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C-May 7 2018
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A-Janeen Bryant
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The idea that once they are taken down, these statues "belong in a museum" doesn't take into account that museums may not want them. Should they?

By Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff

smithsonianmag.com

This article was

originally published on the blog for the Center for the Future of Museums

In the wake of the Charlottesville riots last summer, newspaper headlines throughout the nation were calling for the removal of Confederate war monuments from the American public sphere-and their "safe housing" in museums. " What to do with Confederate monuments? Put them in museums as examples of ugly history, not civic pride," read a Los Angeles Times headline days after the riots. " Confederate Monuments Belong in Museums, Not Public Squares" stated a Weekly Standard headline from last August. " We Need to Move, Not Destroy, Confederate Monuments," was the heading for a thoughtful article by New York Times critic Holland Cotter.

In the subsequent months, dozens of Confederate monuments across the nation have, in fact, been "removed" or toppled, and many have made their way to the "cold storage" of museum collections spaces.

But for many of us who actually work in and interpret museums, the issue of our institutions' rightful role in this debate does not seem to be either straightforward or obvious. Are museums, in fact, the appropriate place for storing these gigantic homages-not even to the Civil War itself-but to the Jim Crow movements that fueled their commissioning and erection on state capitol grounds, university commons, city parks and other places of power in the early decades of the 20th century?

We would argue that the "put them in a museum" response to Confederate memorials reflects a misunderstanding of what museums are for-and an effort to sidestep conversations that we really need to have.

Yes, museums do collect things-savory and unsavory-and, yes, they often put things away and preserve them for a very long time. But 21st century museums are striving hard to expand their reach, shift their focus and repair their popular perception as public warehouses primarily in the cold storage business for art and artifacts. More and more, we aim to surface issues, not hide them-to be places where communities come together to discuss and wrestle with contemporary questions.

There are those who respond that museums should just put Confederate monuments "in context," and by doing so, fulfill the mission of many contemporary museums to serve as sites of civic engagement nimbly poised to investigate, convene and discuss the most contested issues of the day.

Yet putting monuments in context is anything but a simple, declarative act: power dynamics come into play. First, museums are physical spaces that convey authority. Statues remain powerful-and physically imposing-visual forms that will keep speaking even when they are in new settings. They can and certainly will shape social experiences in ways that curators may not be able to anticipate.

A simple label is not enough.

In displaying statues, museums will need to be prepared to contextualize them visually and dramatically, to represent the layers of their history-from the story of their creation to the story of them being taken down and collected.

This is exactly the approach taken by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin when they agreed to house the 8-½-foot-tall, 2,000-pound statue of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, that was removed from the campus grounds in 2015.

The controversial decision to transfer the statue to the history center, rather than store or destroy it, represented one possible solution to the Confederate statue debate. "I think this is the answer," wrote Don Carleton, the center's executive director, in a article that is pointedly titled "When a bronze Confederate needed to retire, the University of Texas found a home." "They are pieces of art; destroying that is like burning books. They need to be preserved and they belong in museums."

He added, "We will not be putting him in our building as some sort of shrine to Jefferson Davis, but as an educational experience and point of discussion." Using old letters, diary entries, and original sketches, the permanent exhibit, titled "From Commemoration to Education," tells the story of how the statue came to be and why it was later moved from the campus' south. The presence of the statue in an educational exhibit, as opposed to a place of honor, underlines that Davis, as well as his ideas and actions, are no longer commemorated by the university, said exhibit curator Ben Wright.

Yet the question still remains whether, by accepting monuments into permanent collections, museums are not continuing to bestow the same value and authority upon them that they "enjoyed" as 'stand-alone' monuments - or even worse, further aggrandizing them. Even if museums contextualize them in more complicated ways, their very monumentality might spark an even fiercer form of physical intimidation when squeezed into the small space of a standard museum building.

