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Officials are calling for the removal of Confederate statues in cities throughout the U.S. after a white supremacist rammed a car into counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19. Some say statues celebrating Confederate officials and heroes are monuments to white supremacy and have no place in society. Others say removing those statues is an attempt to erase U.S. history. Americans must confront the fact that white supremacy is part of American culture. What do you think? 🤔

Should all Confederate statues be removed?

Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Kentucky, announced he'll be removing statues celebrating Confederate leaders from the city in the wake of violent protests by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The statues would be removed from prominent positions at Lexington's courthouses to a nearby park that celebrates veterans.

Gray is one of many mayors who are removing statues and symbols of the Confederacy from prominent places in their respective cities. Many of these statues went up during the 1920s and the Civil Rights era as a way to demonstrate opposition to racial equality. New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu explains why many of the statues were erected:

"They were not statutes that were put up to honor those particular men," he said. "It was to send a message that the Confederacy was really the right cause, and not the wrong cause."

The symbols we choose to have in our public spaces show what we value as a society. These statues to Confederate men are not small, inconspicuous statues. They're designed to be large and imposing. They're in prominent city spaces, overlooking courthouses and plazas where the public gathers.

Confederate soldiers were un-American when they took up arms to defend slavery 150 years ago and they remain un-American today. It's time to stop celebrating them.

Some historians say statues to Confederate officials should be left where they are, so people can confront America's struggles with racial equality. The statues may present a deeply flawed understanding of U.S. history and the South but they are important markers for American history and society. Removing them won't change anything.

These statues were often raised in the 1920s and Civil Rights era as a way to justify segregation and Jim Crow. The statues commemorate more than the Confederacy-they commemorate the hate that went into oppressing Black Americans long after the Civil War ended. This is not something that should be glossed over and swept under the rug.

Instead, historians suggest erecting new statues that provide a more inclusive and accurate account of what happened:

And those who seek to challenge a specific Confederate monument's message directly might consider an alternative-supplementing a statue with a marker that provides historical context about its origins and meaning. A group of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has proposed installing just this sort of plaque next to Silent Sam, a Confederate statue erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy on the campus in 1913.

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Should all Confederate statues be removed? | The Tylt

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Officials are calling for the removal of Confederate statues in cities throughout the U.S. after a white supremacist rammed a car into counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19. Some say statues celebrating Confederate officials and heroes are monuments to white supremacy and have no place in society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Isn't Really About Confederate Monuments

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Reason The Left Wants To Forget The Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are

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

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Last week was a watershed moment in the history of Confederate statues. After the deadly protests over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, pressure mounted across the country to take these statues down. At least 10 statues have been removed in four states, and many more are slated for removal.

For nearly a week after the protests, one mayor was conspicuously absent from this list: Mike Signer, mayor of Charlottesville.

Signer was part of a minority that pushed to keep the statues in place and contextualize them-by adding plaques that would explain the role of slavery in the Confederate cause, and by placing statues of slaves around them so that their glory might diminish. Signer shared this position with many historians and politicians-including Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Levar Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia-and he reiterated his stance as late as Tuesday. But on Friday afternoon, he flipped his position in favor of removal. McAuliffe and Stoney changed their stances, too.

And they're not the only ones. The events in Charlottesville prompted not only a wave of Confederate statue removal, but another wave of "contextualists" becoming pro-removal.
"It's hard to watch [the TV coverage of Charlottesville] and not start really probing this idea of whether or not contextualization is the way to go and can work."
Anne Marshall, a historian at Mississippi State University and a Kentucky native, came out on Wednesday as being pro-removal. "In a present in which racial injustice pervades the everyday life of so many, it turns out that no amount of historical context is particularly helpful," she wrote in Lexington's Herald-Leader. "Contextualization in public spaces doesn't work because monuments speak not only to who had power in the past, but who has it in the present." Kevin Levin, a historian and former high school history teacher in Charlottesville who keeps the blog Civil War Memory, expressed a similar reawakening on Saturday.

For Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle, professors of history at California State University-Fresno and experts on historical memory, the final nail in the coffin of their belief to keep Confederate statues in place came when watching TV coverage of Charlottesville. "It's hard to watch that and not start really probing this idea of whether or not contextualization is the way to go and can work," says Roberts.

