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OPINION AND COMMENTARY

Not so fast on removing monuments

Before we start condemning every park, street, monument, or public building named after a member of the Confederacy, it might be useful to review the entire record of that individual. For instance, Jefferson Davis served with distinction in the war with Mexico, helping to preserve Texas independence. As secretary of war, Davis was responsible for sending Robert E. Lee to defend against Mexican depredations near Brownsville, and helped establish the U.S. Cavalry corps to defend Texas against Comanche, Apache and Kiowa raids.

Thousands of Tejanos, American Indians and free blacks served the Confederacy in both civilian and military roles. As a former Marine and retired Air Force officer, I firmly believe that removing or renaming these monuments is disrespectful to everyone who served, no matter their race or ethnicity.

Daniel L. Nation,

Fort Worth

We can't erase the past

In my opinion, removing historical monuments only removes history facts.

If we eliminate historical monuments, what is next? History books that mention Confederate soldiers? All facts about how Africans were brought into this country unwilling? No mention of how our country was developed? The book Tom Sawyer is banned because of the N-word, then the Confederate flag, now all statues of the Confederacy...

Why don't we just say that "slavery" didn't exist ... It's all a fallacy. We are doing an injustice to our country's history. What we all should do is make sure it doesn't happen again and move forward.

Why we should removeConfederate monuments

As a proud former history teacher, here's why I think Confederate monuments should be removed from our public squares:

All history is instructive and worthy of study, but not all history is worthy of honor.

We must never forget, hide nor stop learning from the ugliness of our history, but we must also be careful that the ugly not be exhibited in places of honor. Monuments in our public squares that celebrate a wrong and un-American cause in a positive light have no place.

They belong in our museums as a reminder that a wrong took place and should not be repeated. I don't want my grandchildren passing a Confederate memorial and thinking that a "cause" is somehow worthy of honor, because it is not. Removing Confederate monuments is not "removing history." It is removing a dishonorable cause from a place of honor. Let's move those statues that celebrate a cause we as Americans have long since rejected to a museum so we can learn from them - not celebrate them.

Where will the destruction stop?

This latest uproar over destruction of Confederate monuments has me very concerned. If these folks on the far left are this upset about past slavery in history, and they are so offended, why not start at the top?

Gather together, travel to Egypt and start with the Pyramids. Tear them all down and then move on to the next stop. When you finally get to the U.S., then we may as one great country understand.

Till then, I just see whiny 5-year-olds wanting to get their way. I just don't understand my country anymore.

Scott Neystel, Fort Worth

Are we eradicating our history?

If we abolish all the Civil War statues and the Confederate flag, rename all the schools, parks, buildings, highways and counties of names connected with the Confederacy, then will history be rewritten that there was never slavery in America?

Many of the Civil War military men were formerly Union soldiers with great service records, but their service in the Civil War has erased that fact in our history. President Lincoln would rather have had Robert E. Lee than U.S. Grant lead the Union Army, but because Lee was a Virginian, he didn't want to fight against his own.

How many Americans know that Arlington National Cemetery was the home of Robert E. Lee and his wife before the Civil War?

As some want to erase the offensive reminders Civil War reminders - as they see them - will we be doomed to repeat it once the history is gone?

Cecelia Gilbreath,

Fort Worth

Is political correctnesstaking aim at our history?

I must ask one question. Why did all of these statues, street names, parks, buildings and monuments become so offensive that they must be torn down or renamed? The ones pushing all of this rely on feelings and political correctness and not on facts we can learn from!

I am not referring to the African-Americans in this statement. Where does this all stop? Next it will be freedom of speech because someone isn't speaking politically correct!

We shouldn't judge history with emotions or being politically correct. We judge our history correctly so we won't repeat mistakes of the past! I am asking the African-American community to forgive my ancestors and me for being wrong, and may we all learn to walk in respect, grace and love.

Let's not take it out on those who fought

Both sides in the Civil War fought honorably and forthright for what they sincerely believed.

I am a great-granddaughter of the Confederacy, but my ancestors were poor farmers, not rich slaveowners. They were not KKK, racist terrorists of the neo-Nazi storm troopers. They were Americans who fought with courage in the Alamo, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Statues and names of ancestors are not our enemies.

We must not let cruel, ugly, mean political groups tear our country apart.

Too bad we're stillrefighting Civil War

A local church has removed a stone plaque that has only three words ... "Civil War Memorial." No Confederate imagery, only a phrase memorializing ALL who died in that war. A worker said, "A citizen complained. We had to take it down to make sure the church building wasn't vandalized."

2) Six Flags over Texas management decides to take down all the flags, except the Stars and Stripes, that have flown over Texas and the Six Flags park since 1961. They explained that they wanted to present a flag the "unites" us. The truth is surely that they wanted to avoid potential trouble, so Six Flags executives simply surrendered to the activists.

3) Dallas appoints a "task force" to decide the fate of the city's century-old Civil War monuments. How fair and transparent will that group be? Dallas' cowardly city officials are just surrendering to avoid trouble by "progressive" agitators.

Is this democracy in action, or is this mob rule by a small group of snowflake, liberal activists?

The pendulum will inevitably swing the other way. It will get ugly. I grieve for our divided nation.

Targeting blacks as gettingfree ride is troubling

A recent letter writer (Becki Hutchison, Aug. 17) seemed to suggest that only whites work and pay taxes while everyone else gets freebies from these tax dollars.

However, I suspect that whites aren't the only ones who pay taxes, and many whites are being helped by government programs, which are supported by everyone's taxes. She believes history is being torn down (I guess because whites are becoming the minority).

From what I've read about history is that this is a nation of immigrants except for the American Indians (who incidentally weren't white). We are a nation of immigrants of many colors and many of them are helping make this a better nation.

Charles Clines,

North Richland Hills

This story was originally published August 25, 2017 5:22 PM.

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OPINION AND COMMENTARY Not so fast on removing monuments Before we start condemning every park, street, monument, or public building named after a member of the Confederacy, it might be useful to review the entire record of that individual. For instance, Jefferson Davis served with distinction in the war with Mexico, helping to preserve Texas independence.

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On the morning of April 24, New Orleans residents woke to news that the "Liberty Place" monument, an obelisk, had been removed from the cityscape. The obelisk, dedicated in 1891, honored a group of white supremacists who, 20 years earlier, had initiated a clash with black police and state militia in an effort to overthrow the government of Louisiana during Reconstruction. Local reporters covering the scene of the obelisk's removal last month described something out of an action film: snipers on nearby rooftops, the identity of the work crew concealed with face masks, tape placed over the contractor's name on the work trucks, and a ring of police officers.

Removing a monument under the cover of night might seem a bit over the top, especially considering that it was the most objectionable of four monuments to Confederate leaders and their defenders slated for removal by the city. In addition to the "Liberty Place" monument, the other three then in question were statues to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard. Just this week, again in the wee hours, the city removed the Davis statue.

The opposition to the monuments' removal in New Orleans has been heated and sometimes violent from the earliest days of this debate, beginning with efforts to intimidate potential contractors who were bidding on removal. After the city removed the "Liberty Place" monument, pro-monument protesters held vigils, armed at times, to protect the remaining statues.

The debate over the monuments in New Orleans has been most active since 2015, in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre at the Emmanuel Baptist Church committed by Confederate sympathizer Dylann Roof. It was then that Mayor Mitch Landrieu proclaimed that the Confederate monuments in New Orleans should come down because they do not reflect "who we are" as a city.

