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Nov.28th 2017

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For over a century and a half, Princeton University neither acknowledged nor investigated its historical ties to slavery, despite the fact that the first nine presidents of the school owned slaves at some point in their lives.

This month, that changes. Students, faculty and anyone else walking past Princeton's Maclean House will lock eyes with an object ― a sculptural relief, to be exact ― depicting the face of Samuel Finley, the fifth president of Princeton, along with the faces of the man, woman and child he possessed as slaves.

The work is part of the Princeton & Slavery Project, an initiative launched by history professor Martha A. Sandweiss in 2012. The ongoing research projectfocuses on the slave-holding practices of Princeton's founding trustees and faculty members, taking into account how the university (and New Jersey at large) profited from and grew out of slave labor, a practice that was not abolished in the state until 1865.

"I was ignorant. I was curious," Sandweiss told HuffPost of her desire to dive into Princeton's ties to slavery. "Since Princeton was founded in 1746, I knew there would be a story. Every institution was implicated, but nobody had investigated it."

Sandweiss, previously a museum curator and director, launched an undergraduate research seminar on the subject of slavery at Princeton in 2012, examining how the university's paradoxical embrace of liberty and servitude echoed the contradictions that have always marred early American values.

Over the next few years, students and faculty collaborated to piece together a dark history of the school their predecessors had failed to reckon with. The initiative has uncovered stories of women like Betsey Stockton, a former slave of former university President Ashbel Green who went on to become a prominent educator, and Moses Tyler Pyne, who wasone of Princeton's most generous benefactors andwhose family owned a sugar trade business reliant on the slave economy.

Thanks to her experience in the art world, Sandweiss realized early on that when strict historical inquiry fell short of producing a full story, her team could turn, at times, to other forms of creative expression to fill in the blanks. History is tethered to documents and dates, but art, she felt, offers space to imagine, extract and interpret.

"I really understand what the boundaries of history are," Sandweiss said. "I live and die by footnotes. That means that I can't imagine what's inside people's heads unless they left me a record. I can't invent dialogue unless people left their own words for me to find. I thought it would be interesting to work with creative artists that aren't bound by the same rules that I am."

Sandweiss relied on these contemporary artists to communicate the pain, mystery and loss that facts could signal but never quite explain. And in 2017, a Princeton selection committee ― co-chaired by Princeton University Art Museum's director, James Christen Steward, and University Architect Ron McCoy, and made up of members of the Campus Art Steering Committee and other stakeholders ― invited a range of artists to submit proposals for a work that would incorporate the Princeton & Slavery Project's findings.

Artist Titus Kaphar was selected from the invited applicants, his artistic practice falling eerily in line with Princeton's vision. Kaphar's "Impressions of Liberty" was installed on Princeton's campus in mid-November. "Kaphar's work does something that academic history can't," Sandweiss said. "It just brings history alive in a different way."

Although the Michigan-born artist, who's painted activists in Ferguson, Missouri, and composite mugshots of women named Destiny, wasn't previously aware of the university's experience with slavery, he wasn't surprised either. "There are very few corners of the country that weren't in some way impacted by slavery," he said. "We like to imagine that the 'North's' hands are totally clean. And that's not historically accurate."

There are very few corners of the country that weren't in some way impacted by slavery. Titus Kaphar

Finley, a former Princeton president, owned slaves until he died in 1766. After his death, Finley's possessions were auctioned off on the university's campus, including furniture, books, grain, farming utensils ― and two women, a man and three children. One of the documents Sandweiss and her team unearthed was an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Journal published July 31, 1766, announcing the sale of Finley's estate. It describes the man, women and children to be sold: "The Negro Women understand all Kinds of House Work, and the Negro Man is well fitted for the Business of Farming in all its Branches."

This brief announcement is the only surviving description of the individuals Finley enslaved. The auction itself took place on a spot on campus near the President's House, also known as Maclean, marked by two Sycamore trees― dubbed " liberty trees " ― which were reportedly planted in 1766 to honor the repeal of the Stamp Act. The fact that people were sold on land adorned with "liberty trees" was not lost on Kaphar.