More than 25 years ago, the Maryland Historical Society shocked the museum world by inviting artist Fred Wilson to "mine" its collections for the revolutionary "Mining the Museum" project. In that exhibit, Wilson juxtaposed slavery-era documents, objects and texts traditionally consigned to storage along with the comfortable objects of privileged white history. The most dramatic example involved the placement of slave shackles next to a polished collection of silver repoussé vessels of the white Maryland upper class.

Could the lessons learned from "Mining the Museum" exhibit inform a museum's approach to displaying Confederate statues with their not-so-subtle messages of white supremacy? Perhaps, but the broader question still remains: No matter how sensitively we contextualize the artifacts themselves, does their larger-than-life presence mitigate or even parody any interpretive value they might otherwise have in the dwarfing gaze of an enclosed exhibition space?

Our co-author Louis P. Nelson, a University of Virginia professor of architectural history, suggested in a 2017 interview that perhaps one solution is not to try to transfer gigantic statues to museum buildings, but rather to create museums around the statues themselves:

"Such statues cannot stand alone in the middle of a square with azaleas. I have argued that we need to transform these open spaces into open-air museums, where we can learn about the simultaneous histories of lynching, Confederate monuments and Jim Crow policies. These are powerful objects so they will need powerful recontextualization...They need to become catalysts for conversations as objects in a museum might."

Yet even this approach raises critical questions about the nature of these conversations, the particular "stakeholders" who are brought to-or absent from-the table, and the role of "professionals" in the process. Do we really trust that curators and museum personnel have the right stuff to make this happen? Who will be the arbiters and decision-makers in the meaning-making process? And how is this process limited-or framed-by the starting assumption that the monuments must be preserved in the public sphere in the first place?

Another co-author, museum educator Janeen Bryant, born and raised in South Carolina, echoes this apprehension about museum professionals' training-and ability-to both facilitate, and effectively translate, historically marginalized community voices about the embodied outrage and pain of such monuments on the landscape. An informal social media poll she conducted corroborated these concerns about whether museums really have the preparation and capacity to house and display these monuments to our racist national past.

"As a native southerner," she says, "I often consider the monuments (and Confederate flags) as a social marker of claimed territory for white people/whiteness-a visual cue of which town/courthouse/pit-stop is safe and not safe."

For years, the deadening silence from mainstream museums was a frustrating reminder that most staff were unwilling or unable to confront racist monuments, racist artifacts or racism in any form. Fortunately now, museums are beginning to recognize the important role they can and should play in facilitating community engagement and response. Our challenge as professionals is a willingness to create intellectually active spaces wherever we gather-in workshops, in conferences, and in staff break rooms-to grapple with the overt assumptions surrounding monuments.

Ibram Kendi, noted historian and anti-racism educator reflected on his childhood in Manassas, Virginia, home to a Civil War battlefield, during a recent speech at the Smithsonian's symposium on " Mascots, Myths, Monuments and Memory." "In thinking through my comments for today," he said, "I tried to really understand, first and foremost, how it felt for me, how it feels for so many of us to live day in and day out surrounded by so many Confederate monuments.

How does it feel for those people that have to literally watch people cheer for mascots that are a desecration of their people?...

And more importantly, what do these feelings say about our memories and our histories, let alone the memories of the defenders of these monuments and mascots?

How can we use these feelings and memories as a motivation to never stop digging into American history to uncover the graves of racial violence?

And how can we study these graves, the dead, to give us a better sense of the living-the life of racial violence in the United States today?"

As we museum professionals formulate our own approach to the thorny issues of where and whether and how to re-contextualize these toppled monuments to our Jim Crow past, we must recognize our own histories of complicity in the centering of white, male, hetero-normative heritages and the celebration of icons of white supremacy in our centuries of collection and display.

It is no secret that a willful erasure of people of color (and the long histories of racist assaults) exists in museums and the public landscape in this country. This has prompted generations of activism whereby communities of color have tirelessly contested these narratives and fought for their rightful place in history.

The successful Take 'Em Down Movement in New Orleans that led to the dismantling of four Confederate monuments, for example, was the direct result of community activism led by black organizers such as Michael Moore. However, most coverage attributed the removals to the open-mindedness and forward thinking of New Orleans' then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu, lauding his speech and unprecedented action, rather than acknowledging the movement and the black leadership that truly and thoughtfully catalyzed these changes.