Since then, other southern cities and towns have had similar debates about what to do with Confederate monuments. College campuses, such as the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Louisville, appointed commissions to study the issue and make recommendations. Other cities such as Memphis and Charlottesville, are still divided, with the fate of the monuments often becoming a tug-of-war between city councils and preservation groups. Baltimore, which also appointed a commission, is still weighing the fate of its monuments.

A City Asks: Who Are We?

New Orleans's three Confederate statues were the work of prominent white citizens who, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, wanted to honor their Civil War leaders. The committees who raised money to build them were comprised of white veterans, the wives of white veterans, and their descendants. The first was the Robert E. Lee monument, erected in 1884 and one of the earliest such tributes erected to Lee in the South. The Jefferson Davis and P.G. T. Beauregard monuments followed, all part of a trend throughout the South at the turn of the twentieth century to put up monuments and memorials dedicated to Confederate leaders.

Such memorials both celebrated the defenders of the pro-slavery South during the Civil War and reasserted white political power and a return to "home rule" after Reconstruction. Unlike Lee and Davis, Beauregard was a Louisiana native who after the war sought collaboration between Republicans and Democrats in city and state politics, much to the dismay of some of his peers.

Because debates over removal of these statues are part of a regional movement, what has been lost in most media coverage of these disputes is that they are all, at heart, local struggles. There may be groups across the country that want to honor Confederate leaders, but there is no longer a Confederacy. Indeed, only at the local level can this standoff be resolved.

Confederate monuments throughout the South were placed in the public sphere at a time (the early decades of the 20th century) when African Americans were denied voting rights, access to public office, equal access to public space, and the right to free speech without intimidation. The statues of Lee, Davis and Beauregard were the work of the city's white elite. In this light, replacing them with something that reflects the city's current population, as a whole, is an act of democracy long overdue.

Those in favor of the removal of Lee, Davis, and Beauregard see these artifacts as oppressive symbols of white supremacy that do not represent the culturally rich and majority black city. Some members of Take 'em Down NOLA, a group supporting removal, have been fighting against racism and inequality since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Those opposed cite arguments about the monument's educational and historical value and the dangers of whitewashing history. The monument supporters are getting late reinforcements from state legislators who are trying to pass the Louisiana Military Memorial Conservation Act that, in future, will compel local governments to hold a city-wide vote before they can remove any military monument from their property. The Act, if passed will come too late affect the imminent removal of the New Orleans monuments.

Not One City, But Two

The recent vigils and protests, which happened during New Orleans's popular Jazz and Heritage Festival, when thousands of visitors join locals in celebration of the cultural diversity of New Orleans and south Louisiana. The concurrence of the protests and Jazzfest exposed the crux of the problem with the Confederate monuments in New Orleans: there are two versions of this city that co-exist in the minds of residents and in the brochures minted by the tourist industry on which we all depend to keep the economy going. One version is a circum-Caribbean port set culturally apart from the rest of the southern states because of its African, French, and Spanish colonial heritage and its close ties to Latin America and the Caribbean. The other is an old-line Southern city with its attendant class and racial divides, the legacies of slavery and segregation. These narratives about New Orleans have co-existed, you might argue, since Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, bestowing an American fate on a multi-ethnic city of French-speaking Creoles. Only sometimes do these two imagined cities directly confront each other, until they do.

The monuments in New Orleans inhabit major public spaces, and their visibility and centrality to daily commutes has helped fuel the debates. The Lee monument, in particular, was considered a major landmark since it was erected in 1884, and was often featured on engravings and postcards. So, they are monuments, memorials, and symbols but even more to the point in this local battle they are prominent ones.

Further still, New Orleans's existence depends upon the tourist industry, to an extraordinary degree. And in 2018, the city will celebrate its Tricentennial, aimed at drawing even more visitors than usual. The notion that in 2018 New Orleans will be in the spotlight brings urgency to the decision to remove artifacts that celebrate the history of the Confederacy.

Mayor Landrieu, in a recent interview, maintains that despite accusations to the contrary, he did not create the current standoff-that he "didn't tear the community apart"-but instead "raised the issue." But it is clear in hindsight that the city's path towards removal produced opportunities for acrimonious exchange-from raucous city council hearings, to threats against public-bid contractors, to court challenges that delayed the city's removal of the monuments by over a year.

What Next?

It's unclear what will happen to the monuments when they are removed. For now, they will be housed in a city warehouse until a permanent home can be found. There are some models for relocation of Confederate monuments already. Among southern states, university campuses seem to have had the most success, so far, in developing plans for moving Confederate monuments to more appropriate sites, such as a center for historical study for their statue of Jefferson Davis, in the case of U.T. (The fate of the remaining Confederate statues on the U.T. campus, however, is still the subject of debate.) The monument from the University of Louisville has been relocated to a nearby town that hosts Civil War re-enactments.

Even with the statues removed, however, we are left with the question of what to do with these public spaces. There are already venues that celebrate the city's cultural achievements, for instance, but as yet there is no monument to the long history of civil rights struggles in New Orleans, struggles that began in the 19th century. And historians and cultural institutions have only recently begun to engage the public about the city's history of slavery and its role in the domestic slave trade, without which the city would not have thrived before the Civil War. If the city is committed to addressing symbols of white supremacy, it should also support-in material and public ways-these long neglected parts of its history.

How do we engage these and other topics in a way that is inclusive, honest, and far reaching? And what other parts of the city's history need to be recognized? Perhaps hardest of all: how will we remember the Civil War itself and its significance for this city whose booming economy was once built on slavery and cotton? These are questions that only New Orleans residents can answer.

In the early days of this debate, I hoped the city could find a creative and instructive way to publicly confront the white supremacy symbolized by these monuments-perhaps countering at least one of the statues with a contemporary of Lee: Andre Cailloux, a black New Orleanian who died fighting for freedom during the Civil War. The idea was to put Cailloux on equal footing with Lee, not unlike the way the recent "Fearless Girl" statue counters the bull of Wall Street. After two years of discussion and protest, it is clear that the hatred of Confederate statues and what they represent, in the eyes of many residents, is too powerful for such a plan.

The mayor has indicated that he will form a committee to develop a design for Lee Circle-a plan that represents "a gift to the future that represents the past." Hopefully, this can be a truly collaborative process. A fierce attachment to this low-lying port city still characterizes both sides of the monument debate. The physical city is, after all, what makes it both part of the South and part of the Caribbean world. Let us hope that this shared love of place, publicly acknowledged, will inspire a new chapter in New Orleans's public history.
Mary Niall Mitchell is Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans.

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A Tale of Two Cities: New Orleans and the Fight Over Confederate Monuments

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On the morning of April 24, New Orleans residents woke to news that the "Liberty Place" monument, an obelisk, had been removed from the cityscape. The obelisk, dedicated in 1891, honored a group of white supremacists who, 20 years earlier, had initiated a clash with black police and state militia in an effort to overthrow the government of Louisiana during Reconstruction.

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C- The video was published July 15, 2018. It has not been updated since.
R- The video does relate to my topic by discussing both side of my claim and the counter claim.
A- The publisher of the video is CBS news and the authors of the transcript are Keith Sharman, Erin Hovan, and Anderson Cooper.
A- The transcript had three spelling errors.
P- The purpose of the video is to inform the listener on both sides of the decision.

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It's hard to forget the violence that broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia last August when hundreds of white supremacists showed up to protest the proposed removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a Confederate hero of the Civil War. What happened that weekend re-ignited a national debate about what to do with some 700 other Confederate monuments in towns and cities across the country, mostly in the south. Earlier this year, we took a closer look at these monuments, and were surprised to learn not just when they were built and why, but who wants to tear them down, and who doesn't. We began in New Orleans where the culmination of then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu's crusade to remove four Confederate monuments looked more like a military operation than a construction job.

