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people who don't support the flag

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AASCU Statement in Support of Banning the Confederate Flag and Reconsidering Laws that Allow Easy Access to Guns

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good info about statues

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song of the south

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Confederate National Anthem - Dixie Land

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Confederate Flags Banned From High School After Fights Broke Out Between Students

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Trump Says Confederate Flag Should Be Able To Fly On Free Speech Grounds

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what the flag looks like

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t was 1957 when little Lindy Luby's great-uncle showed up at her house near Benton, Mississippi, where the family had lived for generations. He was a justice of the peace in Yazoo City, the gateway to the fertile, brutal lands of the Delta.

"Effie, it's just been a bad day," the lawman said to his sister, as the six-year-old listened. "I just had to go cut a black boy down off that hanging tree and take him to his mama."

The infamous tree, used for lynching,was bending over a bridge on Highway 433 toward Lexington.

"What did he do?" Effie Luby asked.

"He raped and killed a white woman."

Lindy, now 66, has shifted her stance on the death penalty. After she sat on a jury that condemned a man to death, she now campaigns for alternatives to execution and stars in a new documentary about her experience.

The first cut of the film also showed Lindy and husband, Ira Isonhood, flying the Confederate battle flag on a 20ft pole in the backyard of one of their homes.

To many white people in the south and beyond, the Confederate flag is a sign of historic pride and defiance to whatever is currently called "liberalism"; to most black Americans, the flag stands for white supremacy and racial violence. Today, the symbol often appears at "pro-white" rallies and is a lightning rod in America's calcifying racial divides.

The flag's history is fraught and complicated, as was the bloody civil war that erupted in 1861 between the US south - where America's slave trade had relocated and expanded by the mid-1800s - and the north. After the north won, it imposed a harsh Reconstruction on the south that still fuels white resentment today.

The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the "lost cause" of the war. By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in 1894, the flag was used to both honor the Confederate dead as well as a romanticized version of the war's purpose.

By the mid-20th century, the flag symbolized white resistance to ending segregation laws. The Ku Klux Klan flew it at lynching parties and angry mobs waved it outside public schools as black children enrolled; in front of white "segregation academies" and next to leering dogs unleashed on black protesters wanting the right to vote. (Today, its supporters say the KKK co-opted it.)

In April 2001, Mississippians voted along race lines to keep the flag as it was. The debate reignited in 2015 after Dylann Roof killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. A photo soon emerged of him holding a Confederate flag.

The matter is especially raw in Mississippi, a state that suffered tremendous Confederate casualties and went from being the richest state from slavery before the civil war to one of the poorest.

The Isonhoods were the first stop of my May 2018 listening tour of Mississippi with photographer Kate Medley to ask flag supporters in our home state why they still support a symbol that represents so much pain, division and difficult history - even as they urge black Americans to get over their resistance to it.

Yazoo County, west-central Mississippi

Ira Isonhood, 71, remembers his father inviting black people to sit in his yard to watch a basketball game through the window when he got the area's first television - a progressive move in the mid-20th century south. But he was still a product of his time.

"Yes, he was. [My father] was prejudiced," Ira says.

One day, a black boy came to his dad's store with a shopping list his mother had signed with "Mrs". His father sent a note back with no groceries. When her husband came later, the storekeeper admonished him in front of young Ira. "Don't ever allow your wife to sign 'Mrs' again!" he warned.

Still, Ira flies the flag, which his own high school and college used as an emblem.

"The Confederate flag played a big, big part in our history," Ira says. "... Why are these minorities pushing to do away with this flag? Look at what's happening to our statues!" he says.

Neither Ira nor Lindy has asked black acquaintances why the flag is offensive, or asked why many believe it belongs in museums, but not part of a state emblem. "I don't think the black people around here care," Lindy says.

She wonders why the flag is once again becoming a big deal. "Is it their feelings? ... Mississippi has bent over backwards to say I'm sorry. How much more do we need to do?"