His sculpture, positioned in front of the President's House, is a continuation of Kaphar's "Monumental Inversions" series, which the artist describes as "an investigation into the American tradition of monument making." The exploration is certainly timely; this year, monuments across the nation are being called into question for being offensive or inconsistent with American values today. Bronze tributes to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which haunted black Virginians decades after the Civil War, and a statue of Dr. James Marion Sims, a New York doctor who experimented on enslaved black women in the mid- to late-1800s, are among the contested figures.

Sandweiss understands Kaphar's sculpture as a monument, in that it commemorates a person, place or event. However, Steward, thedirector of the university's art museum, sees the piece as more of an "anti-monument."

"Monuments often purport to speak timelessly and to engage in a fixed notion of history," he said via email. "Monuments are often erected to memorialize fallen heroes or otherwise reinforce a particular idea of the past. In that light, I think Titus Kaphar's work is more 'anti-monument,' drawing our attention to forgotten histories and to the idea that history itself is being constantly rewritten. It is that understanding of history as fluid (and as a tale of both who is depicted and who is omitted) that indeed drew us to his work."

Another difference: while most monuments are fixed permanently, Kaphar's will only be on view until Dec. 17. Steward believes that by not aspiring to permanence, the work "can heighten our sensitivity to a past that can never be fixed in time or place."

Whether or not Kaphar's work should be categorized as a monument, it certainly illuminates the strange role monuments play in our culture, their ability to reach back into history and reshape it. "There is something slightly propagandistic about monuments and the way they play with timelines," saidAlva Noë, a philosophy professor at University of California, Berkeley. "They have the ability to shift time."

Noë recalled discussing the Robert E. Lee memorial in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a woman he met in the Netherlands. She believed removing the statue would be erasing a crucial trace of the Civil War. "But that monument wasn't built until 60 years after the Civil War," Noë said. Such statues were built in the era of Jim Crow laws as " explicit symbols of white supremacy," though this context has faded out of public knowledge.

Monuments often suggest that history is as clear and unchanging as their bronze bodies. Their imposing and authoritative presence consecrates them as emblems of power and shapers of our collective historical memory. Kaphar, in his early 40s, offers an alternate model that he contends better represents history's fluidity, complexity, thorniness and ambiguity. A figure that doesn't lionize or condemn, but represents, and in doing so, promises to remember. It is temporary and in flux, dependent on the viewer's perspective.

Typically, monuments take up physical space, echoing the way historical figures take up space in our historical memory. Kaphar's "Impressions," however, is a relief within a relief within a relief, a series of carvings that recede into nothingness like a cave or a gasp. The sculpture's emphasis on negative space recalls not so subtly the glaring absences in our nation's shared story that Kaphar has long been interested in.

If history has a body, Kaphar has long been digging it up and ripping it open, exposing what's been swallowed, hidden or purposefully forgotten. His art historical interventions before "Impressions" examine American and European traditions between 1700 and 1900, highlighting what ― and who ― is deemed worthy of being immortalized through paint. As if orchestrating corrective surgeries, Kaphar shreds, carves, peels and paints over portraits to illuminate and address the latent discrimination embedded in our visual language.

"I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this," Kaphar said in a recent TED talk, referencing a painting by Frans Hals. The image features five people standing before a tree, one of whom is black.

"There is more written about dogs in art history than there is about this other character right here," the artist said, pointing to the black figure. "I can find out more about the lace that the woman is wearing in this painting, about the manufacturer of the lace, than about this character right here. About his dreams, about his hopes, what he wanted out of life."

With his Princeton sculpture, Kaphar similarly teases out the relationship between what is visible and unseen. Finley's bust is carved out of a sheet of sycamore wood, the same type of wood as the "liberty trees" that surround it. The material, Kaphar expresses in his artist statement, "appears more akin to skin than grain."

Finley's silhouette, with its powdered wig and regal posture, resembles so many of the white men whose portraits reside in gilded frames. Yet, unlike other art historical subjects, Finley's insides are carved out. In that sunken place inside his edges reside a man, woman and child who Finley owned as slaves. Little is known about their lives, a fact that, Kaphar wrote to HuffPost, "did not surprise me."

Their bodies, etched in white, glow each evening when the sun sets and shift ever so slightly as viewers shift their gazes. The sculpture greets passersby on eye level; their reflections materialize from various vantage points. The figures remain, however, inescapably fixed to Finley's encroaching self.