A broader conversation about museums and monuments must include not only a recognition of the landscapes of oppression that the Confederate statues mark, but also an understanding of the self-determined landscapes of resistance that marginalized communities have created, of necessity, to mark their own histories, in opposition to, but also in spite of these erasures.

Museo Urbano in El Paso, Museum of Chinese in America in New York, Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, Pauli Murray Center in Durham, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, and the now-open, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery are only a handful of examples of "bottom-up" museums that are de-centering white supremacist narratives, centering marginalized histories and social justice, modeling innovative approaches to inclusion and redefining the very idea of what constitutes memorials and monuments.

Mainstream museums have much to learn from the foresight and sophistication of these and other culturally, ethnically and racially specific museums, many of which began to emerge as long as 50 years ago. Museums need to critically examine their own histories before they earn the right to properly contextualize racist memorials.
Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums blog .
As Holland Cotter so correctly noted in his column from last year, in order for museums to name the message of these oversized propaganda monuments for what they are, they "will have to relinquish their pretense of ideological neutrality. They will have to become truth-telling institutions."

The five of us who have jointly authored this blog-museum directors, curators, scholars, educators and architects-will be moderating a roundtable on this topic with the wider museum community this week at the American Alliance of Museum's annual conference in Phoenix. Perhaps an apt point of departure to spark our conversation might be the prophetic words of artist Nayland Blake, who recently stated, "Museums need to decide whether or not they are active participants in the life of their city or if they are just some kind of trophy house."

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Are Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments?

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By Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff smithsonianmag.com This article was originally published on the blog for the Center for the Future of Museums In the wake of the Charlottesville riots last summer, newspaper headlines throughout the nation were calling for the removal of Confederate war monuments from the American public sphere-and their "safe housing" in museums. " What to do with Confederate monuments?

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C-C-September 26 2019
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A-Colin Campbell
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Baltimore's Confederate monuments, removed from their pedestals in the dead of night more than two years ago, remain stashed out of sight in a city-owned lot, awaiting an uncertain future.

After crews took down the four bronze statues under orders from then-Mayor Catherine Pugh in August 2017, suggestions for what to do with them ranged from destroying them to restoring them to their plinths. Instead, they've stood hidden from the public inside a small pen made of Jersey barriers, while officials determine what's next for them.

A museum expressed interest in acquiring the bronze statues, but they were too large, and the Maryland Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans still wants them returned to their platforms, said Eric Holcomb, division chief of the city's Commission on Historical and Architectural Preservation. He declined to name the interested museum, which he said has asked to remain anonymous.

"We are looking for organizations that will care for them, that will [provide] the most historically accurate interpretation," Holcomb said Wednesday. "Everything's on the table, but we're looking to make sure they're kept and interpreted accurately."

A spokesman for Mayor Bernard C. "Jack" Young did not respond to requests for comment

In a surprise move that made national news, Pugh ordered the four monuments taken down from their pedestals "quickly and quietly" to avoid any clashes like the one days earlier in Charlottesville, Virginia. In that event, a counterprotester had been killed and two police officers had died in a helicopter crash during a Neo-Nazi rally to save a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The Lee-Jackson Monument in Baltimore's Wyman Park Dell, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women's Monument on West University Parkway, and the Roger B. Taney Monument in Mount Vernon, had been installed from 1887 to 1948. They had previously come under scrutiny in 2015 after a white supremacist killed nine African Americans in a domestic terror attack at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

(While he did not join the Confederacy, Taney infamously wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision, upholding slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War, as chief justice of the Supreme Court.)

After removing the statues, Pugh suggested adding historical markers to the empty pedestals explaining the significance of the monuments - and the reasons for their removal. As for what to do with the statues themselves, she mentioned the possibility of moving them to a Confederate cemetery. Nothing came of either idea.