I later relay Lindy's questions to Genesis Be, a 31-year-old hip-hop artist, public speaker and anti-Confederate flag activist from Biloxi. I met Be after reporting that her grandfather, Pastor Clyde Briggs, was a target of the Klan in the 1960s for trying to organize and arm black people against white supremacy. I have stuck my finger into a bullet hole in her family home where the Klan fired into the wall above where her aunt, then a child, slept.

"What has Mississippi done to say that it is sorry for the rape, torturing and killings of scores of its black citizens in order to create a white majority?" Be says. "Open a museum?"

"I've never heard of an apology from the Klan in Franklin County for harassing and assaulting my family while flying that flag. All I've heard is a downplaying and whitewashing of history in an attempt to gaslight its population."

Ongoing inequities, Be reminds, are bolstered by a kinder, gentler version of Confederate history rewritten after the south lost the civil war and its rights to maintain and extend slavery.

Greenwood, north-west Mississippi

After driving north along the lonely stretch of Highway 49 through Delta plantation lands, we end up in Larry McCluney Jr's attic in Greenwood.

The room is a shrine to the Confederacy with a rebel-flag-themed cushion, curtains and even a mousepad. There's also a civil war chess set. The closet is packed with battle re-enactment costumes and weapon replicas.

McCluney, 53, is a national officer in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which accepts male descendants of southern soldiers. SCV was created in 1896 for the "vindication of the cause for which we fought" and to ensure "that a true history of the 1861-1865 period is preserved." SCV members worked with the United Confederate Veterans and other groups in the early 20th century to demand school textbooks supporting the revisionist view that the south fought for a just " lost cause" that was decidedly not slavery.

McCluneyhas taught history and government for 25 years to mostly black Delta students.

"People like me ... it's in our blood. We know about our family, their sacrifices," he says of his 20 ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.

"Slavery was an issue, but not the cause," the teacher tells me. He repeats SCV's selective semantics with precision: the south seceded over "states' rights" to financial independence; the north and Abraham Lincoln weren't against slavery at the outset; northern tariffs were killing the south; few southerners and soldiers owned humans; slavery was fading anyway; and it wasn't about white supremacy.

The facts are more complicated.

Despite decades of efforts to renovate history, Mississippi's Declaration of Secession still begins by clarifying that the state left the union in 1861 for a cause "thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," adding for posterity that "none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun" that enables cotton to flourish.

By 1861, the south was demanding slavery expansion into western territories, which Lincoln's " Black Republicans" adamantly opposed. The SCV is correct, though, that Lincoln did not initially call for emancipation. In fact, Frederick Douglass called Lincoln "preeminently the white man's president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men."

The south was demanding a federal slavery cod e to force all states to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and return runaways to owners, even as northern states were passing " personal liberty laws " to circumvent what abolitionists called the "bloodhound law".

In his attic, McCluney downplays slavery ownership - saying "elite" planters, not soldiers, owned most slaves. "Most (southerners) did not have a dog in the hunt," he says.

He is right, but only to a point. Most of the soldiers were young - a fifth were under 18 - and few owned any of the 4 million slaves in the US. But many of their households owned at least one, or they aspired to ascend to slave ownership. The 1860 census shows 49% of families in Mississippi - one in two - owned at least one slave. Mississippi had 436,631, the most in the nation and 55% of the state's population.

But slavery was waning, McCluney insists, and the north should have let it fade naturally. After I mention that Mississippi outlawed freeing slaves in 1857, he said that the south wouldn't have seceded if the federal government had allowed (white, male) voters to decide slavery per state or territory.

McCluney teaches his black students his Confederate history. "I try to be sensitive. I'm a pointblank person. Don't ask if you don't want to know." But, he adds, "they know me as a teacher who cares about them".

The educator points to Roof's "horrible, horrible" 2015 massacre of black worshippers - and his viral photo holding the Confederate flag - as inciting a war on the emblem.

"Politically correct groups seized that opportunity to make it seem like that flag came down that pole, walked down into that church and killed those people," he says. "... That was horrific to my organization (SCV) when that took place."

I later share those words with Derrick Johnson, the national president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who previously led the Mississippi chapter.