They had feared that taking down the monuments would erase "a Jim Crow culture that for decades and decades and decades celebrated falsifying the Civil War" and "put up these monuments to bolster their own segregationist campaign."

But the Charlottesville protests proved that the costs of keeping monuments to the Confederacy-the hurt that they caused African Americans walking past, their potential to serve as a moral justification for a burgeoning white supremacist movement-outweighed any potential benefits. As Kytle puts it, "We adapted to new evidence."
"I'm fearful we're going to be moving towards moving all of these monuments but not putting anything new up."
Still, they hope that cities will go beyond simply removing the monuments and acting as if they never existed. Roberts and Kytle point to New Orleans, which removed four Confederate monuments this spring; where there was once a towering statue of Robert E. Lee, right on the edge of downtown, there is now just an empty pedestal. They see that pedestal as an opportunity. Put something there that commemorates the city's role as one of the most important ports for slave ships, they suggest. "I'm fearful we're going to be moving toward moving all of these monuments but not putting anything new up," says Kytle.

The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, the country's first slavery museum, may serve as another model. Whereas other Southern plantations host weddings and highlight the lives of their former owners, the Whitney has plaques, statues, and artwork honoring the thousands of slaves who died on its land and in greater Louisiana. "We can use this sacred place to reflect not just where we've been, but where we must go as a country," said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu at the plantation's opening in 2014.

One of the more surprising things the Charlottesville protests brought to light was how monuments to the Confederacy weren't limited to former Confederate states. Monuments were removed in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Madison, Wisconsin. Boston has boarded up its one Confederate monument as it decides where to move it. "No one's going to forget that New Orleans embraced the lost cause, that Charleston embraced the lost cause, that Charlottesville did," says Kytle. "But most people wouldn't realize that the lost cause took hold out West, that it took hold in the Northeast and Ohio and Wisconsin. So that could be a casualty of this movement."

Last year, Charlottesville's City Council created a commission to explore how the city could modify its public spaces in order to tell "the full story of Charlottesville's history of race." On Halloween, the commission voted 6-to-3 to keep the city's Confederate statues in place and contextualize them. All five of the commission's white members (plus one black member) voted to keep the statues; all three of the nay votes were cast by black members.

"Let African Americans have something to say about these issues," says Charles Ross, a history professor and director of the African American studies program at the University of Mississippi. He's on the university's Committee on History and Context, which last year reworded the plaque of a Confederate statue on campus in order to highlight its racist origins.
"When you walk by those structures, they are clearly reminders that you have a certain amount of limited status in this society."
If Ross had it his way, all those symbols would be removed or relocated, not merely put in context. To him, the contextualization argument doesn't hold weight; if you want to learn about the Confederacy or Jim Crow, he says, read a book. Don't force black students and faculty to walk by symbols of their state-sponsored oppression. "Particularly for African Americans," he says, "when you walk by those structures, they are clearly reminders that you have a certain amount of limited status in this society."

The university has made some strides in making its campus more welcoming for its black students, whose representation has doubled over the last 20 years. Its old mascot-a white plantation owner-has been replaced with a black bear, and last year the athletic department decided not to play "Dixie" at football games.

But it has a ways to go. The university's nickname, "Ole Miss," is a term slaves would use for a plantation owner's wife. While tailgates aren't the all-white, Confederate flag-adorned affairs Ross recalls from his first weeks on campus in 1995, they aren't the most inclusive, either. And there are still other Confederate statues, street names, and buildings that haven't been removed or contextualized.

Ross hopes that changes-if only incrementally-post-Charlottesville. Classes began on Monday, and a student uprising, paired with pressure from the media, could tip the scales in favor of eradicating Confederate symbols-even on a campus like UM.

"We have to have a whole new definition of who we are," says Ross.
This article's description of the University of Mississippi's former mascot has been corrected.

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These local leaders and historians wanted to leave Confederate statues standing-until Charlottesville

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Last week was a watershed moment in the history of Confederate statues. After the deadly protests over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, pressure mounted across the country to take these statues down. At least 10 statues have been removed in four states, and many more are slated for removal.

