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High Cost to Remove Monuments for tax payers

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High Cost to Remove Monuments for tax payers

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Mayor Mitch Landrieu originally said the project would cost just $170,000 and that private funds would pay for it.

The increased cost -- all of which the city bore -- comes from lengthy litigation and safety concerns about protest groups that wanted to leave the monuments up, Deputy Mayor Ryan Berni told CNN.

"I wouldn't call it a price discrepancy, he said, "but certainly a major escalation [in price]."

New Orleans removed four Civil War-era landmarks amidst protests and threats.

The original $170,000 figure came from a contractor who had to pull out of the project after his car was lit on fire by protesters who were upset the monuments were being taken down, Berni said.

Through the completion of the project, the city continued to pour money into safety measures. The measures included working with the FBI and placing security officers at removal sites to protect those working on the project.

"People were scared to be a part of the project," Berni said. "Who could anticipate these kinds of threats?"

The city shelled out more than 7,000 hours in paid time and more than 3,000 hours in overtime to crews who took down the monuments and brought them to storage.

A $50,000 shed had to be built for one of the statues, which is included in the $2.1 million figure.

Despite the price escalation, Berni says moving the monuments was still worth doing.

"Absolutely," he said. "It's a diminutive amount of money."

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cost of removing confederate monuments in new orleans: $2.1 million - cnn

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Cost of removing Confederate monuments in New Orleans: $2.1 million

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Mayor Mitch Landrieu originally said the project would cost just $170,000 and that private funds would pay for it. The increased cost -- all of which the city bore -- comes from lengthy litigation and safety concerns about protest groups that wanted to leave the monuments up, Deputy Mayor Ryan Berni told CNN.

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Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney on Monday reiterated his belief that adding context to the Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue is preferable to removing or relocating them.

"Currently, as I've always said, since my remarks earlier on this year, the way those statues stand currently, they're a shameful representation of the past that we all disagree with," Stoney said. "For me, it's about telling the complete truth. I don't think removal of symbols does anything for telling the actual truth or changes the state and culture of racism in this country today."

The mayor, who also called the monuments "very offensive" to him, made the remarks after attending a groundbreaking ceremony for the American Civil War Museum's new facility on Tredegar Street.

His comments come after a scheduled white nationalist rally Saturday in Charlottesville ended in violence and death.

What transpired in Charlottesville has led other mayors to hasten efforts to remove Confederate monuments.

In Baltimore on Monday, Mayor Catherine Pugh pledged to tear down four such statues and said she has contacted two contractors about removing them. Pugh wants to move the monuments, but in a 15-0 vote Monday, the Baltimore City Council endorsed a resolution to destroy the statues.

The mayor of Lexington, Ky., Jim Gray, said Saturday that he will pursue removing two Confederate statues from the grounds of the former Fayette County Courthouse in Lexington.

Stoney announced his Monument Avenue Commission in June. He tapped 10 community leaders, historians and academics to make recommendations for adding context to the statues of Civil War generals Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, president of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis and Confederate naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury.

His announcement of the commission came as politicians in Charlottesville and New Orleans pursued removing statues of Confederate leaders.

Asked Monday whether he would amend the mission of the commission in the wake of the events in Charlottesville, Stoney said he would not.

"The mission of the Monument Avenue Commission remains the same," Stoney said. "And that is to provide context and interpretation to the statues that currently stand down on Monument Avenue."

Carrying out the mayor's charge, regardless of what happened in Charlottesville, is important, said Edward Ayers, a historian, commission member and former president of the University of Richmond.

"Having a sense of direction, of what we would want to do, no matter what else happens, people need to understand where these monuments came from, who put them there and for what purpose," Ayers said. "I think whatever else happens, we're doing the right thing for right now."

Commission members polled Monday said they were shocked by the violence that unfolded over the weekend. Two - Kim Gray and Sarah Driggs - suggested taking a step back.

"I think it's time to press pause and we resume conversations around monuments when we can assure people's personal safety won't be at stake," said Gray, whose Richmond City Council district includes the section of Monument Avenue where the Confederate statues stand.