"Wow," he says, then pauses.

"Just a point of history ... Prior to Roof's massacre, the South Carolina NAACP had waged a 15-year boycott against the state for its [Confederate] flag display," Johnson says. "And I was one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Mississippi in 1993 to have the flag taken down." The SCV intervened in that lawsuit and won.

Then Johnson turns to Roof: "All of the views and racial hatred symbols that informed his opinion walked into that church with him. He's more than enough reason that the symbols of the Confederacy should be removed from the public square."

Pearl, Rankin County, central Mississippi

Thomasa Massey, 49, jumps out of her car at Pearl Park in a majority-white Jackson suburb wearing a T-shirt with Confederate butterflies she designed with "Pride, Not Prejudice" underneath.

When I had interviewed her about being in a white gang, I saw her defending the flag on Facebook. Her friend Evangela Hentz, who is black, opens the passenger door, and we all run through the rain to a pavilion. The two single mothers finish each other's sentences, laughing about that time Hentz went into labor where they worked and Massey put her in an office chair to wheel her downstairs to go to the hospital.

"I have struggled. She's helped me. She's struggled. I've been there for her," Massey, the child's godmother, says.

Massey, who identifies as more " Blackfoot-Cherokee " than white, isn't interested in military history, saying the flag celebrates her heritage as a southerner, period. She grew up in Red Bay, Alabama, in a former slave region that the last census showed as 93% white and 1% black.

"We just didn't believe in racism. Nobody, my whole town," she says.

The Confederate flag represents pride in the face of poverty to Massey, who came to Mississippi in 2001, the same year voters decided against changing the state flag. She supports Mississippians' right to keep it as is.

"It was there when our grandfathers, great-grandfathers, were struggling to feed their six, eight, 10 kids. It flew for all colors, black, white, whatever," she says.

Hentz, 41, is from Missouri, once a violent slave state, but calls the flag just an "inanimate object," adding: "Stop letting it control you."

"If you don't breathe life into something, it will die," Massey adds.

The friends reject being offended over what Hentz calls "just a piece of cloth".

Be, who discusses the flag respectfully with friends who like it, challenges Massey, Hentz and others to probe deeper.

"It was poor white southerners who fought in these battles, being strung along by rich, property-owning whites who banked on the ignorance and arrogance of the poor whites to fight and die in the war," Be says.

"They gave their life, but for what?"

Simpson County, south-central Mississippi

Gentlemanly Kevin Davis is surprised when we show up at his large white antebellum-style house in Simpson County. We are stopping by homes with flags, but owners keep pointing us on down the road to him.

Davis - no relation to Jeff - has taught history in public and private schools, and also turned out to be an SCV member. Thirteen of hisancestors fought for the south, but most didn't own slaves. Three died in battle, and one in a makeshift hospital in the Lyceum at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi - one of numerous buildings built by slaves.

"To me, the flag is not a racist thing. It's a piece of our heritage that should be left there to honor sacrifices," Davis says in a cozy parlor, adding that most soldiers were "dirt-poor farmers" with no slaves.

Davis, 47, also believes the institution might have died out due to "modernization ... if they were able to compromise another 20 years. That's what state's rights were about: protecting slavery," he says. "... There would not have been a war over tariffs."

Most Confederacy fans may cherry-pick their side's history, but many are more precise about the chinks in the Yankees' armor - including that not everyone up north was hip to slavery ending, either.

Even as the institution had shrunk outside the south for a century, its riches continued to drive the US economy, including Wall Street and early capitalism, up to the 1860s. As the practice waned up north, white men rushed to the south, bringing slaves. By the civil war, cotton investment had made New York City the country's financial center due to receiving up to 40% of all cotton revenues, representing $200m in annual trade with the south.

And, as McCluney points out, New York-financed slave ships kept sailing to West Africa for people to be sold in the Caribbean and South America.

Davis is circumspect on the complicated history: "I can say it was wrong, and I hope I wouldn't have participated in (slavery), but how can we know for sure?"