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A Virginia judge has ruled that the Confederate statues in Charlottesville are protected by state law because they are war monuments - and will not be taken down while the case is ongoing.

The statues were at the center of shocking violence in the summer of 2017 as neo-Nazis and other white nationalists, marching in support of them staying put in a park in the college town, clashed with anti-rightwing demonstrators in an outbreak that left many injured and one young demonstrator dead.

The ruling on Wednesday by Judge Richard Moore came after a lawsuit was filed against city council members by the Monument Fund, an organization based in Charlottesville that campaigns to preserve such statues, which could yet go to trial.

The suit was filed back in March 2017, alleging that the city council violated state laws when they voted to remove the statues of Confederate generals Robert Lee, and later, the Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson monument from Charlottesville.

Moore cited how the statues depict the men in military uniforms and on horses associated with them during the civil war. Virginia law makes it illegal for local municipalities to remove war monuments without permission from the state.

Moore acknowledged the controversy that has surrounded Confederate statues around the nation in recent years, and said his ruling is limited to the question of whether the Lee and Jackson statues fall under the definition of war memorials in Virginia law.

"While some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy, others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders in a difficult time ... and do not think of white supremacy at all and certainly do not believe in, accept or believe in such. In either event, the statues to them under the undisputed facts of this case still are monuments and memorials to them, as veterans of the civil war," Moore wrote in his ruling.

Before the case goes to trial, Moore must first rule on other pending issues, including the council's motion for immunity from the lawsuit.

Bob Fenwick, a former city councilor who is named in the lawsuit, believes that the council still has a good case for removing the statues, claiming that "It was a lawful act that we did" and that he was "very comfortable" with his vote to remove the statues. "It's based on a flawed law, so the law doesn't make much difference; it was a public process, it was a lawful process, so that's our case," he said.

In an effort to fight against the council's original vote to remove the statues, hundreds of far right members gathered in Charlottesville in August 2017, to protest in what was called a Unite the Right rally. The protest turned deadly when self-avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors killing a woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring nearly three dozen other people. Fields was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison last year.

Other Confederate monuments across the country have been the subject of fierce debate and sometimes clashes. Many have been taken down following the violence in Charlottesville.
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Virginia judge rules confederate statues are war monuments and can't be removed

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A Virginia judge has ruled that the Confederate statues in Charlottesville are protected by state law because they are war monuments - and will not be taken down while the case is ongoing.

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Though it is historically accepted that the Confederacy was established to preserve slavery, monuments still exist throughout the United States honoring the Confederacy.

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As president of a cultural heritage organization, I feel obligated to weigh in on the current controversy over Confederate monuments. The semi-hysterical push to remove them is, I strongly believe, a mistake, a dangerous precedent, and an exercise in ignorance. Mobs pull statues down. ISIS destroys monuments. Fanatics rewrite history to edit out the bits they don't like. Our country should not be walking down that road.

To the advocates of historic cleansing, this is about racism. Remove its reminders from public spaces, and you are helping to remove it from society. That is a bold assumption-in fact it's many assumptions: that what a monument says to you is what it says to everyone. That negative periods of history should be erased. That the losing side in a conflict also loses, for all time, the right to honor or mourn its dead. That driving an opposing sentiment underground will make it go away.

My nonprofit helps people in conflict zones protect their endangered heritage sites or rebuild them if they were damaged by war or terrorism. For example, we are working to restore the last remaining Judaeo-Christian pilgrimage site in the vicinity of Mosul, the only one that was missed by ISIS in its rampage. From my vantage point, the idea that the way to deal with history is to destroy any relics that remind you of something you don't like, is highly alarming. It's bad enough when some insane bunch of fanatics has this idea. When it happens in a supposedly rational, knowledge-based society, it sets a terrible precedent. And by the way it doesn't even accomplish its aim-quite often, a destroyed monument thereby gains in power and resonance. There are much better ways to process the past.

The first problem with projects of cultural cleansing is that they must always, inevitably, be subjective. The people behind the destruction of a statue or an edifice or a monument of course believe themselves to be justified. They see Object X as offensive to their beliefs and values. Others may argue for its survival by pointing out that it does no harm, or that it is art, or that they are sentimentally attached to it, or that they want it to remain for any number of other reasons. But even if everyone agrees that Object X should go, later generations may find that decision appalling, a loss to culture, to art, to science, to knowledge and to the historic integrity of the urban landscape.