When the city of New Orleans removed a giant statue of P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general who ordered the first shots fired in the Civil War, they did it in the dead of night. Construction crews wore bulletproof helmets and vests.

And police snipers were stationed on rooftops nearby. Mitch Landrieu says it was impossible to find a local company that would take the job.

Mitch Landrieu: When we put the thing out to bid, the one contractor that got-- showed up had his life threatened. He had his car bombed.

Anderson Cooper: His-- his car was actually--

Mitch Landrieu: His car was actually fire-bombed. Death threats were comin' in. And so, I couldn't find a crane. I could not find a damn crane.

Anderson Cooper: In New Orleans, you could not get a--

Mitch Landrieu: In New Orleans. I couldn't find a crane in Louisiana.

Mayor Landrieu eventually found a contractor from out of state and finally, after years of legal wrangling, took down four Confederate monuments. The last one removed was a 16 and a half foot bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee. It had stood for 133 years.

Until May, 19th 2017, when, to the cheers and jeers of onlookers, the Confederacy's most celebrated military hero was hoisted off its 68 foot pedestal.

"The whole point was to convince people that actually they won, and even in their defeat, it was a noble cause."

Mitch Landrieu: In a city that I represent, that's 67% African-American, to have a young African-American girl pass by that statue and look at it every day, I ask myself, "Am I really preparing for her-- a really good future? Is she feeling like she's gettin' lifted up by the government or is she being put down?" I mean, I think the answer's pretty clear.

Mitch Landrieu: Really what these monuments were, were a lie.

Anderson Cooper: A lie in what sense?

Mitch Landrieu: Well, in the sense that-- that Robert E. Lee was used as an example to send a message to the rest of the country, and to all the people that lived here, that the Confederacy was a noble cause. And that's just not true.

Mayor Landrieu agreed to show us what's become of Generals Lee and Beauregard - they've been gathering dust for more than a year.

Mitch Landrieu: That-- that's the first time I've seen 'em there.

Anderson Cooper: Is that right?

Mitch Landrieu: Uh-huh. Yup. They're pretty daunting.

Hidden away in this hastily built plywood shed in a location we were asked not to reveal.

Mitch Landrieu: And you can see, they're in the Civil War gear, the-- the military monuments. You know, they're there to revere them for their military service in propagation of the Civil War.

Anderson Cooper: You look at these monuments. You wouldn't know the Confederacy lost.

Mitch Landrieu: Well, that was the whole point. The whole point was to convince people that actually they won, and even in their defeat, it was a noble cause. And of course, the whole point of this is to-- is to confront history. I mean, this wasn't an LSU-Alabama football game where it didn't matter who won and lost, and you just got braggin' rights. I mean, we were talkin' about millions of people enslaved, 600,000 American citizens were killed, and they were trying to destroy the country.

The statues' final fate is unclear, but they're unlikely to ever be displayed again on public property in the city of New Orleans

Mitch Landrieu: I really did want to make a definitive statement, as a white man from the South, as the mayor of a major American city at the dawning of the 21st century, that it's not unclear anymore about what the Civil War was about and who won, and what the values are that we should really revere.

After the removal of the statues in New Orleans, and the violence in Charlottesville, cities, universities, and activists across the country began re-thinking what Confederate monuments said about their values. Several were removed in Baltimore and also in Austin, Texas. In Durham, North Carolina protestors tore down a statue of a Confederate soldier outside an old courthouse.

No state has more Confederate monuments to revere or revile than the commonwealth of Virginia. In Richmond, the capital, there's a contentious debate about what to do about five prominent Confederate statues on Monument Avenue.

Julian Hayter: All these years later, the Civil War, in many ways, is still contested ground. This is contested ground.

Anderson Cooper: This is ground zero of this debate.

Julian Hayter: Absolutely. In large part because it was the capital of the Confederacy.

Julian Hayter is a historian at the University of Richmond.

Julian Hayter: Monument Avenue is not just a national tourist attraction, but an international tourist attraction.

Monument Avenue is like a Confederate walk of fame. There are the generals: Robert E. Lee and his horse traveler; "Stonewall" Jackson; and J.E.B. Stuart; the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis; and finally Matthew Fontaine Maury, a somewhat more obscure figure who tried and failed to start a Confederate colony in Mexico.

Julian Hayter: Those monuments, in many ways, are part and parcel of what we call the Lost Cause.

Anderson Cooper: The Lost Cause. What does that mean?

Julian Hayter: The Lost Cause, quite frankly, is just the Confederate reinterpretation of the Civil War. It's created almost immediately after the war ends by Confederate leadership. it was hard for a lot of people, in my estimation, to believe that their ancestors died and-- and fought for an ignoble cause. 600-and-some-odd-thousand people died in the Civil War. Which is more Americans than died in the second World War. And people had to make sense of that.

Believers in the Lost Cause who raised money to build monuments in town and cities across the country were often veterans or their widows and children. Lost Cause ideology portrayed Confederate soldiers as heroes defending states' rights against northern aggression, and downplayed slavery's role in causing the war.

The first Confederate statue on Monument Avenue wasn't built until 1890, 25 years after the Civil War ended. The last one went up in 1929.

Anderson Cooper: You've written that these statues serve white supremacy.

Julian Hayter: Sure. And that, by the way, is a critical component of the Lost Cause. The idea that African Americans were not only happy slaves, but they were unprepared for freedom. The idea that African Americans were helpless-- after the Civil War. And in that way it represents the continuation of the ways that whites think about-- black folks' intellectual abilities-- not just during slavery, but shortly thereafter.

In the years after slavery was abolished and the Civil War ended, what became known as Jim Crow laws were passed that made African Americans second-class citizens.

Julian Hayter: There are laws that-- disenfranchise African Americans from their-- the 15th Amendment's right to vote. There are laws that restrict their movements. They represent, more broadly, the attempt to-- to reassert control over African Americans after the abolition of slavery.

Anderson Cooper: and these monuments are part of that?

Julian Hayter: Oh, absolutely. They're just as much a part of Jim Crow as they are of the Civil War and slavery. That's when they were built. They were built in the 20th Century. Very few people seem to-- to understand-- that these monuments were built during-- during segregation.

Mayor Levar Stoney: The monuments are just a symbol of the effort to ensure African Americans stayed maybe not in physical bondage, but in bondage in political and economically in this country and in this city.

Richmond's mayor, Levar Stoney, created a commission last year on the future of Monument Avenue.

Mayor Levar Stoney: those who chose to erect those monuments and the figures who are glorified in those monuments-- they made some serious attempts. to ensure that-- people who look like me would never hold any political office ever in Virginia.

Anderson Cooper: With Charlottesville were you surprised at how many people were willing to come out and show their true colors, show their Nazi flags?

Mayor Levar Stoney: I think it woke a lot of people up not just here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but around the country.

There have been protests in Richmond over the future of Monument Avenue. The city has already spent more than half a million dollars on security. Mayor stoney says he wants the statues taken down.

Mayor Levar Stoney: it is for me the greatest example of nostalgia masquerading as-- as history.

Anderson Cooper: It's not real history?

Mayor Levar Stoney: It's-- well, it-- it's the fake news of their time.

William J. Cooper: Well, he and I just disagree. They're a part of history.

