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Fight to remove Confederate statues in the South face legal hurdles

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Erasing history?: The debate over Confederate monuments

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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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P- General George McClellan Statue civilwar.gratzpa.org

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C- Built in 1881
R- These are the statues to be taken down or not
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P- Admiral David G. Farragut Memorial memorialdayfoundation.org

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C-The article was posted February 1, 2019
R- It addresses the topic directly making it essential to the question
A-The URL is a .org indicating credibility.
A- The information is from the Southern Poverty Law Center a non-profit organization
P- Since it's a non profit it seems to not have any biased sponsors

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T he Civil War ended 154 years ago. The Confederacy, as former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has said, was on the wrong side of humanity.
Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people. It's past time for the South - and the rest of the nation - to bury the myth of the Lost Cause once and for all.
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As of February 1, 2019, the data set, map, and online report are up to date as reported to and vetted by the SPLC. That data is available to download for research and exploration.
DOWNLOAD THE DATA Learn more about how communities are dismantling a whitewashed history of the Confederacy and sparking a reckoning with the truth about its cruel legacy by listening to the SPLC's podcast, Sounds Like Hate.
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The 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic "Mother Emanuel" church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy.

Yet, today, the vast majority of these emblems remain in place.

In this updated edition of the 2016 report Whose Heritage?, the SPLC identifies 114 Confederate symbols that have been removed since the Charleston attack - and 1,747 that still stand.

Many of these monuments are protected by state laws in the former Confederate states.

Others are shielded by civic leaders who refuse to act in the face of a strong backlash by white Southerners who are still enthralled by the myth of the "Lost Cause" and the revisionist history that these monuments represent.

White supremacists have also taken up the cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals. We saw a dramatic display of their anger in August 2017 when hundreds of racists marched with torches and shouted Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young, anti-racist counterprotester was killed.

President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of "beautiful" monuments "foolish" and tweeting that it is "[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart."

In New Orleans, a multicultural city steeped in Southern history, the political leadership took the opposite tack. In 2017, then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu powerfully defended the city's removal of three prominent monuments and denounced the "false narrative" promoted by the "Cult of the Lost Cause." That cult, he said, "had one goal - through monuments and through other means - to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity."

We encourage communities across the country to reflect on the true meaning of these symbols and ask the question: Whose heritage do they truly represent?

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Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy

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Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people. It's past time for the South - and the rest of the nation - to bury the myth of the Lost Cause once and for all.

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C- The article was published August 5, 2018
R- If they do end up coming down they need a place to go.
A-  The article was published by Noah Caldwell and Annie Cornish of npr.org, a .org site which are generally reliable.
A- You would be able to verify all of the information presented since it's still happening.
P- The article presents both sides of the argument equally.

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Van Turner has a secret: He knows the whereabouts of the controversial Confederate statues removed last year from two parks in Memphis, Tenn.

"They have to be kept in a secretive location," said Turner on a recent afternoon, standing in a park overlooking the Mississippi River where one of the statues - of Confederate President Jefferson Davis - once stood. "For fear of someone trying to go in and get them."

Turner, a Shelby County commissioner, has been hiding the Jefferson Davis statue since it came down in December, along with a statue of Confederate Gen. and slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest and a bust of Confederate Capt. Harvey Mathes.

They're among the more than 45 Confederate monuments that have come down in at least 27 cities across the country since last summer, when white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In the aftermath, counterprotester Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, was killed. The violence amplified calls for the removal of such monuments and spurred an ongoing debate over whether tributes to the Confederacy have a place in public spaces.

Amid that debate, cities like Memphis are now dealing with a different problem: what to do with the controversial statues once they're removed from public spaces. In many cases, they remain hidden in storage while municipalities decide their fate.

It's not just Memphis. New Orleans is still storing four Confederate monuments more than a year after they were taken down. Mayor LaToya Cantrell has yet to announce a plan for relocation.

The city of Baltimore is also keeping four monuments, which came down last August, in a secret location while a city task force decides what to do with them.

The situation is particularly complicated in Memphis, where the majority-black city had to resort to an intricate legal loophole to remove the statues in the first place.