Monuments are typically, as Noë and Steward reiterated, physically imposing, structurally inviolable and ideologically accessible. They cement a human being into history, ensuring that this singular vision of the past is the one carried forward into the future.

Kaphar's "Impressions of Liberty" proposes a different way to summon the past into the present without solidifying a singular perspective from which to view it. His piece leaves space for contradictions, ambiguity, ugliness and unknowns, providing the viewer the responsibility to read the image, sit with it, let it make its impression. Finley's bust is neither didactic nor fixed, instead it gently beckons passersby to come closer, ask questions and take a second look. The past isn't always as it seems.

American history is not all worth glorifying, but it is worth staring in the face. We might not need another hero. We might not need another monument. But we should look and listen to the stories we have buried. In their representations, we just might see ourselves.
Titus Kaphar's "Impressions of Liberty" is on view until Dec. 17, 2017, at Princeton's Maclean House.

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Princeton Confronts Its Slave-Owning Past With An 'Anti-Monument'

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For over a century and a half, Princeton University neither acknowledged nor investigated its historical ties to slavery, despite the fact that the first nine presidents of the school owned slaves at some point in their lives. This month, that changes.

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So far that debate has been almost entirely a reaction to Mr. Trump and his views on race, with little discussion about the Confederate monuments and sculptures as works of art or historical artifacts of any cultural value.

On Wednesday evening, after President Trump defended white nationalists who wanted to preserve these monuments, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York tweeted that he would remove the busts of two Confederate generals at the City University of New York's Hall of Fame for Great Americans at Bronx Community College. Other politicians have been issuing similar pronouncements rather than going through the more typical process of consulting art historians and curators or forming study commissions.

The anger and action aimed at the statues are reminiscent of recent controversies over two prominent artworks - Dana Schutz's painting "Open Casket" depicting Emmett Till, the murdered African-American teenager, in the Whitney Biennial, and Sam Durant's sculpture gallows "Scaffold," at the Walker Art Center's sculpture garden, which was denounced by Native American groups for recalling an act of genocide.

Protesters objected to both pieces on racial, ethnic, and historical grounds and called for their removal or destruction. Neither work celebrated the Confederacy or slavery, however, and both were created as art rather than as public memorials like some of the statues now being removed.

"These are not works of art, they're propaganda," the artist Adam Pendleton said of the Confederate statues. "To equate them with how a work of art exists in the world is a false equation. They're instruments of a political agenda and it would be real folly to suggest that there is any kind of ambiguity.''

"Their artistic merit is irrelevant because it's beside the point," he added. "We don't think about who created the statue of Robert E. Lee and what her intentions were. We think about who and what Robert E. Lee signifies."

But others argue that it is possible to defend the Confederate memorials as art without defending the subject matter.

"They also were the work of artists," said Hollis Robbins, a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute. She cited Laura Gardin Fraser, whose double equestrian statue of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was one of those removed overnight in Baltimore this week. Ms. Robbins said that artwork should not necessarily be discarded because the subject matter or the artists' personal history is offensive. "Do we teach T. S. Eliot, who was anti-Semitic, or the films of Roman Polanski, who was charged with rape?" she said. "Should we play Wagner in Israel?"

"While I am personally in favor of these sculptures' going away, I think it's important to understand that many of these artists did not have a political motivation," Ms. Robbins added. "They had an aesthetic motivation."

Several people in the art world said there is an important distinction to be made between private artworks and public monuments. Unlike artwork made by individual artists, many of the Confederate monuments were supported by city or state governments - sometimes including tax dollars - and placed on public land, suggesting official approval of what the statues stand for.

"The Confederate monuments are meant to convey a message that we value the history of oppression," said Adrienne Edwards, the Walker's visual arts curator at large.

The statues needn't be destroyed, many said - simply moved to an environment in which they can be studied and understood as historical relics rather than enduringly potent symbols of oppression.

Joshua David, the president and chief executive of the World Monuments Fund - which is usually on the side of protecting monuments - said it can be appropriate to move them to museums or other centers of learning.

"These are statues on pedestals, and when you place something on a pedestal you're putting something in a position to worship it," Mr. David said. "To create a kind of hero worship around the Confederacy and to support state sanctioned white supremacy, it's appropriate to re-examine them and to change their context."