William J. Cooper says removing Confederate monuments is a mistake. He was a professor of history at Louisiana State University for 46 years and is a past president of the Southern Historical Association.

Anderson Cooper: One of the things that-- Mitch Landrieu said that stuck in my mind, he said there is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it. And that-- that these statues are revering a false history.

William J. Cooper: Well it's not a false history. It's not a false history. The monument was put up there by real people who had real beliefs. Maybe we don't like their beliefs. But one of the things that-- b-- bothers me most as a historian is what I call "presentism," judging the past by the present, figuring that we are the only moral people, that nobody else-- could be moral if they didn't think like we think.

Anderson Cooper: When you hear people m-- saying that these-- these-- these monuments celebrate white supremacy-- 'cause that's-- that's sort of the common refrain.

William J. Cooper: when you say "celebrate white supremacy"-- that's not incorrect. I mean, they do celebrate white supremacy. But they weren't put up to celebrate white supremacy.

Anderson Cooper: Really? I mean--

William J. Cooper: No, they were put up to celebrate the Confederacy.

Anderson Cooper: But if the statues do celebrate white supremacy, should they be up today?

William J. Cooper: Well, should Mount Vernon be up today? Should we go burn Monticello down tomorrow? Certainly, Thomas Jefferson believed in white supremacy.

Anderson Cooper: you're saying this is a slippery slope?

William J. Cooper: That's a very slippery slope.

Julian Hayter: I would say the difference, the critical difference between Washington and Jefferson and Lee, and men like Lee, is that while Washington and Jefferson were com-- complicated individuals-- and by our standards-- thought about ideas in-- in an entirely anachronistic way-- they also baked in the Constitution the components that allowed people to dismantle-- the slave system. They built as much as they destroyed. I cannot say the same thing for the Confederacy.

Professor Hayter was appointed by Richmond's Mayor to the commission that's going to make recommendations on what should happen on Monument Avenue.

Julian Hayter: There are 75 million people in the south who are the descendants of-- Confederate soldiers. And who I am to tell them that-- they cannot celebrate their ancestor in a particular way? But I also have ancestors who were the victims of the slave system, and I see no reason why we can't find a usable way to tell two stories, or tell multiple stories

Anderson Cooper: That tell the truth.

Julian Hayter: Not a romanticized version of the truth. where people are trying to absolve themselves-- from the deep inhumanities of-- of what the Confederacy stood for, but people who are willing to face down history for what it is in-- in all its ugliness, and all its beauty.

Anderson Cooper: do you believe the statue should be removed?

Julian Hayter: No. I'm a historian, and-- I think that the statues should stay with a-- footnote of epic proportions.

Anderson Cooper: Essentially you're suggesting

Julian Hayter: I'm suggesting we do a little bit of historical jujutsu. I'm-- right? I'm suggesting we use the scale and grandeur of those monuments against themselves. I think we lack imagination when we talk about memorials. It's all or nothin'. It's leave 'em this way, or tear 'em down. As if there's nothin' in between that we could do to tell a more enriching story about American history.

Historians call it recontextualization, the addition of signs or markers with information about when and why the statues were built to help people see old monuments in a new light.

Anderson Cooper: So, you'd like to see signs or placards or historical--

Julian Hayter: Anywhere--

Anderson Cooper: Lessons somewhere--

Julian Hayter: Anywhere around here, right.

Julian Hayter: --around here. Perhaps even on this sidewalk.

Anderson Cooper: So that as people approach the statue--

Julian Hayter: They can read the story of--

Anderson Cooper: And they can understand the context--

Julian Hayter: Absolutely.

Anderson Cooper: --in-- in which it was built--

Julian Hayter: Absolutely.

Anderson Cooper: --and the reason it was built.

Julian Hayter: Yep you could have-- a glass placard here and etched into that glass placard would be a story. And then when you look through it, you can still see the Lee monument, but you see it through the lens of a more accurate historical depiction.

Last year in a poll about Monument Avenue, more Richmond area residents said they preferred some form of recontextualization, over keeping the statues as they are or removing them.

Anderson Cooper: So someone walkin' down Monument Avenue today, what kind of a view do you think they would get about slavery, about the Civil War?

Julian Hayter: I don't think they'd get much of a view at all.

The only representation of an African American you'll find on Monument Avenue is a statue of Richmond native and tennis great Arthur Ashe. He's surrounded by children and holds a stack of books in his right hand and a tennis racquet in his left.

Julian Hayter: It was unveiled in 1996 in some ways as a proverbial middle finger to the other monuments. And believe me, this town exploded when they told the public that they were gonna build the-- the Arthur Ashe-- statue on Monument Avenue.

Anderson Cooper: A lot of people didn't want it built.

Julian Hayter: Oh, no.

Whatever recommendations made by Julian Hayter and the monument commission he serves on may have a limited impact. Unlike in New Orleans, the Confederate statues here may be protected by state law and the Republican-controlled Virginia General Assembly is unlikely to approve major changes any time soon.

One person who that might have disappointed is Robert E. Lee. Before he died in 1870, he was on record opposing the building of civil war monuments in the north and the south. "Wiser," he once wrote, "not to keep open the sores of war."
Produced by Keith Sharman and Erin Horan.

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The history and future of Confederate monuments

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It's hard to forget the violence that broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia last August when hundreds of white supremacists showed up to protest the proposed removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a Confederate hero of the Civil War.

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C- The video was published May 19, 2017 7:50 PM EST. It has not been updated since.
R-  It does relate to my topic by discussing reasons why it is good to remove these statues. It agrees with my claim statement.
A- The publisher is pbs.org.
A- The transcript for the video has one spelling error.
P- The videos purpose is to inform the listener.

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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.

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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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C-published 8/15/17 and has not been revised or edited since.
R- It relates to my topic by showing an examples of my topic and different peoples perspectives on the event.
A- The publisher is Countable and the author is Asha Sanaker. The URL is .us.
A- I didn't find any grammar or spelling errors in the article.
P- The purpose of the article is to inform the reader and entertain them.

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C- The article was published March 11, 2018 and the information has not been edited or revised since.
R- The article does relate to my topic and it agrees with my claim statement.
A-The article was published by wyntonmarsalis.com and the authors are Ann Silvio, Will Croxton, and Lisa Orlando. The source the article used is CBS news.
A- The article has one spelling error.
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Behind the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee

Last May, a crane removed a 16½ foot-tall bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from its perch 60 feet above New Orleans. The statue was one of four Confederate monuments the city's mayor, Mitch Landrieu, had removed last year.

"In a city that I represent that's 67 percent African American, to have a young African-American girl pass by that statue and look at it every day, I ask myself, 'Am I really preparing her for a really good future? Is she feeling like she's getting lifted up by the government, or is she being put down?'" Landrieu tells Anderson Cooper this week on 60 Minutes. "I mean, I think the answer's pretty clear."

On the broadcast this week, Cooper reports on the debate throughout the South to remove Confederate monuments, including the two that were at the center of the violence that broke out in Charlottesville last August.

Landrieu told Cooper that his decision to remove the Lee monument began with a conversation with an old friend, renowned jazz musician and New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis. Among other subjects, the two had been talking about plans for New Orleans ahead of the city's 300th anniversary, which will occur this year.

"It was absolutely Wynton who said to me, 'I really want you to think about taking that thing down,'" Landrieu says in the video above.

In an interview with 60 Minutes Overtime's Ann Silvio, Marsalis says the statue - which stood prominently in a traffic circle called "Lee Circle" - was a " definitive marker" in New Orleans. The statue featured Lee, arms crossed, in his Civil War regalia, and it faced north "as an affront to the Union," Landrieu says.