Still, Davis balks at the need to exorcise the emblem from the state flag today out of respect to Mississippians who descended from slaves. His own ancestors' sacrifice is paramount. "It's so we don't forget," he says.

The history teacher could handle it if the state flag changed, though. "I would be sad about it, not violently upset. I would not be up around the last flag making a chain gang to keep somebody from taking it down," Davis says.

Seminary, Covington County, south-east Mississippi

We're on Highway 49 south when it pops up: Flag Heads, which sells "adult novelties" and Confederate tchotchkes.

"You won't find it at Wal*Mart," a large sign proclaims, reminding shoppers that the retailer dropped Confederate merchandise within a week of Roof's massacre.

If you can put a rebel flag on it, they do: beach towels, BBQ aprons, windshield dice, coasters, flip-flops, polar fleeces, bikinis, umbrellas and more. Pipes fill a glass case, and we avoid the curtained adult room.

Petite Roslyn Stuart is behind the counter with a swagger like she has seen it all more than once. She immediately brings up Roof.

"Until that kid went in that church in Charleston, people never thought anything about the Confederate or Mississippi flag," she says. "... The flag not gon' change the hate."

Stuart blames detractors. "It's not us that's racial; it's them that's racial. Most of 'em don't know what it means," she says. "It's a symbol of our state; it's who we are."

She continues: "Northern people were down here trying to burn all our stuff" - true; the Yankees torched Jackson three times - "and we were trying to stop them ... They didn't think it was right we had slaves. It turned into one big heckuva mess. It's lingering still out there."

She worries that young people now think the flag stands for the KKK. "Eventually, they will take the state flag; they will change it. What's next? The Christian flag?" she asks.

A black FedEx man wouldn't come through the front door, she says, instead leaving heavy packages on the porch because "he thinks we're racial". So she asked for a new driver and got one.

Seminary, Mississippi

"Come on over!" Joe Barnes booms, describing his nearby Seminary home as the one with the US, Confederate and Mississippi flags out front, after I tell him Roslyn sent us.

Barnes, 66, beams as he hands us his SCV card with Nathan Bedford Forrest, the wealthy Memphis slave trader and first KKK grand wizard, pictured on the front.

Retired military, Barnes used to attend all the Ole Miss college football games, but he now watches on TV. He wrote the chancellor that he would never buy another ticket after the game ban of the rebel flag.

"Our ancestors fought under that flag," Barnes says. "It's not about hatred." He adds that blacks fought for the south, too. (True, but usually for their masters. Many defected to segregated union camps.)

"Schools are not teaching history the right way," he says. "... It's not whites that are the racists; it's mostly the blacks... What it boils down to is black people are just trying to overrule us."

"If we can't get white people to stand together, it's going to be another civil war," he adds.

Barnes has black friends, he says, and points out that African Americans use the N-word. "White folks can be that, too. There are trashy white people and trashy black people."

SCV is not racist or violent, he says. "The Klan is different from us. The SCV might fly the flag, but we don't associate with them. We're not a violent organization. We try to help people."

Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, says he wishes poor whites would recognize how powerful politicians have long played racial politics with Confederate emblems - a deliberate strategy to divide them from people with shared economic interests.

"The very same people that exploit the working class for cheap labor and create systems to undermine their development through poor education systems use issues of racial division to maintain economic control," the NAACP president says.

The flag could easily be honored or studied in museums, he adds.

"The NAACP respects the constitutional, first amendment right for private citizens to maintain symbols and monuments on private property," he says. "Enjoy."

Johnson would not censor individual ownership or display of Confederate regalia - but also not continue official approval to historic symbols of racial violence and oppression. "Everyone should have the right to purchase and display symbols for themselves on private property, but [not force the flag to] represent all citizens of any particular community," Johnson says, because they don't.

Copiah County, south-west Mississippi

"Can you tell me why?"

On the last day, I again sit with Lindy Isonhood, this time at Deer Hollow, their other home farther south where Ira's Confederate man cave, as Kate is calling the rooms we've seen, is packed with deer antlers, a boar's head trophy, and little rebel flags. Ira is in the backyard posing for pictures in front of his Confederate flag.