But others argue that removing a statue from its place of origin diminishes the power of its historical significance. "The meanings and the history that we are able to draw from them in a different site, especially a sort of sanitized site like a museum, are not going to be the same," said Michele H. Bogart, a professor at Stony Brook University. "That is a historical loss."

And there are those who warn against rashly removing public art without thoughtful and thorough public discussion. Ms. Kirk of Duke suggested that people in Durham, N.C. - where one statue was pulled down and another was defaced - could brainstorm about monuments that might be substituted for those that were removed.

"Why don't we have a monument to justice, to the arts?" Ms. Kirk said. "Why don't we have a monument to John Coltrane? He's a North Carolinian."

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council in New York, also suggested that public officials nationwide, including Governor Cuomo, were moving too quickly on removing the monuments.

"We believe that in instances where there can be a further discussion of public art or the removal or mediation of it, that there should be," Mr. Bankoff said. "The public discourse is a very important one."

Mr. Bradford, the artist, said that it was important to have a public process around replacing the Confederate statues so that the broader citizenry could grow from a painful chapter. "If this whole conversation is about the history of this country, then you have to talk about the history of this country," he said. "Don't just leave these empty spaces. Contextualize the action. I don't feel like that can be rushed."

But Mr. Pendleton suggested that the removal of the statues is in itself a positive form of artistic expression, a "performative act" and long overdue.

"Part of what's being debated is what these statues represent," he said. "It's very clear what they represent: They memorialize a very dark period in American history. We're talking about a moment when people were enslaved. It's the opposite of everything America is supposed to stand for. Get them down."

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charlottesville  va  violence (august  2017)

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Trump Aside, Artists and Preservationists Debate the Rush to Topple Statues

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So far that debate has been almost entirely a reaction to Mr. Trump and his views on race, with little discussion about the Confederate monuments and sculptures as works of art or historical artifacts of any cultural value. On Wednesday evening, after President Trump defended white nationalists who wanted to preserve these monuments, Gov.

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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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In separate interviews, a leading critic and a prominent supporter of the monuments reflected on the turmoil in New Orleans, the legacy of a protracted debate and the place of Confederate-focused symbols that still stand across a changing South.

The interviews, conducted after the removal of the Davis statue, have been condensed and edited.

Angela Kinlaw
Ms. Kinlaw helped steer the Take 'Em Down NOLA movement, which urged city leaders to remove the monuments. She is an educator who has lived in New Orleans for about four years. Why do you want these monuments to come down?
It's a necessary part of the struggle toward racial and economic justice.

The statues are intended to send a message to black folks to stay in their places. We don't see the time, energy and resources going into promoting the kind of images, the kinds of systems that people need to really thrive.

This art is not reflective of the majority of people in the city. The majority of the people in this city are black folks, and it doesn't reflect them.

When people say, "This is a topic that's just come up," it's absolutely inaccurate. This is a fight that's been going on for decades.
New Orleans is a liberal city in a conservative state. Are you surprised to see the monuments actually being removed?
I think that I'm always cautiously optimistic, and I say that because no matter what breakthroughs we have, we're clear that our work is never done. Even though we can have an appreciation that the mayor finally gave in to an ordinance for four of these monuments to white supremacy, the reality is that they're all over the city. You should take down these four, and you should take down the others.
But are you surprised to see even these four coming down?
We've always believed it was possible. It required will.
The mayor has talked about how he thinks the removal of the monuments will foster reconciliation. How will that happen?
Reconciliation is going to require us to really put some truth on the table about what we're dealing with. If reconciliation is going to happen through policy or through legislation, there's going to have to be a shift in power, a shift in resources.
Supporters of the monuments walked around New Orleans waving Confederate battle flags. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana native, was a prominent critic of the decision to remove the monuments. What do you think of your opponents?
I'm not as concerned about the folks who come out and wave their flags. They are problematic, no doubt. I'm more concerned about the rich ruling class that has decision-making power and resource power to determine people's destinies within the city.
What do the successes with the monuments mean for the future?
As long as folks, people see it as symbols, they think it's in isolation. But all of these things are connected. People wouldn't be working so hard to defend them if they didn't matter. As they see them coming down, they question their own power.

