The recent events in Charlottesville have opened a national wound that has been festering for, well, since the Civil War. The national response and dialog has been reassuring, though it’s a tragedy it took a heinous act of violence and murder to get us talking so openly at a national level. The swift action to remove Confederate statues is eye-opening, at least for someone like me. I have never lived in the South, nor ever really experienced the overt – as well as more nuanced – expressions of racism and slavery that Confederate statues represent for both the oppressed and the oppressors.
The Civil War, which was a fight to ensure a future for slavery, is not a part of our history that we should relegate to the back corners of the closet. But the legacy is not one of celebration and its symbols should not be venerated, paraded, or in any way honored now. How many memorials in Germany – or other countries who suffered under the Nazis – sell Nazi pins, flags, or other paraphernalia? Sure, they can be purchased somewhere, but they’re not sold as tourist items at memorials, killing fields, or concentration camps. The swastika does not wave on flag poles at county, state, or federal government buildings.
In fact, a large number of the Confederate statues were installed in the early 1900s, during what is referred to as the Jim Crow era - the time between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the Civil Rights era in the 1950s when laws enforced racial segregation in parks, restaurants, buses, schools, theaters, drinking fountains, etc. Based on the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" ruling, Jim Crow laws were meant to prevent any contact between blacks and whites. The Supreme Court reversed itself in 1954, ruling that the laws were unconstitutional. It is hard to dismiss the timing of the dramatic rise in monuments "honoring the Confederacy" during the Jim Crow era as insignificant. They were meant as visible reminders of the "rightful" place of African Americans, regardless of the outcome of the war.
In all the controversy, it has been interesting to learn a bit about Robert E. Lee, and the possibility he may have been somewhat conflicted over slavery. He may have been a “nice person” and may not even have been keen to go to war, but he did. He – and others – fought to divide the United States, to destroy it as a single nation, so that the Confederacy could maintain its ownership over a distinct and captive group of people. So, unless you feel that it’s right for whites to own other people, there is no reason to honor the Confederacy – or anyone in it – with a statue, plaque, or other visible means of glorification.
Does that mean existing memorials to Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others should be destroyed? No. They should be placed where they can help interpret the war for what it was, an act of sedition and treason by individuals who thought it was not only o.k. to own slaves, but their right to do so. And they were unsuccessful. This is what is forgotten with the prominent display of Confederate statues, this is the history the Lost Cause is trying to rewrite. Lee and others were not American heroes, they were American traitors – regardless of whether they were also “nice people”.