The monument was also an insult to Marsalis' uncle, who grew up on a plantation. Marsalis lived with him for a year when he was 6 years old.

"The only reason I noticed the statue was my great-uncle, who was born in 1883, always talked about that statue," Marsalis says. "He'd point it out every time. He hated that statue."

"It made my great-uncle feel bad," Marsalis says. "So because it made him feel bad, I was aware of it."

Today, Lee's statue sits in a hastily built plywood shed, along with the other three Confederate statues that were removed from New Orleans. Landrieu asked that 60 Minutes not reveal the location.

On the broadcast, the mayor tells Cooper the monuments were a "lie."

"In the sense that Robert E. Lee was used as an example to send a message to the rest of the country, and to all the people that lived here, that the Confederacy was a noble cause," Landrieu says. "And that's just not true."

Beyond the Confederacy's racially charged defense of slavery, Marsalis emphasizes that Lee led the Confederate forces against the United States - and they lost.

"Where in the world are you going to find a losing general with a statue in a major city of the country that won?" Marsalis asks. "No. Go look around. You tell me, when you find that statue, take a picture of it and show me."

After Landrieu removed the monuments in New Orleans, other cities saw the removal of their own Confederate monuments, including Baltimore, Austin, and Durham, North Carolina. Landrieu wrote a book on his decision to remove the monuments titled In the Shadow of Statues, which we be released later this month.

The video above was produced by Ann Silvio, Will Croxton, and Lisa Orlando. It was edited by Will Croxton and Lisa Orlando.

Source: CBS News

Posted on March 11th, 2018 in Profiles & Interviews | Tags: 60 minutes, cbs, new orleans

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Behind the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee

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Last May, a crane removed a 16½ foot-tall bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from its perch 60 feet above New Orleans. The statue was one of four Confederate monuments the city's mayor, Mitch Landrieu, had removed last year.

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C- The article was amended Sept. 27, 2018.
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A- The article had around 5 spelling errors. (Mostly missing spaces)
P- The purpose of this article is to inform the reader.

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ape Town was the first. In March 2015, a student named Chumani Maxwele brought a bucket filled with shit to the University of Cape Town, where there stood a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond magnate, colonial politician and avowed white supremacist. "There is no collective history here - where are our heroes and ancestors?" Maxwele announced. He splashed the contents of the bucket over the monument.

The incident attracted national attention and within days had grown into a full-scale protest. Students covered the Rhodes statue with graffiti and plastic bags, and promised to demonstrate until it was removed. The statue had drawn criticism before, but none of such sustained anger, even though there was no mistaking what the Rhodes monument represented. Erected in 1934, it occupied the very centre of the campus, the bronze Rhodes gazing out over the city as though contemplating creation: his and, perhaps, God's.

Rhodes believed black Africans were a "subject race" and that white rule was the natural order. The setting and the figure's obvious stylistic debt to Rodin's The Thinker symbolised the "civilisational" ambitions Rhodes harboured for the colony he governed, ambitions made plain by the inscription from Kipling along the plinth: "I dream my dream / By rock and heath and pine / Of empire to the northward / Ay, one land / From Lion's head to line."

But there was an air of fragility, of the elegaic, at work too: the figure that looks out from its seat in photos from before the protests is bare-headed, middle-aged, mortal. It is Cecil Rhodes near the end of his life. (He died in 1902.) He contemplates his life's work, and with it, the future that will come to pass without him. The monument didn't satisfy itself with celebrating Rhodes; it lamented that he did not live long enough to enjoy the white-ruled South Africa he helped to create.

When the statue was installed in the pre-apartheid era, white rule couldn't be taken for granted - not yet. The suffering of its black residents needed to be naturalised first, and to that end the monument cast Rhodes's life's work as a noble struggle, with his supposed civilisational achievements implicitly justifying his policies and the pain they caused. If black Africans were admitted into this anxious reality, it was so their suffering could be diminished and finally negated. They were the obstacle Rhodes surmounted. In place of their suffering we got, obscenely, his suffering.

The statue finally came down a few weeks after the Rhodes Must Fall protests began. It had stood for more than 80 years, including through two decades of majority black rule under the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela. The protests and the removal of the statue took the South African establishment by surprise, including those, such as the then president, Jacob Zuma, and the archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who a generation earlier had helped end apartheid.

The blindness of the everyday

There was a time not long ago (though it feels like forever) when a kind of blindness was possible as you moved through your city - any city. You could step out of your front door and cross street after street without giving much thought to the former colonies and forgotten diplomats they memorialised; go to school or work in a building named for a famous statesman without doing a moral accounting of his achievements; eat your lunch beneath the statue of another long-ago luminary renowned for his charity without wondering about the provenance of his wealth; stop on your way home to take in a view of the city at night without imagining what, or who, was there before. To never wonder, never imagine: this was possible if your skin was a certain colour.

This is the blindness of the everyday. We grow used to the spaces we inhabit. We stop seeing them. And we grow used to the ideas around us until we can't see them either. Not long ago it was possible to believe the past was irrelevant - that history had no purchase on the postcolonial, post-cold war, post-everything present. With the horrors of the 20th century behind us, the free market would deliver us into a future where democracy and prosperity were available to all. (Again, this was easier to believe if your skin was a certain colour, if you belonged to a certain class, if you had a certain set of experiences.)

Little by little, that narrative began to fray. The growth and exuberance of the 1990s set the tone for a decade of reckless military adventurism, financial deregulation and economic globalisation, which in turn gave us the disastrous wars in Iraq and Syria, a market crash, multiple refugee crises and massive, rising inequality. At some point along the way, around the time of Brexit and Donald Trump, the ideas we took for granted lost their explanatory power. All around us the historical forces that have always shaped our lives have become visible. The urban monuments we barely noticed have become the centre of protest movements around the world.

As the Cape Town protests spread across South Africa, students at Oxford University in England launched their own version of Rhodes Must Fall: they marched on a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, demanding it be torn down and that the university curriculum be changed to reflect the diversity of thought beyond the western canon.

In Berlin, social justice groups launched a campaign to rename the African Quarter because of its connection with Germany's genocidal colonial reign in the early 20th century. The protests have challenged Germany's self-image as a bastion of tolerance, coming as they have while the country struggles to integrate hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East.

Across the US, Confederate monuments have become the target of protests, most spectacularly in Charlottesville, where anti-racism activists clashed with white supremacists last August over a statue of Confederate army commander Robert E Lee. One woman who was peacefully protesting died and many people were injured. Trump defended the torch-wielding far-right extremists as "very fine people".

The fury of the counterprotests in Charlottesville and in other cities show how high the stakes in the so-called statue wars are, and how difficult removing the symbols of slavery and colonialism will be. But the protests continue to gain momentum. In the past month, protesters toppled the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina and defaced another monument in Virginia. The city of San Francisco quietly removed a 19th-century statue that celebrated the founding of California - and the humiliation of Native American peoples. Austin, Texas, is supposedly mulling a name change because of its namesake's association with slavery.

In Canada, the country's founding prime minister, Sir John A MacDonald, has become the focus of opposition for his role in the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. The city of Victoria recently announced it would remove his likeness from outside city hall, and MacDonald statues in Montreal and Regina were defaced as pressure mounted to recast his legacy.

From New York to Bristol to Sydney to Bulawayo, no monument is apparently safe.