It's helped us understand that we can't put our complete trust and faith in elected officials. We as the people have to unify and demand what it is we need. The government's not just going to move and roll over and do right by people. We have to demand that.

It becomes challenging when everybody's fighting for different things at different times. Now people realize the power of coming together collectively.

A former dean at Tulane University and a member of the Monumental Task Committee, a volunteer-run group that supports keeping the city's existing monuments, Mr. Marksbury was part of the legal effort to keep the statues. Why should these monuments be left in place?
Richard A. Marksbury

I'm a cultural anthropologist - I'm 66 years old, I was in the Peace Corps, I did my research overseas, and I helped two different peoples try to record and save their cultural heritage - so my whole life has been dedicated to trying to preserve cultural heritage, which means I don't believe in tearing down anything.
So what or who is driving the uproar? The mayor?
We have very wealthy donors who would pay for bronze plaques explaining who these men were, what they fought for, what happened to try to educate people. I'm an educator, so I think there's ways to educate people without tearing anything down.

This was a man-made crisis. We didn't have an issue. This was a one-man show from the top down for self-serving reasons.
What about the other critics? The mayor isn't alone, so what are the motives of the others?
In 1993, the City Council passed an ordinance, and the way this nuisance ordinance is triggered is any citizen can come to the Council and make a presentation and say, "This monument violates the ordinance." We had three black mayors who never invoked it. Nobody ever cared about it, nobody ever used it until Mayor Landrieu did.

I think it's part of the social-economic problems we have in America and in our cities, whether it's high unemployment among young people and a lot of crime and school systems that are broken.

These are mostly young people, and this gives them some opportunity to protest some aspect of the government. Deep down, I don't think it has anything to do with the monuments because when these monuments are down, they're going to migrate to another thing.
How much of an effect do you think David Duke had on the debate? He's been on Twitter a lot.
The monuments are just symbolic of issues, and it's a way out to vent, quite frankly, and the mayor opened the door to vent that way.

Any effect he had was minimal. He's a flash point, and people love to mention his name.
Supporters of the monuments have sometimes been lumped together as racists. How do you feel about that? Does it bother you that the rhetoric has become what it is?
Mitch Landrieu created this man-made disaster, and the press wants to create the David Duke involvement. It's just nonexistent. If he's tweeting, he's tweeting.

I didn't know I had been lumped in with anybody.

I've had threats, and I've had to call 911. But no one's called me any names. I have a pretty good reputation with the people that know me. I ran a division at Tulane where I gave people second and third chances for education.
How does this episode shape the city's culture?
No one has looked me in the face and called me any names. Maybe they do it behind my back, but I've never been lumped in with anybody that I know of because I've never made it a race issue. I've made it an issue about education and destroying or sanitizing history.

That's the $64,000 question. It's a sad situation. This issue has brought more racial tension than anything I've seen or witnessed in the 44 years I've lived here, and I think most adults, black or white, living here would say the same thing. It's sad.

Also, we don't know how it will end. If anybody thinks it's going to end when these monuments are down, they're kidding themselves. Take 'Em Down says they want to take down another 128.

This will not go away anytime soon.

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Tributes to the Confederacy: History, or a Racial Reminder in New Orleans?

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In separate interviews, a leading critic and a prominent supporter of the monuments reflected on the turmoil in New Orleans, the legacy of a protracted debate and the place of Confederate-focused symbols that still stand across a changing South. The interviews, conducted after the removal of the Davis statue, have been condensed and edited.

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Confederacy: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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"The mayor has the right to protect her city," she said. "For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation. We don't need that in Baltimore."

In recent days, cities and resident from Gainesville, Fla. to Lexington, Ky., called for their Confederate monuments to come down on the heels of the weekend's violent clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters over a Robert E. Lee statue that is set for removal in Charlottesville.

David Goldfield, a professor of history who studies Confederate symbols at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said the removal of the monuments in Baltimore was likely to be part of a "rolling cascade" of cities and states ridding themselves of, or at least relocating, similar statues.

"You're going to see another wave of these removals." Mr. Goldfield said. "The fact that it's done fairly expeditiously is not surprising because if you do it quickly the opposition can't build up, and the confrontations that we've had, not only in Charlottesville but elsewhere, will not materialize."