Driggs, an author and member of the commission, said the events in Charlottesville left her "heartbroken and enraged." The violence, she said, "confirmed the true power of symbols and the true meaning of symbols to those who committed these crimes."

"I think this is a conversation that needs to happen, but things may be too inflamed right now to get anywhere, and we have to figure out the process by which we can discuss this more calmly than happened in Charlottesville," Driggs said.

The commission held its first public hearing last week. About 500 people attended, and more were turned away at the door.

The two-hour event saw more than 40 speakers weigh in on what - or whether - context should be added to the monuments, but was marked by discord as some speakers were heckled by audience members and others sought to give speeches instead of share ideas, as organizers intended.

Gregg Kimball, co-chair of the commission and director of education and outreach at the Library of Virginia, said the commission needs to convene and evaluate its process so the next hearing generates "a dialogue, not a shouting match."

"Maybe we need to do something different so it isn't just as oppositional as it has been," Kimball said. "As we saw at the meeting last week, both removal and not doing anything are both going to be there. They're the elephant in the room, so to speak."

The commission's next public hearing is scheduled for Sept. 13.
mrobinson@timesdispatch.com
(804) 649-6734

Twitter: @__MarkRobinson

Information from The Baltimore Sun was used in this report.

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Mayor Stoney: Richmond's Confederate monuments should stay with context added; commission's mission remains the same

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Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney on Monday reiterated his belief that adding context to the Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue is preferable to removing or relocating them. "Currently, as I've always said, since my remarks earlier on this year, the way those statues stand currently, they're a shameful representation of the past that we all disagree with," Stoney said.

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As last week made obvious, America still has a race problem on its hands. And that problem is much larger than President Trump and whether he ultimately repudiates groups he doesn't want to repudiate. When it comes to race in America and the way we let it drive us crazy, our problem, in a word, is us.

Dismissing Trump's most ridiculous claim is relatively easy. A mob with torches, spoiling for a fight, shouting, "Jews will not replace us," is simply not in the same moral universe as terrified protesters, arms linked, trying to fend off vicious attacks. Thank God the deadly violence did not carry over to the demonstrations in Boston on Saturday.
More: More: Other countries have healed, and so will we: Ellis Cose Charlottesville unmasks Trump. Stop expecting him to denounce white supremacists.
Nonetheless, Trump's claim that destroying Confederate monuments somehow crosses a line, that it somehow rips apart the nation's culture and history, takes a bit more reflection. For while Trump is far from right, he is not totally wrong. Valuable lessons can indeed be learned from studying the history of these monuments, but they are not lessons Trump would welcome.

Contrary to what the president and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers seem to believe, the Confederate monuments are not honoring great patriots or even great soldiering. Most of those monuments did not go up in the wake of the Civil War but much later, "as Southerners put Jim Crow in place - and Northerners gave up on racial justice," notes W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In order to make commemorating symbols of racial hatred and oppression palatable, champions of the Confederacy had to rewrite history. Gen. Robert E. Lee, who led a war that killed more than 600,000 Americans for the patently immoral purpose of extending slavery, "became a convenient icon of reconciliation who was depicted as having reluctantly fought to protect his native state ... and then after the war devoted himself to ... binding the nation's wounds," Brundage writes.

That image of Lee is false in every important aspect. It makes a joke of the history Trump supposedly wishes to rescue. That would-be Nazis and KKK sympathizers attach such importance to the Confederacy should tell you all you need to know about Confederate heroes. Even so, most Americans seem unconvinced that their statues should be taken down.
More: POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media The reality of racism America continues to deny
In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll released last week that asked Americans whether the monuments should " remain as a historical symbol " or "be removed because they are offensive to some people," 67% of white respondents thought they should stay, as did 75% of whites who were not college graduates; 65% of Latinos were fine with keeping the statues, as were 44% of blacks.

In short, a majority of Americans - even many blacks - are fine with leaving the statutes alone, or at least they see no reason to remove them just because some folks are offended.

