville sprayed with blood-red graffiti

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Park officials in Nashville were greeted with a jarring sight Monday morning when they discovered that a century-old Confederate monument had been vandalized. Blood-red liquid spattered the bronze figure of a Southern private, while letters scrawled across a list of hundreds of Civil War fighters declared, "They were racists."

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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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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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New Orleans is the latest city to start taking down historical but controversial monuments that many say celebrate slavery and the Confederacy. Angry opponents see the move as suppressing or rewriting history in the service of political correctness. William Brangham talks to Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:
Last week in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana Statehouse passed HB-71, which would require a referendum before any military monument could be renamed or removed. In a show of defiance, black caucus members walked out after vote.

Meanwhile last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, torch-bearing protesters, including white nationalist Richard Spencer, marched against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue there.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counts more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public lands across the country. The vast majority of those are in the South.

So, is this the right approach for dealing with the darker sides of U.S. history?

I'm joined now by two men who've wrestled with this very question. Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He's helping build a national monument to the victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama. And Walter Isaacson is a historian and writer and president of the Aspen Institute.

Welcome to you both.

Walter, I would like to start with you first.

You are a native of New Orleans. You were there when they are bringing Robert E. Lee down off his pedestal today. What do you make of the city's moves?

BRYAN STEVENSON, Founder, Equal Justice Initiative:
Well, I think it's also very long overdue and a really important step for one of America's great cities that wants to be open and inviting to all the people of the world.

And I think this legacy of racial inequality and segregation has really put a cloud over New Orleans. And these statues and monuments have reflected that cloud more powerfully than anything.

These totems are made of concrete and steel and bronze, but they have been screaming at African-Americans for decades. And what they have been screaming is this narrative of racial difference, this history of white supremacy.

So, I think this is long overdue. And part of that has to do with the legacy. I don't the great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude and forced labor. I think the real evil of American slavery was this narrative of racial difference we created, the ideology white supremacy that we made up. We said black people are different than white people. They're not fully human.

Our courts held that black people were only three-fifths human. And our 13th Amendment dealt with involuntary servitude and forced labor, but it didn't deal with this ideology of white supremacy.

And because of that, I don't think slavery ended in 1865. I think it just evolved. And the proof of that was the erection of these narratives or these monuments and totems, which came after a violent resistance, as Walter said, to racial equality.

And they have been there for decades screaming that that narrative of racial difference, that resistance to the end of emancipation, to integration is something worth honoring. And I think that has to change if we're going to be a country that makes progress in dealing with racial inequality.

WALTER ISAACSON:
I would agree that it was good to have the discussion, too, Bryan, which helped this city.

When I was first asked to be on the Tricentennial Commission down here, Wynton Marsalis said, I will do it with you if we take down Robert E. Lee.

And I said, well, I never paid much attention to Robert E. Lee when you go around Lee Circle. And Wynton said, I did. We did.

And that helped us do a dialogue down here, which now is pretty complete.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:
But, Walter, you heard Bryan say that they were screaming, that these statues were screaming about inequality and white superiority.

There's also a great deal of screaming, the people who are furious that these monuments are coming down. How is a mayor or a governor anywhere in the country supposed to wrestle with that very real boiling anger over these exact moves?

WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, I think what happened here in New Orleans is, we spent a lot of time talking about it, and the anger, especially among local citizens, receded.

I think there's a willingness now to put this behind. As I said, I just came from Lee Circle. There is a brass band there playing the national anthem.

I think that, once we had this catharsis of talking about it, there were people who protested the monuments coming down, but they were all outsiders who had come in from these weird groups around the country.

In New Orleans right now, it was a daytime, very peaceful thing to get this monument down, and I think the whole process of talking it through, and realizing that we don't need to put the Confederacy on a pedestal in New Orleans, which wasn't even part of the Civil War, really.

BRYAN STEVENSON:
Well, I think it's important to have a conversation about what we honor and why.

But I think there's a huge difference between Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and people who were the architects and defenders of slavery, people who were actually considered traitors and treasonous, many of whom thought should be hanged after the Civil War.

And I think it's just a radical difference between what we see in the American South. We have states, like my state of Alabama, where Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday, where Jefferson Davis' birthday is a state holiday. That's very far away from the conversations that we're having in other parts of the country.

And I think it does matter. We talk about memorials a lot. We have a 9/11 Memorial in this country because what happened on 9/11 was significant to the nation, to its history, to its culture. And we believe in the power of memorials to say something about who we are.

That doesn't mean that, if a nation put up a statue honoring Osama bin Laden, we would think that that is acceptable. We would be absolutely provoked by that.

And so there is a way to think about what we honor that reflects who we are, what we think is significant. The greatest person, the most influential person of the 20th century was arguably Adolf Hitler. That doesn't mean that there should be statues of him in Germany. We would be very provoked by that.

And so I do think we have to ask hard questions. And I think, on the question of the Confederacy and the architects and defenders of white supremacy, symbols of resistance to integration, there should be no debate. We cannot move forward if we actually think there is something acceptable about honoring that legacy.

WALTER ISAACSON:
You know, William, all slopes are slippery. That's why you try to find a moral footing.

Bryan got it right. You say, what was the purpose of this memorial? We have a memorial in this city right behind me - look over my shoulder - to Andrew Jackson. That's because it was put up in 1840. In the square where Jackson's statue is, that's where he mustered the troops to win the Battle of New Orleans. So, that memorial is there to honor that.

He was a bad slave owner. He had a lot wrong with him. But you have to say, is this a symbol of white supremacy and Confederacy and traitorousness, or is it because he won the Battle of New Orleans?

People who say things are slippery slopes, of course they are slippery slopes. That's why you have moral arguments to say, where do I put my footing, where do I try to draw the line?

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Why Confederate monuments are coming down

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New Orleans is the latest city to start taking down historical but controversial monuments that many say celebrate slavery and the Confederacy. Angry opponents see the move as suppressing or rewriting history in the service of political correctness. William Brangham talks to Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.