Deadly rally accelerates removal of Confederate statues

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said she has contacted two contractors about removing that city’s Confederate monuments. The move comes two days after a white nationalist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia which was reportedly sparked in protest of plans to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

The rationale was that the statues were offensive to a portion of the population. His comments spurred a social media uproar, with critics questioning how a Minnesota native came to be such a staunch defender of what are widely considered to be symbols of white supremacy. There are statues and memorials to the Confederacy all over the South.

Confederate supporters, like Paul Gramling, say these monuments are war memorials and symbols of heritage.

“George Washington was a slave owner”.

“It’s not my desire or mission to tear down any monuments or memorials. In our community, the vast majority of people would like to get rid of that monument and build something that is a better contextualized representation of our shared racial history”. To them, that was what the “War Between the States” was about.

So please, all you folks who thought it so important to fight to keep these monuments in place, don’t pretend that you’re just now learning who your allies were in that fight.

In an interview on Monday, Jim Gray, the Mayor of Lexington, said that the time has come for people to stand up and speak out on the hate that the monuments symbolize.

In a report published in April 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – a civil rights advocacy group – found that more than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy are located on United States public lands, mostly in the South.

“To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our more prominent places – in honor – is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, is an affront to our present and it is a bad prescription for our future”, Landrieu said. Furthermore, Lee wrote that, “Secession is nothing but revolution”, but his primary loyalty was to his home state, Virginia.

Stone marker on Georges Island in Boston: Placed on the MA island by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1963, the marker refers to the Civil War as “the War Between the States” and commemorates Confederate soldiers imprisoned at Fort Warren, also located on the island.

To further bolster their hero, the Lost Causers also gave Lee a villain: Former Confederate General James Longstreet, who was already a “scalawag” for joining the northern Republican party and deploying black and white officers to defend New Orleans against the militant White League during Reconstruction. 19 others were injured.

The father of Lt. Cullen told Local 24 the 1987 Germantown High School graduate performed in the band while in school and was a good student. Most Union figures, besides President Abraham Lincoln, weren’t granted as many honors. “But a strong loyalty to Virginia held Lee back”.

Trump appeared incredulous at the prospect of removing the statues, and implied that removing Confederate statues was akin to removing monuments for Washington and Jefferson, both men who championed the cause of liberty for the United States against the British while they also owned slaves. To attach another meaning altogether to his memorial is to paint today’s political correctness with too broad a brush.

“Other displays were intended as acts of defiance by white supremacists opposed to equality for African Americans”.

In declaration after declaration, Confederate states explicitly said that they had seceded in order to preserve slavery. We have a deep history of white supremacy in this country, whether our president recognizes it or not.