I'm curious how poll respondents would have answered if given more compelling reasons for statue removal than them offending people. Even so, I understand why so many Americans of all races might be fine with keeping Confederate figures in place. Why spend so much energy trying to topple statues, offensive and ugly as they might be, when the statues are not really the problem, and when their removal riles up so many people - some of whom are pathologically violent?

Also, there is likely a feeling among many Americans that, as Trump suggests, the statues do, in fact, tell us something important about our past - and that it might be better to keep them than to simply wash history away. But that is only true if we can be honest about why those monuments exist and what they were meant to promote, which is racial oppression.

If we are prepared to face what those statues really are, perhaps we can more capably tackle the question of why appeals to prejudice still resonate so strongly, and why so many people eagerly voted for a presidential candidate of questionable competence who made bigotry the central plank of his campaign.

Americans find it difficult to deal with such questions in part because we are not ready to own the full weight of our history - much of which is noble and beautiful, but some of which is sickeningly ugly. And we certainly are loath to seriously contemplate how much that history still shapes who we are today.

Under pressure to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from certain structures on Princeton's campus, the trustees named a committee that proposed the following: Keep Wilson's name on the buildings, but publicly and widely acknowledge that Wilson "held and acted on racist views." They resolved to recognize "Wilson's failings and shortcomings as well as (his) visions and achievements."

Perhaps, given the apparently widespread sentiment to keep Confederate monuments, we should consider doing something similar with these symbols littering America's landscape. Wherever such monuments remain, we should put plaques and other material in place that point out that these men were traitors, not American heroes, and that their ugly legacy haunts us still.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.
In illuminating how vulnerable Americans have long been to ugly racial appeals, and how willfully blind we have been to racial injustice, those statues could remind us of the catastrophic consequences of not putting bigotry aside.

What other useful purpose could those monuments to evil possibly serve?

Ellis Cose, senior fellow and writer in residence at the American Civil Liberties Union, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. He's author of The End of Anger, The Rage of a Privileged Class and other books. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose.

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Keep Confederate monuments, but put their horrific history on center stage

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As last week made obvious, America still has a race problem on its hands. And that problem is much larger than President Trump and whether he ultimately repudiates groups he doesn't want to repudiate. When it comes to race in America and the way we let it drive us crazy, our problem, in a word, is us.

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Posted August 17, 2017 12:49 PM by Chris Pandolfo

President Trump believes that Confederate statues should remain, and most Americans agree with the president.

Demands to remove Confederate memorials have sharply increased following the violence that erupted during a "Unite the Right" rally consisting of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups - ostensibly to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Va. In Durham, N.C., Monday, a mob tore down a Confederate statue, kicking and spitting on it.

In a series of tweets Thursday morning, the president said it was "sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart."

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also...
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

...the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

Despite hysteric opposition from the media to the president's suggestion that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could be next if we start tearing down memorials, 62 percent of Americans agree with the president that the statues should remain, per a new Marist poll.

Notable from @NPR @NewsHour @maristpoll:

Shd Confederate statues remain or be removed?

62% remain
27% remove https://t.co/xv6wB5BiFI
- Domenico Montanaro (@DomenicoNPR) August 16, 2017

Additionally, a new YouGov poll found that a majority, 54 percent, believe the statues of Confederate war heroes are signs of Southern pride, rather than symbols of racism. A plurality of Americans, 48 percent, had the same view the Confederate flag. This reflects the results of a PRRI poll conducted last October, just before the 2016 election.

PRRI polling surprised me: 51% see Confed flag as sign of Southern pride, 41% as sign of racism. 60/33 among whites. https://t.co/88TWPBltuT
- Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) August 14, 2017

What is clear is that nationwide demands to tear down Confederate memorials and flags are out of touch with a majority of the American people.

The fate of these monuments should be lawful, local decisions, made by the communities where they are. There's no reason to attack the president for making an argument most Americans agree with when there is plenty else to criticize.
How do we stop the mainstream media from warping the national narrative? We push back together. With the truth. Get CRTV's free weapon against the worst the media has to offer delivered to your inbox daily: WTF MSM!? Chris Pandolfo is a staff writer and type-shouter for Conservative Review. He holds a B.A. in politics and economics from Hillsdale College. His interests are conservative political philosophy, the American founding, and progressive rock. Follow him on Twitter for doom-saying and great album recommendations @ChrisCPandolfo.