To the Taliban, the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan were impious remnants of a pre-Islamic age, idols that deserved to be blown up. Now these irreplaceable, priceless and beautiful statues are gone, lost to the world. ISIS dynamited Palmyra ("a heathen site") and many other beautiful and valuable places in Syria and Iraq, including the tombs of the Biblical prophets Jonah and Daniel and countless other historic treasures. And they can make a case for so doing-not a case you and I might agree with, but a case nonetheless. They disapprove of monuments altogether-a sort of radical "thou shalt make no graven images" argument, and they especially disapprove of monuments honoring anything that is not Islamic, or not Islamic in line with their own particular vision, which is why they also destroy historic mosques and Muslim shrines. They feel virtuous and justified in targeting something they despise and turning it to rubble. The rest of us ought to beware of that feeling.

The second problem with this method is that it doesn't work. Object X will just become one more martyr. Fifteen years after their obliteration, the Bamiyan Buddhas are arguably the most vivid Buddha figures in the minds of millions of people. There are other colossal Buddha statues in the world-but how many can the average nonarchaeologists, non-Buddhist name? The Buddha of Hyderabad anyone? Of Kamakura? Similarly, can we seriously expect that removing Robert E. Lee from perches in parks will contribute to the elimination of racism in America? Taking a statue away is not a social reform action, it is a pseudo-action to make people feel they are accomplishing something when in fact they are not.

Another thing to consider, and perhaps be healthily humbled by, is the temporal nature of our societies, their accomplishments, their battles. Tour the archaeological ruins of any formerly great civilization, and you will invariably encounter inscriptions that have been chiseled away, faces that have been obliterated, heads that have been struck off the rumps of their statues. Someone overthrows or assassinates a predecessor and orders his or her name and image removed. Often, the relevant dynasties have been lost to historic memory, and no one has any clue what their bitterly monumental conflicts were about, who won, who lost, who got slaughtered, what they believed in. What could have remained is their story, and any lessons later humans might draw from it. Erase your story and you erase yourself.

And on the subject of stories: a monument does not impose a story. A monument is just a piece of stone or metal. The "get Robert E. Lee out of here" contingent assumes that anyone who stands before his statue will be thinking, "how noble it was to own a plantation and have slaves, I wish the South had won." A reasonable viewer, however, is more likely to think: "How sad that so many thousands of young men had to die for this lost cause. Too bad that Robert E. Lee, by all accounts a brilliant man, made the wrong call. We should all learn to subject our loyalties to very careful moral scrutiny." Instead of removing the object, it's much better to try and shape what lesson it conveys.

And President Donald Trump was right to ask where this will end. Our Founding Fathers were flawed personalities on many levels, and one could make the case that none of them deserve to be put on pedestals. An estimated 70 precent of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. And let's spend a moment perusing the following quotation:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races- I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Any guesses on who the speaker was? Robert E. Lee perhaps? Stonewall Jackson? No, these are the words of Abraham Lincoln. The sad hard truth is that although he presided over the abolition of slavery, Lincoln was and throughout his lifetime remained a racist. Shall he now be purged from our memory and deprived of our esteem, or shall we accept-as Professor Tanya Marsh argues in an exceptionally engrossing article-that history is " messy." And not just ours.

Which is why we need to ask ourselves: what's the bottom line here? That after a societal conflict, the losing side should have its symbols erased? That instead of looking forward and considering how to do things better, we should focus on looking backward to retroactively judge and eviscerate the past, in a Cultural Revolution of Politically Correct Righteousness?

It's true, of course, that there are historic personages who should not be honored or venerated. But I don't agree that keeping a monument means venerating the person or era it depicts; it can just as well stand witness to the folly of some despot's hubris or some tragic mass delusion. If North Korea ever becomes a normal state, I for one sincerely hope that they keep the bizarrely grandiose monuments of the peculiar dynasty that kept them in thrall for so long-as a historic curiosity, an object lesson, and a warning. Statues can have many meanings. In Vienna, just off the Ring-the broad circular boulevard that was built in place of the old fortification wall when the city had begun to sprawl beyond its medieval boundaries-stands an expansive fountain. At its head looms a twenty-meter high column topped by the statue of a Russian soldier holding a shield with the insignia of the Soviet Union in one hand and a Soviet flag in the other. At the base are two quotations from the dictator Stalin. The statue was erected by the Soviet army in 1945, using German POW's as forced labor. Designed in the trenches before the troops had even entered Vienna, the plan for the monument was modeled out of bread, since the architects had no other materials to work with.