In Tennessee, it's illegal for cities to remove historical monuments without approval from the state. Six other states - Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia - have similar laws. Memphis petitioned the state for a waiver but was denied. So Mayor Jim Strickland, a Democrat and Memphis' first white mayor in 24 years, found a workaround.

"It prohibits government from doing it, but it doesn't prohibit a private person from doing it, on private property," says Strickland, who took office in 2016. Protests against the statues had been growing throughout the summer of 2017, and he needed to act. "We needed to find a way to do it legally."

The city's attorney pitched an idea to Turner, the local county commissioner: Turner would create a nonprofit, the city would sell the two parks to the nonprofit - for $1,000 each - and the nonprofit would remove the statues.

It was a risky gambit.

"You would possibly get death threats," Turner says, recalling his thoughts at the time. "Are you willing to endure this, knowing that you are a husband and a father? And I said yes."

The plan worked. On Dec. 20, the Memphis City Council approved the sale to Turner's new nonprofit, Memphis Greenspace. That same night, he brought in cranes and the statues came down.

Turner wasn't planning to hold on to the statues indefinitely. He had imagined a museum would take them. Or maybe a Confederate cemetery or a historic battlefield.

Instead, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nationwide organization that fights to preserve Confederate history, sued the nonprofit and the city, accusing them of violating state law.

A lower court ruled in favor of Memphis and the nonprofit. The suit is now with the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and Turner is forbidden from moving the statues until the proceedings are over.

But even without the legal morass, it's unclear who would be willing to take the three Confederate monuments. Museums, which might seem like the obvious choice, are often hesitant to take them on.

"Truth is, we absolutely could not take them," says Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va. Coleman often receives calls from cities hoping to find homes for their Confederate monuments.

"The biggest reason, I'd say, that museums aren't able to accept them is that they simply can't afford to take care of them," says Coleman.

Many of the statues were built for large public forums, creating logistical challenges for museums. A prominent statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, for example, is more than 60 feet tall, including its pedestal.

"[Most] museums are not equipped ... to not only take and place them, but to provide the kind of care and conservation required to ensure that they are around for perpetuity," says Coleman.

That's not the only challenge.

"Sometimes when you take on artifacts or things that will skew one's mission and/or collection direction and resources toward something that you know strays from its strategic work, that's problematic," Coleman says.

In 2016, a history museum in Gainesville, Fla., refused to take a Confederate statue from the county government, citing the high costs of creating an entirely new exhibit. The Smithsonian has also said that it does not accept monuments - Confederate or otherwise - into its collection.

Even if a museum could accommodate the costs and logistics, contextualizing Confederate statues for visitors is a challenge for curators, considering how racially and politically charged the objects still are.

"They say things about gender, they say things about race, they say things about militarism that would take more than a plaque to sanitize," says Ben Wright of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin.

Despite these challenges, Wright and his team believe they've figured out one approach to the curatorial dilemmas: focus specifically on the time period in which the Confederate statue was created.

Last year, the Briscoe Center designed an exhibit featuring a statue of Jefferson Davis that once stood on campus. Instead of highlighting Davis' role in the Civil War, it tells the story of the statue's creation, placement and the subsequent controversy on campus.

"It's a history of the statue, which touches on race relations, it touches on the way the monuments were contested at the time," says Wright, who curated the exhibit. In this case, it was the 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow laws. "What we did by concentrating on the statue and the rich archival sources around the statues, we were able to create a space where all those things get talked about."

For those who fought to remove the statues, the question of what to do with them is a simple one to answer.

"I believe that Confederate statues should be disposed of," says Tami Sawyer, the founder of #TakeEmDown901, the group that formed in Memphis to protest the city's Confederate monuments. "You don't need oppressive structures in museums."

One idea being floated as a possible solution is to return the statues to the Confederate organizations that, in many cases, paid for them in the first place. (Around the turn of the 20th century, as Confederate veterans began to die in larger numbers, these groups erected hundreds of monuments across the South.)

Last year, the United Daughters of the Confederacy accepted the return of one of its statues - the one the local museum in Gainesville, Fla., refused - and placed it in a private cemetery nearby. But it's unclear whether the group, which has thousands of members nationwide, has an organizational policy about accepting returned statues. (NPR reached out multiple times to the group for comment but did not receive a reply.)