Brandon Scott, now City Council president and a candidate for mayor, suggested melting down the bronze monuments and molding them into statues of prominent Baltimoreans, such as Clarence "Du" Burns, the city's first black mayor, or legendary abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

If someone wants to buy them from the city, they should be sold, and the profits should fund scholarships for low-income students, he said.

"I would want to do something that helps benefit Baltimore," Scott said Wednesday. "That's what this is about for me, turning darkness into light."

Terry Klima, commander of the Maryland division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said in 2017 that the monuments "should go back exactly where they were found." Criticizing the monuments' removal as an arbitrary attempt to erase history, the group has called on the Maryland Historical Trust to overrule Pugh's directive and restore the Confederate statues to their pedestals. Klima could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The city preservation commission is required to regularly update the Maryland Historical Trust on its progress in finding homes for the monuments, said David Buck, a spokesman for the state Department of Planning.

The most recent correspondence, on July 5, mentioned CHAP staff members had briefed the mayor's office on their work, Holcomb said, but no home for the monuments had been found.

The Historical Trust and the city "are working cooperatively to make the monuments accessible to the public in an appropriate setting," Buck said in a statement.

Lawrence Brown, associate professor in Morgan State University's School of Community Health and Policy, said Wednesday that the statues belong in a museum exhibit examining the white supremacist roots of the post-Civil War veneration of the Confederacy.

Short of that, he said, "destroy them."

Brown said he is more concerned with what replaces the dethroned monuments on their still-empty pedestals around the city.

He suggested creating monuments to black Union soldiers; to African American civil rights leaders in Baltimore; and to the scores of people who were sold into slavery in the city.

Even a memorial of the Pratt Street Riot in 1861, in which Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore drew the first blood of the Civil War by attacking Union soldiers passing through the city, would provide important historical context for the subsequent riots of 1968 and 2015, after the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Freddie Gray, respectively, Brown said.

"Understanding the Pratt Street riot and contextualizing it helps us understand why the city is so prone to violence and uprisings," he said. "It's in Baltimore's DNA. You're not going to get to the root of that if you don't understand how it all started. ... You can't solve today's pressing problems by ignoring the past."

Corey Brooks, associate professor of history at York College in Pennsylvania, researched the origins of the Confederate statues after noticing the Taney monument in Mount Vernon when he lived in Baltimore.

"Nostalgia for the Confederacy and public monuments commemorating supposed heroes of the Confederate 'lost cause' emerged in concert with widespread postbellum efforts to shore up white supremacy," Brooks wrote in a piece that ran in Maryland Historical Magazine in 2017.

Baltimore's residents should be given a say in the decision about what happens to the monuments, he said in an interview Wednesday.

"It seems to me whatever is going to be done with [the monuments] should be done as part of an inclusive process of community engagement," he said. "How do we want to tell these stories, not just that Taney was a force for promoting systems of racism in Civil War-era America, but also what it means that the city sought to honor him in the post-Civil War decades?"

Originally Published:

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Baltimore's Confederate statues were removed in the dead of night. 2 years later, they languish on a city lot.

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Baltimore's Confederate monuments, removed from their pedestals in the dead of night more than two years ago, remain stashed out of sight in a city-owned lot, awaiting an uncertain future.After crews took down the four bronze statues under orders from then-Mayor Catherine Pugh in August 2017, suggestions for what to do with them ranged from [...]

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US Confederate monuments: What is the debate about?

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We answer the most asked questions on Confederate statues and list those monuments that are being taken down.

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C-August 21 2018
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P-persuade

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C-August 16 2017
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C-3 years ago
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C-August 24 2018
R-he agrees with it
A-Anne Bailey
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Protesters toppled the 'Silent Sam' Confederate statue on Aug. 20 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gerry Broome/AP

When protesters tore down the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on Aug. 20, it wasn't just destruction of state property - a crime for which the protesters are now being investigated.

Rather, the protesters knocked a powerful symbol of white supremacy from its pedestal - both literally and figuratively. Silent Sam, after all, was meant to pay tribute to those who wanted to maintain slavery.