Ms. Pugh said she had spoken with the president of the City Council on Monday, the same day the council voted unanimously to remove the four monuments, and said she intended to take them down "quickly and quietly." Initially, she also wrote a letter to the Maryland Historical Trust, providing notice of her concerns, but was advised by the city's attorney that she could move forward without its approval, based on her executive powers to protect the city.

"I think any city that has Confederate statues are concerned about violence occurring in their city," Ms. Pugh said.

Small, celebratory crowds gathered as the monuments were removed overnight. Residents were seen celebrating by the pedestal of a monument to the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two Confederate generals, which had been spray-painted with the phrase "Black Lives Matter." The mayor had moved so swiftly that even some members of Baltimore's City Council were unaware.

The president of the City Council, Bernard C. Young, known as Jack, missed a late-night phone call from the mayor because he had taken cold medicine for bronchitis and was asleep.

And Brandon Scott, another member of the City Council, received a text message from a city worker informing him of the removals while he was talking with his neighbors about a shooting in his neighborhood.

"I didn't know it was going to happen yesterday," said Mr. Scott, although he was glad the city acted swiftly to stave off any effort by protesters to take them down themselves - like the ones in Durham, N.C.

Members of one activist group, Baltimore Bloc, had announced Tuesday on Twitter that the city planned to take down the statues on Wednesday evening. Instead, at least one of their members watched happily as a statue of Lee and Jackson was hoisted off its pedestal, posting a video on Twitter and writing, "Move Lee, get out the way, get out the way Jackson, get out the way."

The city had been studying what to do with its Confederate monuments since 2015, when a mass shooting by a white supremacist at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., led to a renewed debate across the South about removing Confederate monuments and battle flags from public spaces.

Ms. Pugh said she had been working on the removal of the statues since June, when she met with Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans to discuss his city's removal of its own Confederate monuments. By last week, she said she had reached out to contractors to solicit assessments on the feasibility of removing each of the statues in short order, and sped up her efforts after watching the violence in Charlottesville on Saturday.

Ms. Pugh said she did not anticipate a legal challenge but that the city would fight any suit.

"I don't think it would matter, because I think having consulted with my legal team I acted in the best interest of my city," she said,

The mayor said she did not know where the statues were moved or where they will end up. She suggested plaques be installed that describe "what was there and why it was removed."

Maryland never seceded from the Union in the Civil War, but there was popular support for the Confederacy in Baltimore and southern Maryland, where Confederate soldiers are buried. The monuments, here in a majority-black city, are considered widely offensive because of their ties to slavery and the Confederacy.

The monuments, which are now empty pedestals, included the one to Lee and Jackson, a double equestrian statue of the generals erected in 1948; the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, erected in 1903; and a statue of Roger B. Taney, a Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, which held that even free blacks had no claim to citizenship, which was erected in 1887.

The fourth statue, the Confederate Women's Monument, was dedicated in 1917.

On Tuesday, Gov. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor here, called for the removal of a second Taney statue, this one from the State House grounds in Annapolis, the state capital.

Some of the empty pedestals, including the one to Mr. Taney in the Mount Vernon neighborhood, drew the attention of passers-by, some who were seen reaching atop the pedestal to feel a sticky black goo left behind.

For a moment, a middle-aged woman pulled up in a sedan and idled next to the site. "Have they taken the monument down?" she yelled out a window to a man sitting on a nearby bench. "All of them?"

He answered in the affirmative, and she responded with a slur before driving away.

Kaylyn Meyers, 29, watched the exchange and said it seemed to sum up the tension gripping the country.

"People are really emboldened right now," she said, while pausing to smoke a cigarette and look at the pedestal. Regarding the woman in the car who uttered the slur, she said, "That was just completely wrong."

Ms. Meyers had taken the day off to visit all four monument sites. History could not and should not be erased, she said, but men like Taney did not belong on a pedestal in a nice public park, either.

"Good riddance," she said.

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charlottesville  va  violence (august  2017)

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Nicholas Fandos, Russell Goldman and Jess Bidgood

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Baltimore Mayor Had Statues Removed in 'Best Interest of My City'

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"The mayor has the right to protect her city," she said. "For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation.