'Fake news before there was fake news'

In a recent essay for the Guardian on the Oxford protests, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri wonders: "When is it possible to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols, and when does it become hard to do so?" Chaudhuri remembers visiting Oriel College as a student in the early 1990s and finding "its old-fogey students with monarchist enthusiasms, its conservatism ... uncharming but weirdly funny". During the visit he caught a glimpse of Enoch Powell, the former MP whose race-baiting "Rivers of Blood" speech a generation earlier was "synonymous with a dark moment in British history", and barely flinched. Chaudhuri didn't even notice the Rhodes statue that would become so controversial. Looking back, he marvels at how irrelevant any reminders of the colonial era felt, and how he shrugged them off so easily.

Our relationship to a statue, or a building, or a sign is always changing. Often the change is so gradual, happening over decades and generations, that the monument - the version of reality it embodies - simply recedes into the background. Of its time: this is the explanation we reach for as we shrug and walk past, if we've bothered to look at all. We make the assumption that the past is past, that those ideas and values no longer have the power to threaten or harm, or never did.

The reality is more complicated. For one thing, this is what monumentsdo: they normalise the past, for better or worse. They make injustices easier to defend and, more insidiously, harder to see. For another, it's the people most likely to defend those injustices who ultimately decide what is or isn't threatening, not the people who have been most affected. Only the dominance of the settler majorities in the US, Canada and Australia, for example, can explain their indifference to the statues of Theodore Roosevelt, John A MacDonald, and Captain James Cook that for many indigenous peoples have long represented genocide.

But as the past resonates in unexpected ways as social and economic conditions change, so a monument's power ebbs and flows. Its semiotics are always volatile. What the Oxford Rhodes represents to students of colour and their allies right now might be closer to what it represented to their counterparts in the 1960s, when the lived experience of colonialism was fresh, than either would be to Chaudhuri's cohort in the early 1990s, when - as Chaudhuri points out - multiculturalism was ascendant in Britain and their place in an equal, just society felt increasingly secure.

The hated Rhodes statue in Cape Town was relatively uncontroversial in the 1990s. It stood for more than two decades after apartheid, as did (and do) many other white supremacist monuments across South Africa. With Mandela's election and the transition to black majority rule, victory seemed total: the future was too bright for the past to matter very much.

The country embarked on a forward-looking restorative justice process whereby the perpetrators of apartheid were forgiven so South Africans could move on with the job of building a free and equal society. School curriculums were updated to play down the more painful aspects of the country's past and many black parents chose not to burden their children, the "Born Frees", with the history they had lived through and which had been so psychologically devastating. There was power in forgiveness, and in that moment of great optimism it was suddenly possible to regard the figure of Rhodes and feel pity or disgust rather than fear or anger. The statue now contemplated a city whose future, in spite of his life's work, belonged to all South Africans. Contemporary South Africa was a living, breathing repudiation of Rhodes's legacy. What need was there to remove the statue?

For black Americans, the symbols of the Confederacy have always had the power to menace. The many hundreds of monuments built in the century following emancipation speak to the brutal, persistent fact of white supremacy; that nearly all of them have remained standing through the civil rights era and the decades that followed, up to the present day, speaks to the fact that, however enlightened white Americans might think they are, their understanding of racism differs wildly from black Americans' experience of it.

If you believe that America is more or less equal, and whatever discrimination black people face is a problem with individual racists and not the symptom of a racist system, then you might struggle to appreciate the persistent, malevolent power of a stone likeness of Robert E Lee or Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Even if you dislike Confederate iconography, you might still struggle to grasp how fully the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow continue to circumscribe black lives, how they limit opportunity. If black people have failed to thrive in the post-civil rights era, you might convince yourself they just need to strive harder.

This way of thinking has deep, unbroken historical roots in the "Lost Cause" movement that emerged in the southern states after the civil war - what the historian and public monument expert Madge Dresser calls "fake news before there was fake news". Led by groups such as the United Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Lost Cause movement sought to recast the defeat of the Confederate army as something tragic and even noble.

In this version of history, the south went to war not to preserve the institution of slavery but to protect states' rights to self-determination against a federal government determined to impose its secular, cosmopolitan values on southerners' way of life. What was being defended was tradition, in other words, rather than economic self-interest. Central to this aggressive campaign of historical revisionism were pageants, plays, novels and monuments that portrayed the old south as a proud, Christian culture where men were chivalrous, women virtuous, and black people their spiritual and intellectual wards, in need of correction and uplift.

Hundreds of statues went up across the US between the 1890s and 1950s. Lee, the commander of the losing side, was a favourite avatar of this sentimental and dishonest vision. The Lee mythologised in the Charlottesville monument was brave, honourable and enlightened - if not opposed to slavery, then sensitive to its excesses.

Compare him with the man who emerges from the actual historical record, though, and the revisionism at the heart of the Lost Cause narrative becomes pretty clear: as Dresser noted in a TEDx talk, it was "under [Lee's] watch that the Confederate army kidnapped free blacks and slaves who had fled north, and forcibly returned them to slavery". The Lost Cause version of history is at such odds with established fact that when you peel away all the pomp and ceremony, you're left with kettle logic: the Confederacy didn't fight to preserve slavery, but even if it did, there were good slave owners, and anyway, those who were enslaved benefit ed from it. Like colonialism, it was a "civilising" mission.

The Lost Cause narrative shaped white Americans' understanding of slavery and racism. For southern segregationists at the turn of the 20th century, it was a way to reassert their identity within the union and recover a measure of dignity. For northern abolitionists, it was a bargain to be struck for the sake of national unity: let them have their statues and their Confederate flags if it brought them back into the fold. But it did something else too.

Comforting but destructive

These symbols of the Confederacy were allowed to mean very different things to different groups of white people, even as the symbols reaffirmed for both the cherished idea of America as a land of freedom and opportunity. The monumentalisation of figures like Lee allowed segregationists and abolitionists alike to invest themselves in the comforting and ultimately destructive idea that slavery (and, by extension, racism) was a "people" problem - bad slave owners, as the segregationists saw it; all slave owners, as the abolitionists did - and therefore not an "America" problem, not something woven into the fabric of the entire project of American capitalism from the very beginning. As the historian Ibram X Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, has pointed out:

When you make it about ignorance, you're not making it about power and policy and structures and systems, that the problem centrally is not America's institutions, is not the American story, is not American capitalism, that the problem is ignorant individuals. So it allows people to deny how fundamental racism has historically been to America.

By shifting the problem of racism on to the individual, white Americans of all political persuasions absolved themselves of their complicity in, and responsibility for dismantling, systemic racism.

This way of seeing things gained a new kind of legitimacy in the 1980s as American politics fell under the spell of the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek, who conceived of society itself as a market, and people as individual economic actors rather than, first and foremost, "bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties".Capitalism could even be the driver of racial progress: the free market would solve the "people problem" of racism because self-interest would lead everyone, eventually, to enlightenment - obviating the need for critical policy solutions. As the writer Pankaj Mishra has noted:

The cruellest trick used by both Republicans and Democrats was the myth that America had resolved the contradiction at the heart of its democracy. For the conviction that African-Americans were walking and running and would soon start flying, enabled by equal opportunity, paved the way for an insidious ideological force: colour-blind universalism.

During the cold war, any serious discussion about the deeper, structural causes of racial inequality was impossible because it required some degree of apostasy - entwined as the problem was with the very roots of American capitalism - and because inequality at home paled next to the threat of Soviet domination. The cold war limited the spectrum of political possibility, not just in the US but around the world. It hijacked the process of decolonisation happening in many of the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. There was to be no renegotiation of their relationships with the west on something like equal terms. Those relationships were reset instead along cold war faultlines.

