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Th earticle was published on August 22, 2019. NO it has nt been updated or revised since then. The article agrres with my claimthat confederatr monuments should not be taken down. The author is Patrick Jonsson. The source is CSMonitor.com. There was no spelling or grammar errors. The purpose is to pusuade the reader that confederate monuments should not be taken down.

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Erected in 1911, Atlanta's Peace Monument depicts a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier, "Cease firing - peace is at hand."

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

Why We Wrote This

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We Wrote This

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monumental contested meanings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The statues are no longer static"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?

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

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he article was published on May 16, 2017. Yes the article has been updated since then. The article has both the Pros and the Cons. The athor of the Pro side is Gregory D.Smithers and the author of the Cons side is Kendall Wills Sterling. I did not find any spelling r grammar errors in the article. The purpose of this article is to teach and infrom thge reader about boththe Pros and the Cons.

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Would the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces be a mistake? Writing in the Washington Post, legal scholar Alfred Brophy believes it would. Brophy contends that the removal of Confederate monuments would "quite literally, erase an unsavory - but important - part of our nation's history."

BY KENDALL WILLS STERLING

The Confederate battle flag has come down from the State House grounds of South Carolina, and the National Park Service has removed the flag from all battlefields where it flew, sparking a debate between those for whom the flag carries hurtful connotations and others for whom it represents family and the land they love.

** This article was originally published in July 2015.

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PRO AND CON: Should Confederate monuments be removed?

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Would the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces be a mistake? Writing in the Washington Post, legal scholar Alfred Brophy believes it would. Brophy contends that the removal of Confederate monuments would "quite literally, erase an unsavory - but important - part of our nation's history."

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The article was published on June 1 , 2018 And it hasz not been updated or reviseds since then. The article agrres with my claim that confederate monuments should not be taken down. The author is Sophia A. Nelson. The Publisher is Think. The URL reveal that she wrote her opinion. There was no spelling or grammar errors. The purpose is to infrom the reader why the confederate monuments should not be taken down

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Opinion: Confederate monuments should stay and here’s why

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

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The article was piblished on August 13, 2017. No the artical has anot been revised since then. It is from The Atlantic and was written by Yoni Appelbaum. No there was no spelling or grammer errors. The purpose of this article is it infrom and pursuade the reader.

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

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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