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It's been over 150 years since the last shots were fired in the US Civil War, but a debate still rages over how history will remember the losing side.

Hundreds of statues dedicated to the Confederacy - the southern states which revolted against the US government - exist all throughout the United States, and often serve as an offensive reminder of America's history of slavery and racial oppression.

Recent decisions by local governments to remove those memorials has triggered a backlash from a vocal group of Americans who see their removal as an attempt to subvert US history and southern culture.

President Donald Trump waded into the debate on Thursday, tweeting that the controversial monuments are "beautiful" and bemoaning that their beauty would be "greatly missed" from cities.

When were they erected?

Most Confederate monuments were not built until nearly a generation after the war ended in 1865, mostly due to a lack of funds during the Reconstruction era.

It was not until the turn of the century, as southern states began to enact so-called Jim Crow laws designed to deprive recently freed slaves of equal rights, that the monuments began to go up in public spaces.

The second wave came in the 1950-1960s, as civil rights campaigners demanded desegregation and equal rights for African-Americans.

"The civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists," according to a report by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups and civil rights movements.

To date, there are over 700 monuments to the Confederacy - most, but not all, located in the South.

Who do they depict?

Some memorials are dedicated to the foot soldiers of the Confederacy, and many depict famous generals such as Robert E Lee or Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

Descendents of Jackson on Wednesday called for depictions of their relative to come down in the Virginia state capitol, saying that the white supremacist protest in Charlottesville "showed us unequivocally that Confederate statues offer pre-existing iconography for racists".

The phrase "Monuments Must Go" began trending on Twitter in the US, as users shared the descendants' open letter to Richmond officials.

After the Unite the Right rally, which was comprised of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi supporters, Robert Lee's great-great grandson condemned "the misuse of his memory by those advancing a message of intolerance and hate".

The far-right marchers had nominally come to the university town to protest against the city council's decision to remove a statue of Lee.

Why are they controversial?

Most defenders of Confederate symbols say they are not meant to memorialise slavery, which the South fought to preserve.

They say that the war was fought for "state's rights" and against the federal system, adding that symbols such as the Confederate "battle flag" commemorate the region's history and culture.

But most historians agree it was about slavery. Racial minorities, especially black Americans, feel that their presence in public life is offensive.

Maine Governor Paul LePage said on Thursday that removing them would serve simply to whitewash history.

"How can future generations learn if we're going to erase history? That's disgusting," Mr LePage told WGAN radio, adding that removing them is "just like" removing monuments to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"To me, it's just like going to New York City right now and taking down the monument of those who perished in 9/11. It will come to that," he described.

Mr Trump has also applied this argument, saying that it will only be a matter of time before liberal activists suggest removing monuments to Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, because they owned slaves.

In 2015, only days after the 150th anniversary of the Civil War was commemorated, a white man killed nine parishioners in an African-American church in South Carolina.

Photos of the man posing with Confederate flags changed how many Americans viewed the emblems.

No longer were they considered harmless symbols of culture, commemorating a rebellious spirit.

After the South Carolina government chose to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol, many local governments followed suit by removing their own images.

Now a second wave of removals are happening, sparked by the violent events in Charlottesville.

Just this week, vandals have targeted them in Ohio, North Carolina, and Maryland.

But some states such as North Carolina, where this week angry crowds tore down a bronze statue of a soldier, have laws preventing local governments from removing the monuments without higher approval.

In a Marist poll conducted this week, 62% of Americans believe they should remain "as a historical symbol", and somewhat surprisingly, 44% of African-American respondents agreed.

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It's been over 150 years since the last shots were fired in the US Civil War, but a debate still rages over how history will remember the losing side. Hundreds of statues dedicated to the Confederacy - the southern states which revolted against the US government - exist all throughout the United States, and often serve as an offensive reminder of America's history of slavery and racial oppression.

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Alas, it fell to an Air Force general to remind America of its values. His rank may be lower than the commander in chief's, but Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria spoke with extraordinary passion and eloquence.

Everyone in America should listen to Silveria's words; everyone, including the President.

It happened on Thursday, at the 10th Air Base Wing in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Silveria, the superintendent of the US Air Force Academy, brought together more than 5,000 students, staff and Air Force officers to tell them with electrifying clarity that prejudice, bigotry and intolerance cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.

