Statue representing Robert E. Lee at Duke Chapel vandalized

The city removed a granite fountain Friday that stood in a park as a monument to Confederate soldiers since 1916. The Civil War, said historian Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ remarkable PBS documentary series, “was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads”.

Some have suggested museums, others putting them in Confederate cemeteries and one city councilman proposed using their metal to make likenesses of civil rights leaders.

He then went onto compare Confederate leaders Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson to Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Gov. Roy Cooper has urged the removal of Confederate monuments from public property around the state, though his goal would be hard to achieve because of a 2015 state law restricting their removal.

Activists expressed interest and support for removing statues honoring Confederate soldiers and the MS state flag, which includes a Confederate symbol, after the June 2015 massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, where Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who was photographed with Confederate memorabilia, killed nine black Americans during a church prayer service. “They won the battle over the peace”. We can not continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.

“I know to some that may be hard to hear, but we feel strongly he was a man of dignity and honor and truly a great unifier in many ways”, he said. Four people have been arrested, and authorities say more arrests are planned. So this isn’t something the country needs to honour or commemorate in any possible way. Now, debate rages in northern and southern cities alike about which statues to remove and how to go about this both legally and legislatively.

Well before the bloodshed in Charlottesville, the debate over the monuments was heating up and becoming more polarized.

At the center of the Charlottesville violence is the Robert E. Lee statue, to which a descendant says take it down. Damage to the figure’s face was discovered Thursday morning-three days after demonstrators pulled down a Confederate monument on Main Street in Durham and as monuments to the Confederacy are being removed and covered up across the country.

Boyd Brown of SC, a former state lawmaker and onetime member of the Democratic National Committee, says Democrats are right to oppose Confederate monuments and criticize Trump’s remarks.

“If you complained, they’d probably put you in jail”, said Reid, who was Virginia’s first black state lawmaker since Reconstruction. Among those paying his bail were prominent northerners, including abolitionist Horace Greeley.

Asked specifically if he thought Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee should be torn down, he said: ‘I would say that’s up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located’.

But since Saturday’s violence, mayors of Baltimore and Lexington, Kentucky, said they would push ahead with plans to remove statues, while officials in Dallas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Jacksonville, Florida; announced initiatives aimed at taking down Confederate monuments.

The answer for one woman was to simply remove the statue herself. Eight people have been charged with tearing down the statue during a protest on Monday. “Burning books written by those who used to own slaves?”

“The problem with revising history based on a standard of ‘feeling offensive, ‘ as this anti-Confederate craze is rooted, is that someone, somewhere will always take offense at something”, she added.

But when President Donald Trump made a decision to weigh in on the side of preserving public Confederate icons as “beautiful”, my dilemma vanished.

Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the CUNY hall of great Americans because NY stands against racism.

In the States, we have a fetish for big buildings where the important objects of history are anointed, preserved, and explained: There are more museums in America than there are McDonalds and Starbucks combined, majority sustained by wealthy donors and overseen by board members with a preference for the specific memory they’re preserving.