In Memphis, the Sons of Confederate Veterans - which helped pay for the city's two prominent statues - wants more than just the return of the monuments.

"The statues go back up, of course," says Lee Millar, regional spokesman for the group, which is suing both Memphis and Turner for removing the statues.

"We'll fight as long as it takes, all the way to the end. Because the solution is to put the statues back up," Millar says.

Opponents of the Forrest statue point out that the Confederate general was a slave trader who, according to the Mississippi Civil Rights Project, was also an instrumental figure in the early years of the Ku Klux Klan.

But for Millar, who says he is a distant relative of Forrest, the statues deserve to be in the public sphere because they were meant to honor military service.

"The citizens back then were erecting these statues to those veterans," says Millar, who lives in Collierville, a suburb of Memphis. "It had nothing to do with race, nothing to do with slavery."

In mid-July, the Sons of Confederate Veterans threw its annual birthday celebration for Forrest, at Davies Manor Plantation in Bartlett, Tenn., just outside of Memphis.

Confederate soldier re-enactors marched in formation and fired off a musket salute to honor the general. At a folding table in a corner of the yard, Millar collected donations in a large water jug with the label "Save Our Parks" to help with the legal costs of the lawsuit.

Seven months after the Forrest statue came down, attendees were still angry.

"I think it's deplorable," said Paul Alford, an group member from Memphis. "The city council all needs to go to jail."

Others, like Gary Elam of nearby Potts Camp, Miss., are fighting with their wallets.

"Since they took the statues down on Dec. 20 of last year, I have not spent one red cent in Memphis," said Elam. "I'm not going to put any money in the coffers as long as they're acting the way they're acting."

Elam is not alone. In April, the Tennessee legislature stripped $250,000 earmarked for Memphis from the state budget, with Republican lawmakers citing the statue removals as the reason for the vote.

But Mayor Strickland isn't worried. "We'll be able to handle it," he says. "We knew that there would be some pushback."

And Strickland stands by the decision to take the city's Confederate monuments off public property.

"If you go to Germany, there is no statue of Adolf Hitler. But you certainly learn about Adolf Hitler. And people ought to have in their history textbooks and in museums a history of Nathan Bedford Forrest," Strickland says. "But statues are for honoring people. And Memphis of the 21st century does not want to honor that individual."

The saga is far from over. The lawsuit against Memphis and the nonprofit that removed the statues is expected to stretch on for the rest of the year.

In the meantime, the tedious responsibilities of owning recreational parks - mowing the grass, cleaning the sidewalks, keeping the lights on, paying for insurance - are beginning to add up for Van Turner, the statues' reluctant owner. He estimates it will cost him at least $30,000 this year. And, as he feared, his family has received death threats.

Still, Turner believes that once the litigation is over, he'll be able to find the statues a new home.

"I think there will be more than one group interested," he says. "This is still American history."
Jolie Myers edited and Noah Caldwell and Melissa Gray produced the audio stories. Maureen Pao edited the Web version of the story.

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Where Do Confederate Monuments Go After They Come Down?

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Van Turner has a secret: He knows the whereabouts of the controversial Confederate statues removed last year from two parks in Memphis, Tenn. "They have to be kept in a secretive location," said Turner on a recent afternoon, standing in a park overlooking the Mississippi River where one of the statues - of Confederate President Jefferson Davis - once stood.

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C- The article was last updated May 7, 2018
R- It proposes a possible future for the statues
A-It's from the Smithsonian Magazine which is important because they're discussing museum possibilities
A- Information from the Smithsonian is generally reliable
P- It is impartial since they never take one particular side.

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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."

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Are Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments?

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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?

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C-It was published June 22, 2019 making it recent.
R- It's important to the topic because it directly addresses it.
A- Information from The New York times is generally trusted.
A- It's accuracy can be proved where it cites actual events.
P- The information has a slim chance of being biased but it's unlikely.

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What Should Happen to Confederate Statues? A City Auctions One for $1.4 Million (Published 2019)

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The debate over whether to remove Confederate monuments divided the country. The question of what to do with them next is just as complicated.