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Destroying Confederate Monuments Hurts Us All-and Accomplishes Nothing

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As president of a cultural heritage organization, I feel obligated to weigh in on the current controversy over Confederate monuments. The semi-hysterical push to remove them is, I strongly believe, a mistake, a dangerous precedent, and an exercise in ignorance. Mobs pull statues down. ISIS destroys monuments.

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A judge rules that the monuments to Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson are protected by a state law

SINCE 1924, a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee (pictured), the Confederacy's top general and a brutal slave owner, has stood in a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. In August 2017, a crowd of white nationalists gathered in the pretty college town to protest against the city council's plan to remove the statue. One of them drove a car into a group of counter-demonstrators, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. President Donald Trump's remark that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the protests was one of the lowest points of his presidency.

Nearly two years later, a legal battle over the statue of Lee and one of another Confederate general, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, drags on. On April 25th, a judge ruled that the city council could not take the statues down because of a Virginian law that forbids authorities other than the state government from removing war memorials. While, "some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy," Richard E. Moore, a circuit judge wrote, and "others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders at a difficult time", their views are irrelevant; the statues are war memorials and thus protected.

Opponents of the statues are understandably concerned. Don Gathers, former chairman of the city commission that recommended removing the statues, said he feared the ruling would embolden white supremacists, "to think they had won and to come back to Charlottesville".

The battle over Charlottesville's Confederate statues echoes similar ones elsewhere. Since 2015, when a white supremacist, fond of posing for photos with the Confederate flag, slaughtered nine black churchgoers in South Carolina, there has been a concerted push to remove monuments to the Confederacy from public places across America. Proponents of the removal of such monuments point out that the majority of them were erected long after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era of the early twentieth century. This, it is argued, makes them less war memorials than symbols of a defiant and reborn white supremacy.

Their defenders often argue that, notwithstanding the spirit in which they were raised, the monuments are part of America's heritage. This argument has been broadly successful. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an advocacy group, over 100 Confederate symbols including flags and place names, have been removed from public places, but over 1,500, including over 700 monuments, remain.

This is largely due to state laws, like Virginia's. When in early 2017 Charlottesville's city council voted to remove the statue of Lee, the Monument Fund, a local group, sued, citing a law, passed in 1904-in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy-against the removal of war memorials. After Ms Heyer's murder, the council also voted to remove a statue of Jackson (erected in 1921) and the Monument Fund updated its lawsuit to include that.

Other states have passed such laws more recently. In 2004, Mississippi passed a law banning the removal of monuments. It was followed in 2015 by North Carolina. In 2016 Tennessee made it more difficult for the state legislature to approve monuments' removal. In 2017, Alabama passed legislation protecting memorials that had stood on public property for 40 years or more.

In some cases, novel ways have been found around these laws. In Memphis, Tennessee, several Confederate statues came down after the city sold the two public parks in which they stood to a non-profit organisation for a mere $1,000 each. On other occasions the laws have been flouted. Last year protestors toppled "Silent Sam" a statue of a Confederate soldier at the University of North Carolina; the university chancellor then had the monument carted away before she resigned. The laws are also being challenged in the courts, sometimes with more success than in Virginia. In January, a judge in Alabama ruled that the state law violated the rights of citizens opposed to Confederate monuments; the attorney-general has said he will appeal.

In Charlottesville, the legal wrangling will continue. As well as arguing that the statues of Lee and Jackson are not war memorials, the city council points out that the law did not originally apply to cities like Charlottesville, only to counties. (It was amended in 1997 to include cities.) The judge has yet to rule on that but the case may end up in the state's Supreme Court.