With the backing of the state, Silent Sam has stood proudly and defiantly at UNC Chapel Hill since 1913. Now the statue has become one of many in dozens of cities and municipalities where monuments of Confederate soldiers and generals have been removed - mostly with official sanction.

But what, if anything, will this latest removal of a Confederate statue accomplish?

While the removal of Silent Sam was a joyous moment for protesters who had long requested that the university acknowledge that the statue was a divisive symbol of white supremacy - for the opposing side, it was an example of what they call the intolerance of the left, particularly among those who oppose the views and policies of President Trump.

Slavery at root of divide

This divide has deep historical roots. Silent Sam and the other 700-plus Confederate statues still standing in the U.S. represent a legacy of slavery and the structural racism that followed.

My book, " The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History," documented one important aspect of antebellum slavery. The harsh and devastating reality of slave auctions meant that profit mattered more than people. My book is one of many new books that seek to remind a forgetful public of America's original sin.

Beginning first in Virginia in 1662, with the other colonies and states following suit, officials enacted laws to specify that slave status followed the condition of the mother. This continued right up to the eve of the Civil War in 1861 where the enslaved were still bought and sold on the open market. And so, until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, to be black in America was synonymous with a separate and unequal status.

The American Civil War was fought to settle the question as to whether blacks should continue to be separate and unequal or whether the United States of America would finally be united - united in its commitment to the notion of justice and equality put forth in the Declaration of the Independence.

The simple fact is that the North won the war, and in winning it, the North preserved the union. The Confederate statues, therefore, represent a step backwards - a symbol of what the United States once was - not what it is now.

Averting a civil war over statues

Today, the nation is experiencing what some call a civil war over statues. The only way to avert this new civil war - in some ways a symbolic one over the outcome of the original Civil War - is to have dialogue. And after dialogue, actions must follow. It could be that protesters who toppled Silent Sam acted out of a sense that dialogue had reached a standstill after years of debate.

Communities may decide to take the statues down or replace them with monuments that honor abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William H. Seward or Thaddeus Stephens. They may also choose to keep the Confederate statues intact with a plaque that gives a more balanced view of the causes of the war. In this way, they would be used as a tool to teach about the Civil War - one of the bloodiest chapters in American history and one that none of us should want to repeat.

Tearing down Confederate statues may actually do little to further the goal of ending the legacy of slavery. It will not bring about systemic change or end notions of white supremacy or eradicate structural racism.

The more difficult work when it comes to dismantling the legacy of slavery involves ending some of slavery's byproducts, such as mass incarceration of black and brown bodies and systemic educational inequities for children of color. The hope is that those protesters will channel their zeal and apply it to these thorny and persistent problems. There is no easy fix. But if and when that fix does come, 100 years from now, America will be remembered not only for its technological advances - such as its computers, its robots or its driverless cars - but for its commitment to human rights.

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Tearing down Confederate statues leaves structural racism intact

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When protesters tore down the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on Aug. 20, it wasn't just destruction of state property - a crime for which the protesters are now being investigated. Rather, the protesters knocked a powerful symbol of white supremacy from its pedestal - both literally and figuratively.

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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.

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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.

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C-April 2018
R-They do not agree they don't want to honour it.
A-Cait Bladt
A-No
P-inform

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Protesters at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill tore down a statue honoring university alumni who had died fighting for the Confederacy. The destruction of the statue, known as Silent Sam, has renewed the national debate about what to do with Confederate statues. Advocates for removing the statues say they memorialize racism and honor traitors. But even some who want to keep the statues say that removing them would, in effect, whitewash America's history. What do you think?

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Should all Confederate statues be taken down? | The Tylt

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Protesters at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill tore down a statue honoring university alumni who had died fighting for the Confederacy, renewing the national debate about what to do with Confederate statues. Advocates for removing the statues say they memorialize racism and honor traitors.

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C-August 15 2017
R-No They are trying to remove it.
A-Asha Sanaker
A-No
P-it informs why they should be removed

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C- August 18 2017
R- It relates by that the civil war statues are important in our history.
A-Anna Dubenko
A-no
P-To persuade

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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?