Lindy has thought about our first conversation overnight and wants to understand why I do not support the flag.

"The war really was about slavery, and they didn't hide it then," I say as she listens intently. "But I don't believe everyone who likes the flag is racist. Many people were taught certain things."

I add that the division most hurts poor whites and people of color.

Lindy nods, describing her childhood of poverty when the family's land was all they had left. Her sister would exchange clothes with a black friend, she says. "My family, we were poor. When I graduated from high school, we didn't have an indoor toilet."

"I am going to start researching this," she adds about the history as Kate calls for her. Knowing that Lindy now talks to other Mississippians after rethinking the death penalty, I feel a twinge of hope as I watch Ira's rebel flag flying outside the window of Deer Hollow.

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Pride and prejudice? The Americans who fly the Confederate flag

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t was 1957 when little Lindy Luby's great-uncle showed up at her house near Benton, Mississippi, where the family had lived for generations. He was a justice of the peace in Yazoo City, the gateway to the fertile, brutal lands of the Delta.

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Is it racist to fly the Confederate flag? | The Tylt

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In 2011, Pew Research reported that 58 percent of Americans have "neither a positive or negative reaction when seeing the Confederate flag." But today, the rebel flag has become a flashpoint in America's culture wars

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we should keep the flag

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"A great nation does not hide its history, it faces its flaws and corrects them."-President George W. Bush, Opening of the NMAAHC, September 24, 2016

A great Nation does not hide its history. Let that sink in for a moment.

Truer words were never spoken than those offered at the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture last September, by the man who signed the legislation authorizing the Museum, George W. Bush.

Remembering is powerful. Remembering, forces us to become wiser.

We think of the words Never Forget and we instantly remember 9-11 or the Holocaust. We connect because we remember. We look. We learn. We discover. And hopefully, with a little faith, self-discovery and humility we grow into better, more loving human beings.

We do not learn when we run from our wrongs. We learn when we face them.

This is why I, as a black woman, who is a direct lineal descendant of African slaves in my maternal family tree (my grandmother "Viney" was brought to America in the hull of a slave ship in the early 1800s, around 1803 we believe from Africa and was sold to the Henry plantation in Georgia), am opposed to the removal of Confederate statues in the south whether it be here in Richmond, Virginia or deeper south in Alabama.

Although I agree with the powerful words and sentiments expressed by Mayor Landrieu of New Orleans last week about why he thinks Confederate statutes and symbols should come down, I do not think it reflects the great first amendment freedoms America was founded upon.

Let me be clear: I felt very differently about the Confederate flag because it was a waving symbol of hate, rebellion and division flying over modern day state capitols throughout the south. However, I am not opposed to people wearing the confederate flag on their hats or flying it in their yards. That's called "free expression" and in America it is sacrosanct.

Just as we cannot tell people not to buy Nazi paraphernalia or collect it in their homes (no matter how abhorrent we may find it), we likewise cannot tell people they are not allowed to honor family members who fought for the confederacy or that their forbears could not raise monuments to southern heroes like Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson-both of whom were decorated and beloved West Point graduates and union officers before the south seceded from the union in rebellion.

In July 2015 when former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, now UN Ambassador Haley, ordered confederate flags down after the horrific shootings of nine black church members in the historic AME church in downtown Charleston, she was 100% correct.

The symbol was used by Dylan Roof to stoke his murderous rage one night after a Bible study where he killed nine God-fearing black church members. After that incident, the public sentiment shifted and the flag had to come down. More powerfully, South Carolinians taught us all a profound lesson of love, compassion and reconciliation as tens of thousands of them marched together on the famed Arthur J. Ravenel Bridge.
Related: Opinion: Racial Hate Is Infecting College Kids in America
But here is my point: In America, we pride ourselves on free thought. Free expression. Freedom to worship as we believe. Freedom to speak our minds without terrorizing or harassing others (hate speech is not free speech as defined by the US Supreme Court). Freedom to associate with groups and have ideas that may differ from each other, even if they are the "wrong" ideas.