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Poll: Americans agree with Trump, Confederate statues should stay

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Posted August 17, 2017 12:49 PM by Chris Pandolfo President Trump believes that Confederate statues should remain, and most Americans agree with the president. Demands to remove Confederate memorials have sharply increased following the violence that erupted during a "Unite the Right" rally consisting of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups - ostensibly to protest the removal of a Robert E.

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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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Newsela | PRO/CON: Should cities be allowed to take down Confederate monuments?

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https://newsela.com/read/confederate-statue-removal/id/33909/

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The overdue momentum to remove various Confederate symbols, especially about 1,500 statues, from their perches has picked up across the country in the aftermath of right-wing violence in Charlottesville, Va. In Gainesville, Fla., Durham, N.C., and Baltimore, the toppling has already begun. In some cases, state or local authorities have driven the process. In others, activists have seized the initiative to speed things up.

Yet despite the growing consensus that the "dangerous totems" (as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has dubbed them) must go, there is no agreement about the monuments' fates. Ideas range from traceless destruction to warehouse storage to museum display. Some propose, to quieter applause, to keep the objects in place, accompanied by appropriate labeling.

In the cacophony of opinions, few observers and participants seem bothered by the lack of a coherent, thought-out strategy for disposing of the Confederacy's visible traces while preserving evidence of this vitally important chapter of our past.

They should be. Not out of concern for the preposterous right-wing lament about the erasure of history, but because the task at hand is to purge the imagery in a way that guards against amnesia, while also transforming the statues from celebratory monuments to objective evidence.

The United States is not alone in confronting this dilemma. Countries across the globe routinely grapple with how to handle reminders of unsavory chapters in their history. Recently, the issue has made headlines from Ukraine to Taiwan.

But nowhere have the questions about the physical markers of unwanted pasts - first Nazi, then Communist and, lately, colonial - played out as long as they have in Germany. Over the last 70 years, the country has accepted a simple truth: Out of sight hardly means out of mind. The removal of the relics of a hateful social order is not in itself cause for celebration. It is the aftermath that matters.

The German case is exemplary not because Germans attained closure, but because they came to recognize that closure was neither tenable nor desirable. Instead, the processing of history is like an open wound that slowly heals only with careful debate about the often-explosive issues at stake. The United States can avoid making irreparable mistakes by learning from Germany's blunders and subsequent course corrections.

Over time, Germans have moved through three distinct phases to tackle the country's fascist legacy: erasing it, ignoring it, and consigning it to the Vergangenheitsbewältigung - German for "the enduring confrontation with the past." The experience offers seven lessons for the fight over America's Confederate past.

There is no zero hour. After the war in occupied Germany, restraint and caution were not initially on the agenda. For nearly a decade, West German authorities followed the path of least resistance by simply eliminating the traces of Hitler's rule.

For better or worse, wartime Allied bombing and firestorms had given them a considerable head start. In some cases, the wartime damage did 90 percent of the job. And yet this near-total destruction did little to prevent the neo-Nazis and revisionists from reorganizing. The 1952 court ban on the Nazi Party's successor, the Socialist Reich Party, sent a much stronger message.

Compromises look weak but have benefits. Soon enough, it became obvious that wiping out every structure with a whiff of Nazism was unrealistic. The traces of the Third Reich included entire city blocks constructed in the regime's signature bombastic, boxy style. Blowing up structurally sound buildings or the highways Hitler expanded into a Reichsautobahn network would have further hurt a nation whose infrastructure lay in ruins.

East Germany, all the more parsimonious after bearing the brunt of Soviet reparations, was the first to realize that pragmatic compromise was essential. Of course, the Third Reich's insignia had to come down and mostly did, but the structures themselves were retained for new functions and uses. Though driven by necessity, this pragmatic solution now gets credit for preserving for posterity the pathetic bleakness and soullessness of Hitler's architectural vision. It has not aged well, turning from shades of white to brown as decades have gone by.