In the scramble for ideological supremacy, the Americans and the Soviets traded money and arms for allegiance, intervening in elections and propping up sympathetic strongmen where necessary. The dynamic of patron state and client state obscured the dysfunction these fledgling nations inherited from the colonial regimes that preceded them, perpetuating and even exacerbating their inequality and brutality.

The fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s represented more than just a victory of capitalism over communism: it reaffirmed the Enlightenment narrative of progress, so badly tested by the horrors of the 20th century. Western-style liberal democracy was the destination, and free trade and globalisation were the twin engines that would take the world there. Neoliberalism's time had come.

The problem was that neoliberalism preserved classical liberalism's blind spots: its pretense to universalism (of the exceedingly white, male landowner variety) and over-idealisation of the market. Never mind the deep inequality that existed between and within nations: a deregulated global market would be the tide that lifted all boats. Applied as a broad, one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing impoverished and traumatised post-Soviet and postcolonial nations (as well as increasingly multicultural countries in the west, with complicated histories of their own), neoliberalism couldn't help but be disastrous for many people.

For a while, though, things looked pretty good. The economies of the west grew rapidly and countries such as China, India and Brazil began to emerge as economic powers in their own right. In many countries the upper and middle classes flourished. Even if your own situation was tenuous, a kind of aspirational fellow-travelling was still possible. From your vantage point on the lower rungs of wealthier countries or the middle rungs of poorer ones, you might watch other people growing richer and think, One day that will be me. The promise of neoliberalism was the promise that the burden of history was being lifted from your shoulders.

And this was true in a sense: the victory of the west over the Soviet Union lifted the threat of global cataclysm that had existed for most of the previous 75 years. But the psychological weight of the cold war and now the euphoria and triumphalism of the neoliberal moment obscured the other forces of history that had been (and still were) bearing down on you all along. All of which paved the way for the hubris of the 21st century's first decade.

Fast-forward to 2018. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have displaced nearly 20 million people, part of the largest refugee crisis in modern history. The top 1% of people now own half of global wealth, while the bottom 70% account for less than 3%. The past few years have seen the Great Recession, the steady breakdown of international norms, the rise of illiberal democracy and re-entrenchment of authoritarian regimes, and the emergence of rightwing populism in the west, leading to the self-inflicted wounds of Brexit and the Trump presidency. Meanwhile the world faces a new existential crisis: climate change. The impact of decades of unchecked growth is now undeniable, with rising temperatures and quickening cycles of natural disasters that threaten new calamities every day.

Suddenly life feels overdetermined, shaped by forces larger than any individual, community or nation. Larger than the now. In the anxious present, it has become very hard indeed for anyone to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols of the past.

In an article published not long after the Cape Town protests broke out, young activists describe the experiences that led them to Rhodes Must Fall. Chumani Maxwele, the student who started the protests, recalls looking around his neighbourhood and struggling to understand why, nearly two decades after the end of white rule, everyone was still so poor. A student from an upper-middle-class background remembers seeing the mostly white faces and white professors in his classes and wondering why he was the exception. A third student remembers having to discover for herself the works of black thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko because they weren't taught at school.

Each was troubled by the feeling that the world around them didn't make sense, and little by little they began to connect the inequality of the present to the past that Rhodes represented. The South African government's well-meaning attempt at a clean break with history played a significant role in the alienation of the post-apartheid generation. As the upper-middle-class student says in the story: "Our experience of racism is worse. It's subliminal. The form of racism that makes you ignorant about your subjugation."

Those policies alone don't explain the sudden fury of the protests, though. Even as the ANC had tackled the problem of race with a comprehensive programme of reconciliation, it did not dismantle apartheid's economic legacy to alleviate the poverty of the many. Instead the government pursued a long-term strategy of austerity and privatisation, which entrenched the highly stratified society in slightly different form: a tiny group of white and now black South Africans at the top, a small black bourgeoisie in the middle, and a massive black underclass. No surprise, then, that for the students who came of age in the post-apartheid era, the Rhodes statue would be flush with menace once again.

The cognitive dissonance the students describe is not unique to Cape Town or South Africa. As the lens through which people view the world comes to feel insufficient, they go looking for deeper explanations and discover the buried continuities between the injustices of the past and the present. For the Oxford protesters, it's the privatisation of British society and, as Chaudhuri notes, "gradual extinction ... of the ideals of multiculturalism" over the past several decades. For Americans, it is extreme inequality, which has made reconciling the idea of America with the grim prospects they face nearly impossible. And so on.

But many other people have arrived at the opposite conclusion: the situation is bad today because we have strayed too far from the way things used to be. The nostalgia of Brexit and Make America Great Again is exactly an appeal to the consoling idea (for some white people) that the moral failures of the past are, in fact, the triumphs we once thought they were.

Statues, buildings and street signs have become flashpoints because they embody the tension between these two worldviews.

Reconciliation

So what should we do with troublesome monuments? Based on the media coverage that the Cape Town and other protests have attracted, you'd be forgiven for thinking that controversial monuments are falling all the time, all over the world. In fact, most - including the statue at the centre of the tragic Charlottesville protests, and the vast majority in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - remain untouched.

There are those who would remove the most offensive signs and statues (the so-called antagonistic approach), those who would modify them to reflect contemporary sensibilities (agonism), and those who would leave them alone (conservatism).

Conservatism is clearly the easiest option, and the least tenable one because if the past is not past, and some monuments never totally lose their power to threaten certain groups of people, then they can't be left to stand unaltered. We have a responsibility to take those threats seriously whether we see them at first glance or not. They are not idle threats: these monuments have not lost their power to normalise the dominance of one group of people over another. At best they seem embarrassing or irrelevant; at worst they help to nourish an aggrieved sense of superiority among what is clearly a growing number of people. The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville is only one of the more obvious examples of their everyday toxic effect.

On the other hand, what is actually lost when a statue of Rhodes or Lee falls? Virtually all western cities are monuments to colonialism. Either they were superimposed on earlier indigenous settlements (New York), founded to support the trade in slaves and natural resources (Cape Town), or substantially built with capital extracted from the colonies (pretty much any major European city). Removing a few of the most egregious statues will not, as some people fear, erase the histories of these places, nor diminish the cultural heritage their residents are, for better and worse, heir to.

Dresser makes the case that something else is lost: an opportunity. "As a historian, I love the idea that you have all these different statues from different eras that represent changing value systems - a palimpsest that enriches the urban landscape," she tells me. "But then I'm not a black student in Oxford feeling that the white imagination is excluding me from belonging, which is important. So do we eviscerate this historical building? If we get rid of problematic statues, we foreclose the discussions we can have about those statues, which is important to the evolution of our shared identity. But if we keep them, what are we saying to these students?"

Oxford University has tried to stake out the middle ground, announcing that the Rhodes statue at Oriel College will stay, with modifications that "draw attention to this history [and] do justice to the complexity of the debate". Proposals include building a second version of the statue that could be defaced with graffiti. This idea of agonism is appealing: it seems both creative and reasonable. Cities such as Asunción, Hamburg and Odessa have all invited artists to rework and recontextualise statues with troubling legacies, with interesting and even powerful results. In Asunción, a hated statue of the former dictator Alfredo Stroessner was crushed and the pieces reassembled into a much-praised monument to those who resisted his regime.