At the end of the day, I don't want statutes of Robert E. Lee to come down.

I attended Washington & Lee University in Lexington Virginia as a first-year law student. It was an experience I will never forget. We had racial threats made against us as the largest black class of law students in the schools storied history, (which I wrote about in a 1998 Washington Post article entitled, "A Black Law Students First Trials"). But our white classmates were as outraged as us, and the Dean reacted swiftly and firmly to handle the perpetrators. We endured.

I don't fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we see in real time in 2017 on social media and in our political rhetoric.

The people who hated having black classmates at their school didn't hate us because there were statues of Robert E. Lee or George Washington (our nation's first President and a slave owner) on campus. It wasn't because of a Gen. Stonewall Jackson monument VMI or downtown.

They didn't like having black classmates because they had racist hearts. They honored racial prejudice. They harbored cultural bias. That, my friends, is what we must work toward eradicating.

And we won't do it by hiding from our racist, slave owning, segregated past. If we start taking statues down, well, we better go for old Thomas Jefferson (master of a slave who was his mistress and mother of at least four of his children). And let's not forget President Trump's favorite president, Old Hickory-Andrew Jackson. Another slave-holding Indian-killing president of our nation. Get my point?

We do not learn when we run from our wrongs. We learn when we face them.

Keep the statues where they are so that people can explain history to their kids. Keep them so that we can have a constructive dialogue at places like Montpelier (the home of President James Madison, who is considered the father of the Constitution).

Montpelier has a series called The Mere Distinction of Colour, a provocative new exhibition examining the institution of slavery and its legacy. Mount Vernon has done something similar with its new slave exhibit as of last year. Monticello announced earlier this year a new wing about Sally Hemings and of course, the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (which was the victim of yet another hateful racial act yesterday) is the place that every American family should go and take their kids, and their grandkids. And teach them, so that they do not repeat our mistakes.
Related: Is Removing Confederate Monuments Like Erasing History?
America is different because we value freedom. Freedom of thought. Of Speech. Of Heritage. Of celebration.

I don't fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we are seeing in real time in 2017 on social media, on our college campuses, in our workplaces and in our political rhetoric (i.e.: Kathy Griffin).

America is advanced citizenship. You have to want it, work at it, and trust that it ultimately works for us all.
Sophia A. Nelson is an NBCBLK Contributor and author of the new book, "E Pluribus One: Reclaiming our Founders Vision for a United America." Follow NBCBLK on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

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Opinion: Confederate monuments should stay and here's why

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I don't fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we see in real time in 2017 on social media and in our political rhetoric.

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statues stay up and not hide the history from the civl war

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The Surprising Reason Why So Many Civil War Memorials Look Almost Exactly the Same

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As this video clip explains, the reason why common statues to those who fought in the Civil War look so similar is more than coincidence.

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn't honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it's long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down-stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.

This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It's a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d'être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble-and, for a free people, necessary-about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.

For all the tough talk this week about the problems with these historical monuments, there hasn't been nearly enough discussion of their history. Most of them were built a half-century after the war, as the Civil War generation was beginning to die off. Before the turn of the century, Confederate graves had for the most part not been cared for in federal cemeteries, and erecting a Confederate monument was considered treasonous.

But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Of course, the monument boom across the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century came at a time of terrible race relations, mass immigration, and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause mythos, which poisoned the South.

So the monuments reflect more than one current of early twentieth-century America. They served to venerate Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, thereby cementing the narrative of the Lost Cause and all its misty-eyed nostalgia about the South. But they were also an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation?

And for as much as Lost Cause mythology adorns so many of these monuments, their purpose was also to convey to future generations why so many people kept fighting, for years and in the face of staggering casualties. For the ordinary soldiers who fought and died, devotion to the Confederate army did not arise primarily from a devotion to the institution of slavery (just as most Union soldiers were not fighting primarily to end slavery) but from a devotion to their home states and a sense of honor and duty to defend them from what they considered to be an invading army.

That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight-and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off.