That legal battle aside, Charlottesville is likely to remain in the news. Last month Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, made the violence there a central part of his official campaign launch. In his announcement video the former vice-president chastised Mr Trump for praising the white supremacists who chanted, "the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 30s". The president's words, Mr Biden went on, "stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation".

In response, Mr Trump said he was defending those who had opposed the removal of the statue of Lee. "If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly," Trump told reporters. "And I was talking about people who went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals." Mr Biden disputed this. "Hatred was on the march, and he knew it," he said.

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Why Charlottesville's Confederate statues are still standing

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A judge rules that the monuments to Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson are protected by a state law SINCE 1924, a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee (pictured), the Confederacy's top general and a brutal slave owner, has stood in a park in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Opinion: Confederate monuments should stay and here's why

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

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ATLANTA -- Those driving or even flying here this week for the American Historical Association's annual meeting might have glimpsed Stone Mountain out their car or airplane window. The massive, Mount Rushmore-style tribute to Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson is hard to miss and -- for many -- hard to stomach. But what can and should be done about the thousands upon thousands of Confederate memorials and other symbols throughout the American South, many of which are on college and university campuses?

The topic was the subject of a plenary session for the first time open to the public here Thursday at the AHA's gathering.

James Grossman, executive director of the AHA, and a panel of noted experts on the American South all said the evening's discussion was precipitated by the June massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, S.C., which prompted debates about state-sanctioned Confederate iconography due to the shooter's interest in such symbols, as well as the recent student protest movement.

But speakers also said that the history of the Confederate flag and other symbols is long and fraught, and that another national conversation over their value and rightful place was already overdue.

For David Blight, the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University, the Confederate symbol question is, in part, about where one's "line" is. For some, he said, the line between what is historically valuable and not is drawn at that which does not promote maximum unity. For others, the line leads to maximum knowledge, and the "troubled wisdom" that comes with it.

Others still draw it at healing justice, if such a thing can be achieved, he said, and yet others at maximum pleasure or pain. Blight said he was pushed by a reporter earlier this year in the aftermath of the Charleston shooting -- which he called the past "exploding" into the present -- to draw his own line. Without realizing it, Blight named the Davis and Lee figures in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol as Confederate monuments he found unacceptable.

"I found I had a line," Blight said, but admitted he couldn't do anything to remove the statues, which are selected by individual states.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor and chair of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he used to shrug off the Confederate symbol problem in favor of what he saw as more pressing issues. He's come around, he said, but the problem is of a massive scale, and seeking to "rebalance" the Southern memorial landscape would likely be prohibitively expensive. According to the digital archive he's helped create of all the monuments in his state, just 30 of several hundred Civil War-related ones honor Union or black soldiers.

So what to do about all the other monuments in North Carolina and other states -- such as Georgia's giant Stone Mountain? Brundage suggested that the mountain -- with its various historical ties to white supremacists, including those in the Ku Klux Klan -- might best serve as a museum tracing the history of American white supremacy. But because there would be little public interest in such a project, he said, it's probably best to start by addressing the "lowest-hanging" fruit, or smaller monuments and memorials -- many of which are housed at colleges and universities.

While students on campuses across the country have called for the removal of monuments to everyone from Davis to Thomas Jefferson, who was not involved the Civil War but who owned slaves, Brundage said colleges and universities should target symbols for removal based on their significance.

For example, he said, some students have argued that all tributes to Woodrow Wilson, a known racist, should be expunged. While Wilson's imprint on certain campuses might be relatively insignificant, and therefore perhaps best left alone, he said, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Service and International Affairs at Princeton University probably should be renamed because Wilson's views contradict in many ways what the school is trying to promote.

Daina Ramey Berry, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, was a member of her university's task force on what to do about several Confederate monuments in a prominent area on campus.

The task force didn't tell President Gregory L. Fenves what to do, but rather described the historical context of the monuments, gauged how members of the campus community felt and outlined possible ways of dealing with them. Students were nearly perfectly split on the issue, and in the end Fenves decided to move the most controversial monument -- that of Davis, president of the Confederacy -- to a museum on campus that could provide appropriate historical context. Several other monuments stayed in place because they were found to have significant ties to Texas.