Bad history can be put to good use. Walking around cities like Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg today, a tourist will not often find an obvious Nazi landmark. Yet many inconspicuous remnants remain, ranging from unremarkable city squares and department store amphitheaters to more famous one-offs, among them a retired airport, an Olympic stadium, Nazi party rally grounds, and a former resort.

While the government (and, increasingly, private initiatives) pours money into conserving these places, city tour companies train their guides to peel back all of the layers of the morally complicated history for visitors. Many prominent buildings that are still in use have information boards - not tiny plaques - in front, with meticulously researched historical explanations.

Especially fraught places, where the Nazi project was most present, like the Haus der Kunst in Munich - the inaugural venue for the Nazi art exhibit organized to compete with the more popular modernist "Degenerate Art" show across the street - now commit a lion's share of their resources to displaying the art they would have shunned during the Nazi reign. In the hallways, historical timelines lay out the turbulent past.

Empty spaces can talk, but not all should. In Berlin, the Topography of Terror museum fills the space that once held the sprawling lair of Hitler's bureaucracy. It has transformed an otherwise empty lot into a meaningful, and sobering, reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime.

And yet some sites, Germans have decided, must remain unmarked and obscured for good reason: to prevent them from becoming shrines to the Nazi past. The Berlin bunker where Hitler killed himself, which was blown up in 1947, remains buried under a parking lot, with no signage.

Erasure comes with no guarantees. Austria has a similar vision for Hitler's birth house. In June, after protracted debates, its Constitutional Court finally authorized government seizure of the structure from its private owners. To this point, the building remains under protection as a historical monument.

As in Berlin, Austrian authorities hope to prevent the house from becoming a difficult-to-control and illicit neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. But even a razed landmark is still a spot on the map, and many concede that it, too, could become a beacon for hate groups.

Preserving difficult pasts calls for civic negotiation. In the 1990s, German officials applied the lessons learned from dealing with Nazi iconography to the markings left over from the Communist era. Berlin's Senate impaneled a special commission of experts from the city's East and West. It concluded that celebrations of the Communist past had no place in the reunified capital-to-be, but that the distinctive history should be accessible in both parts of the city.

Other corners of former East Germany have also striven to preserve this history by allowing many statues of Communist heroes to remain standing. In some small towns, such as Königswusterhausen outside Berlin, streets named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels run parallel to each other.

Razing and replacing uncovers more than it hides. Where attempts to dismantle Communist symbols had prevailed, as in the case of the East German Palace of the Republic, which was destroyed to rebuild the shell of the Kaiser's Berlin Palace, new issues emerged. The demolition and reconstruction have exposed additional unprocessed chapters of Germany's past, especially its history of colonialism. Achieving a clean slate, free of historical stains, proved to be a delusion.

These lessons from Germany should serve as a cautionary tale for Americans rushing to destroy every Confederate monument within reach. Rather than rashly overcompensating for decades of inaction by haphazardly tearing down or hiding Confederate monuments, Americans should have the painful debates necessary to decide the fate of these relics of a bygone era. If German history is any indication, simply turning the page isn't an option.
Yuliya Komska, a cultural historian of the Cold War and author of "The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border," teaches German studies at Dartmouth College. She wrote this for the Washington Post.
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Take a lesson: How Germany handles monuments from Nazi and communist eras

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The overdue momentum to remove various Confederate symbols, especially about 1,500 statues, from their perches has picked up across the country in the aftermath of right-wing violence in Charlottesville, Va. In Gainesville, Fla., Durham, N.C., and Baltimore, the toppling has already begun. In some cases, state or local authorities have driven the process.

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Mayor of New Orleans gives his opinions 

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Mayor of New Orleans gives his opinions 

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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."

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Opinion: Confederate monuments should stay and here's why

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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.

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https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/opinion/2016/04/29/if-we-remove-all-the-confederate-monuments-how-will-we-remember-the-lessons-they-teach

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Baltimore takes down statues in the middle of the night

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Baltimore takes down statues in the middle of the night

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/baltimore-takes-down-confederate-statues-in-middle-of-night