Speaking on Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran who saw a great deal of action, talked about the importance of transmitting the emotional weight of the war from one generation to the next, and he specifically mentions the role of monuments: "I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be."

For Holmes, it was also the duty of Civil War veterans themselves to convey the significance of the war to posterity. He said, "the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire... we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after."

This Isn't Really About Confederate Monuments

Nevertheless, a common objection to these statues today is that because they occupy public spaces, they serve to venerate their subjects, who were of course racists and fought to preserve slavery. But if we know the history, why can't we see them in a different light? Why shouldn't we view them as we should, as a haunting and cautionary tale?

Certainly, the statues were not originally meant to educate future generations about the evils of slavery and secession, but that doesn't mean that we can't take them as such today. Indeed, the fact that these statues were erected in prominent public places is itself a powerful lesson in American history-a testament to our turbulent past that would be diminished if they were removed to a sanitized display in a museum. Not every statue or piece of public art has to comfort and console us. Sometimes, they should oblige us to grapple with our nation's history and the vagaries of human nature.

Even so, some conservatives are willing to let the things go. Kevin Williamson at NRO urges conservatives to do nothing. "The Left's vandalism is intended mainly to get a rise out of the Right, in the hopes of getting some Republican to wrong-foot himself over a racial question," he writes. Even if some conservatives sympathize with those who want to remove Confederate memorials-and plenty of prominent right-of-center writers clearly do-there's no need to join them because the iconoclasm sweeping the country, says Williamson, "mainly consists of local authorities making democratic decisions about the disposition of public property," and thus "there is a case for political quietism in this matter."

That would be fine advice if it were true that this is really just about local authorities making democratic decisions about statues. It would even be fine if it were just about the moral preening of Democratic politicians and activists, seizing on an opportunity to shame and embarrass Southerners for gradually abandoning their party in favor of the GOP.

But the iconoclasm on display now is about more than anathematizing the Confederacy or scoring cheap political points against hapless Republicans. It's part of the Left's overarching critique of American constitutionalism, the goal of which is to overthrow that order.

The Real Reason The Left Wants To Forget The Past

President Trump was mocked for suggesting that if we tear down statues of Lee then activists would demand the removal of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson next. But sure enough, later in the week the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC was vandalized with spray paint. A Lincoln statue in Chicago was burned. Al Sharpton said the Jefferson Memorial should be abandoned. A pastor in Chicago asked the mayor to remove the names of Washington and Andrew Jackson from city parks because they owned slaves. A writer at Vice News called for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. One columnist in Philly even argued for tearing down a statue of Frank Rizzo, who served as police commissioner and mayor in the late 1960s and '70s. In some cases, any monument would do.

All this sounds crazy, but jumping from Confederate statues to Lincoln to Rizzo follows a certain logic. For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we've seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future. That's why Mao's Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.

The modern-day American Left isn't as bad as all that, but its ideology about the past is more or less the same. Hence the statement issued Thursday by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray calling for the removal of all "symbols of hate, racism and violence that exist in our city." Murray is at least consistent, as he includes not just Confederate symbols but also a well-known statue of Vladimir Lenin. These symbols, Murray says, represent "historic injustices," and "their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities."

He is not interested in the history of the statues themselves, the people or events they depict, or "what political affiliation may have been assigned to them in the decades since they were erected." Don't be fooled by the therapeutic language about causing pain. The statues must go because they remind us constantly of a past that needs only to be overcome and forgotten.

A more mature society would recognize that the past is always with you and must always be kept in mind. There's a reason Christians in Rome didn't topple all the pagan statues and buildings in the city, or raze the Colosseum. Edmund Burke had strong words for the French during their revolution, while they were doing their best to destroy a rich past and slaughter one another in the process:

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you... If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourself. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.

That is part of why these memorials and statues are important. Perhaps not all of them need be preserved, but giving into the iconoclasm of the Left, with temperatures running high, will mean we lose far more than we gain by hiding these physical reminders of our nation's troubled past.

Let them stand as a memorial of our ancestors who died, a challenge to understand their time and its troubles, and a warning for the present day.

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Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country.