Berry said she'd refrained from talking publicly about her work on the task force after someone commented in a local newspaper article that black faculty members should be chained to the Davis statue. But because she felt that she was among peers on Thursday, Berry said she wanted to speak out. She asked what the historian's role was in the national ongoing debate, and encouraged her colleagues to get involved.

"I've been saying to my students for the last year, year and a half, that we are in a particular historical moment," Berry said. "So what is the historian's role in this moment, I ask again? The historian's role is to provide the context in which people can understand the very complex issues of the past and the present."

In addition to students, Berry said, historians also serve the public. "What will we say?" she asked. "Some of you in this room have already weighed in and I know these are difficult conversations. We will certainly not always agree with one another's interpretation, but that is history and it is what we do."

John Coski, an historian with the American Civil War Museum and author of The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem,said historians can help elevate the "tone and substance" of current and future conversations about such issues. Most importantly, he said, historians can help distinguish between sovereignty and free speech contexts -- that is, the difference between a state flag that looks like the Confederate flag, for example, and someone wearing the Confederate flag on a T-shirt.

Second, he said, historians can help explain the difference between the facts of history and the "glorifying" of it. For example, he said, it stands to reason that those who strongly value the Confederate flag as a means of memorializing the soldiers who fought and died under it ought to want to limit their expressions to a memorialized context. That's instead of, say, wearing a prom dress featuring the flag's pattern, he said.

Last, Coski said, historians should demand a more sophisticated conversation about what it means to "erase" history, and whether that's really possible. "That's what we have heard about and will be hearing a lot about in the next few years, unless these discussions morph into something unexpected," he said. "'It's erasing history!' Is it really? Well, you can't really erase history. You can erase the presentation of it, you can erase the memory of it, you can erase a particular spin of it, but is it really erasing history? We should be at forefront of trying to clarify what does and does not constitute erasing history."

Jane Turner Censer, a professor of history at George Mason University, made a similar argument, saying that the earliest attempts at memorializing Confederate soldiers -- undertaken largely by white women's organizations -- sought to locate and identify their remains. Over time, the monuments became more and more celebratory, and "glorifying," boldly moving from the cemetery to public squares and other prominent areas: Davis on a horse, a Confederate soldier standing guard.

Some of the supporters argued that these efforts weren't political, when they of course were, Censer said. "White Southerners showed their power by dominating the space with martial monuments."

But rather than eliminating such symbols altogether, she suggested, what if they were moved back to cemeteries and other locations more clearly tied to the act of memorializing, or the "bringing about of remembrance?" Censer said that while she's much more comfortable dealing in 19th-century history than 21st-century policy, "I suggest the way that these Confederate statues came to exist can offer something to our decisions .... Purpose matters. Even though cemeteries are not generally closed to the public they do not appear public" in the same way parks or colleges or universities do.

Grossman said it would have been irresponsible for historians to meet in Atlanta without talking about the "presence of the past within our lives." And while the city is rife with reminders of a cause that "deserved to be lost," he said, it's a history that can't be erased -- even through the removal of monument and symbols -- and which instead must be confronted.

During a question and answer period, U.S. Army Col. Ty Seidule, chair of the department of history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said Confederate symbols and monuments were "not just a Southern problem." While West Point rejected as traitors all Confederate veterans in the aftermath of the Civil War, he said, the university in the 20th century began to honor some Confederate officers. Now it's rethinking some of those ties, he said, based on the idea that Lee, military leader of the Confederacy, alone "killed more U.S. Army soldiers than Hitler."

Michael Allen, a community partnership specialist with the National Park Service based in Charleston, said he was heartened to hear some of the evening's suggestions, and that he'd report them back to leaders of the Emanuel AME Church. They want to plan a memorial or museum for their slain members, he said, and will have to face many of the issues discussed.

Allen also said he'd had some success trying to "rebalance" the memorial landscape in and around Charleston. A historical marker at the site of secession caused controversy and was knocked down, but survives. And a marker dedicated to Robert Smalls, the first African-American to command a U.S. warship, is still standing.

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Historians debate the value and place for Confederate monuments and other symbols

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ATLANTA -- Those driving or even flying here this week for the American Historical Association's annual meeting might have glimpsed Stone Mountain out their car or airplane window. The massive, Mount Rushmore-style tribute to Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson is hard to miss and -- for many -- hard to stomach.