Someone had written racist slurs on a message board at the academy's prep school, where students hone the skills to join the prestigious Air Force Academy. If his audience had not heard about the incident, Silveria wanted to make sure they knew.

"If you're outraged," he said, "you're in the right place."

He was just getting started. "You should be outraged not only as an airman, but as a human being."

With the five-minute video of his powerful lesson going viral, you can almost hear much of America answering, "Amen!"

If the general's resonant words had sounded in the same hall a couple of years ago, they would not have spread across the country; they would not have seemed remarkable. After all, speaking out against hatred has been a staple of America's most respected leaders for decades. But that has changed. It started to change the day Donald Trump launched his presidential election campaign. His willingness to traffic in bigotry has threatened to unravel America's social fabric and undermine the country's standing in the world from the day he became President.

Silveria would not attack his commander in chief, but he knows that when five black students found the words "Go home" with a racial epithet on the message boards outside their rooms, it was not an isolated incident.

We would be "tone deaf," he said, "not to think about the backdrop of what's going on in our country." He mentioned the events in Charlottesville and Ferguson, and the controversy over protests at NFL games.

Silveria gave the clearest explanation of how free speech is supposed to work. "The appropriate response for horrible language and horrible ideas -- the appropriate response is a better idea."

In the battlefield of ideas, the general launched a frontal assault. "We are here," he said, "because we have a better idea." He called for "civil discourse" on the issues tearing the country apart.

And he explained why the ideas of the bigots are wrong, speaking about how diversity creates strength, about the power we derive because, "we come from all walks of life... from all races ... all backgrounds ... all upbringings."

The general extolled the academy's values. He might have been talking about American values, about human values, about the principles that America proudly championed until recently, exhorting his rapt audience to defend them -- and to leave if they cannot embrace them.

At the heart of those intangible principles of tolerance and respect for others lies the most important element of humanity -- the imperative to treat every human being with respect.

"If you can't treat some with dignity and respect, then you need to get out," Silveria declared. "If you can't treat someone of another gender ... of another race or a different color skin with dignity and respect, then you need to get out."

His words are all the more striking because he could have been addressing the current president.

According to an Axios report, Trump has been mocking Sen. John McCain in private gatherings by imitating his distinctive movements, which are the result of injuries endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Trump had already disparaged McCain during the campaign for being captured during the war. The new revelations are all the more distasteful because McCain, who has served his country at great personal cost, is now suffering from a deadly form of brain cancer.

We saw Trump's ghastly mockery of a disabled reporter during the campaign, and we heard him confess how he treats women.

But it all pales next to his defense of white supremacists after the events in Charlottesville. And the contrast with Lt Gen. Silveria's words could not be sharper. As the general reminds us all that "we are not naïve," we know prejudice exists, he also tells us it is our duty to fight against it.

Instead of seizing what could have become a turning point in his presidency, instead of elevating the discourse, Trump jumped in the mud, defending men who advocate white supremacy, who marched chanting slogans directly translated from the original German of the Nazis, and crying out, "The Jews will not replace us." Trump said there were "very fine people" in the bunch.

The general issued a helpful reminder for those who don't want to see those views take hold in the age of Trump: "No one can take away our values." He was talking to his audience at the academy, at the air base, but his message applies to the entire country, and to people everywhere.

When you hear an ugly, offensive idea, find a way to talk about it. Don't let it stand unchallenged. Seek a forum for civil discussion. Above all, offer a better idea.

Military rules, unlike the laws governing the rest of the country, do not allow for racial slurs. For that reason, those who anonymously wrote the insults may end up getting expelled from the academy.

To those who remain, Gen. Silveria paused dramatically with a suggestion: "Grab your phones," he told them. "I want you to videotape this so that you have it, so that you can use it." He urged everyone to use his words, share them and talk about them.

"So that we all have the moral courage together."

If only we had a President who could say that.

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the general's speech is the one we wish the president could make - cnn

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The general's speech is the one we wish the President could make

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Alas, it fell to an Air Force general to remind America of its values. His rank may be lower than the commander in chief's, but Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria spoke with extraordinary passion and eloquence. Everyone in America should listen to Silveria's words; everyone, including the President.

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Stars protest against racism injustice and police violence