Amin Husain, one of the organisers of recent protests at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that saw a statue of Theodore Roosevelt splattered with red paint, argues that agonism doesn't go far enough. The problem with keeping but modifying statues, he says, "is that it's still the dominant group that sets the terms of the debate. Shouldn't affected communities have a say? If you want to learn from it, but you don't want to perpetuate that mythology that is doing harm every day, you can put it in a museum or a statue garden."

Even if agonism can work as a dialogue between cities and affected communities, it is limited in what it can do. It remains centred on the sins of the coloniser, in relation to which the colonised are thus always secondary. We can modify statues to recognise historical truths, and to perform a kind of apology, but that's as far as agonism goes. Given the now impossible-to-ignore continuity between the misdeeds of the past and the conditions people face in the present, this feels insufficient.

No single solution - leave up, tear down, modify - is equal to the problem, because each is zero-sum when applied case by case. A thoroughgoing approach that considers each case in relation to the larger urban landscape might be needed to tackle such complexity. Modify some monuments to reflect those histories, whether by adding interpretive signs or re-engineering them. Tear down others to make space for new ones that represent affected communities on their own terms, not just in relation to their victimisation. Representation is critical.

Vancouver, where I live, offers an unlikely example of what that approach might look like. Today the city is known for its easygoing charm and expensive real estate. 150 years ago, and for millennia before that, the area was the hunting and fishing grounds of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their settlements dotted the shores of the Burrard inlet and Fraser and Capilano rivers. The arrival of Europeans and founding of Vancouver precipitated their almost total erasure over the next 150 years.

In 2014, Vancouver declared itself a "city of reconciliation", formally recognising its occupation of the unceded territories and embarking with local First Nations governments on a longterm plan to decolonise and indigenise the city. To begin with, some streets, parks, schools and landmarks will be renamed, including Siwash Rock, a well-known sea stack near Stanley Park whose name (derived from the French word for "savage") is seen as an offensive slur against indigenous people.

The new names will be specific to the group whose territory the landmark or sign is on - for example, Sir William Macdonald elementary school, which sits on Musqueam territory, recently became Xpey' elementary school, meaning "cedar" in the local hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Halkomelem) language. The University of British Columbia, which also sits on Musqueam territory, has replaced all of the street signs on campus with bilingual street English-hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ ones. The sites of historical villages will be reinscribed with signs and interpretive displays, and other artistic interventions. "The point is to make sure Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh are reflected and visible everywhere in Vancouver," Ginger Gosnell-Myers, the city's aboriginal relations manager, tells me.

Renaming and monumentalisation are only the most obvious aspect of the process. "Colonial structures permeate every part of the city, from the place names to the architecture and the use of space, even the way city departments are organised," Gosnell-Myers says. "So for reconciliation to actually work, the plan needed to be comprehensive, too." Inspired by a similar exercise in New Zealand, the partners have together created a set of indigenous design principles that will inform the design of all future public space in Vancouver - including sightlines and building materials, the ways structures relate to the natural environment, and how they are used. There will be greater emphasis on communal, intergenerational public spaces, for example, because in the local indigenous cultures, all buildings are meant to be used by all people.

Everyone agrees that reconciliation can't just be about the past; it must be forward-looking. "When we say we want to indigenise the city, the first thing somebody's going to say is that we need to put a longhouse [a traditional dwelling] here," Gosnell-Myers says. "But what does a city with contemporary indigenous culture look like? A mixture of the wood and the glass and the metal from a design standpoint?"

The challenge is that Vancouver does not have any Musqueam, Squamish or Tsleil-Waututh architects or urban designers, because local indigenous people have for so long been shut out of opportunities for education and professional advancement. "We could have done the easy thing and hired indigenous architects from other parts of Canada," she said, "but it's not true to who we are as a city of reconciliation." Part of the process is training local indigenous designers and planners who can translate and synthesise their cultures into contemporary urban forms. In the meantime, the city has begun the work of hiring indigenous professionals across all departments, from engineering to finance, so that every civic decision takes indigenous perspectives into account.

Obviously, not every city would benefit from the same solutions as Vancouver. Even the success of the City of Reconciliation project is not assured. For one thing, Vancouver must solve its longstanding affordability crisis - the result of decades of policies geared toward globalising the local real estate market - which affects indigenous and other vulnerable groups disproportionately. If indigenous people can't afford to live in the city, then "reinscribing" their presence will amount to a branding exercise. Such a risk raises the much bigger question of whether decolonisation is even possible within capitalism as it is currently constituted.

But in spirit at least, the project shows how cities might begin to rethink their relationship to the past. Public space is one of the few truly populist mediums we still have, especially as people retreat in their private lives to the echo chambers of social media. If, as Dresser argues, the right tends to be "more effective at mobilising public opinion because they focus less on abstract, universal values and more on the particulars of place, historic and family traditions ... on people's emotions and their need for belonging," then here is a way to engage people with the facts of historical injustice while also appealing to their sense of belonging.

For minority groups, this means seeing themselves represented in ways that recognise their historical marginalisation but also go well beyond that, making their contemporary perspectives and experiences a central part of civic culture. For everyone else, this means relating to these perspectives and experiences as we move through the city every day, in ways that include but aren't limited to that painful history. It is in spaces where everyone belongs that justice and equality begins.

A new consensus on reality?

We live in uncertain times. As neoliberalism stutters and falters, political space is opening up. For the xenophobia and illiberalism of Trump and his imitators, yes, but also for the emancipatory politics of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Idle No More, Rhodes Must Fall and monument protests around the world. They are as bold as any in recent memory. Even if they don't amount to a single movement, we are seeing a shift in thinking in the west; a repudiation not just of the neoliberal status quo but of the deeper historical structures that support it.

It's an open question whether, in this era of fake news and hyperpartisan politics, we can even hope for something like a new consensus on reality: a set of facts, a way of seeing the world to replace the neoliberal narrative we are leaving behind. That won't stop people from trying to establish one, in good faith and bad, and without resistance it is the powerful who will set the terms. Which is what gives the protests in Cape Town, Charlottesville, Berlin, Oxford and beyond such urgency.

The Cityscape: get the best of Guardian Cities delivered to you every week, with just-released data, features and on-the-ground reporting

Facts matter, and the protests are, at bottom, about facts - the historical truth of colonialism, slavery and patriarchy, and the contemporary truth of the people they still marginalise. Without facts and without protest, the best we can hope for is that these systems and their legacies will continue to exert their insidious effect. At worst, they will be fully rehabilitated and weaponised. We are seeing this already in the resurgence of rightwing populism all over the world.

Until it happened, no one would have imagined that the spontaneous protest of a South African student would inspire long-overdue discussions about structural racism, not just in South Africa but in Britain and Canada and Germany, too. Nor that cities like Berlin, Toronto, Baltimore and New Orleans would begin quietly removing racist monuments of their own accord, or that Auckland and Vancouver would commit wholeheartedly to indigenisation. All these things were impossible to imagine until they happened, just as the injustices of the past are impossible to see until you see them everywhere. Minds and eyes are opening - come what may.
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Statue wars: what should we do with troublesome monuments?

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The global protest movement to tear down urban memorials that reinforce racism is rewriting the very story of our cities. Should any monument be safe?

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C- The article was published Aug.5, 2018.
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A-The publisher of the article is NPR and the authors are Noah Cadwell and Audie Cornish. The URL is .org.
A- The article had two spelling errors.
P- The purpose of this article is to inform the reader.

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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- Publish date n/a.
R- It relates to my topic by showing people wanting a Civil War statue to be taken down for what it represents.
A- The image was posted by The Huffington Post.
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P- The purpose of the image is to inform and persuade.