Defaced memorial stirred controversy from beginning (NC)

[struggle4progress]

BY JONATHAN MCFADDEN AND LANGSTON TAYLOR

Ten days after a Confederate monument on city property was vandalized, it remains in a city warehouse as officials decide how to clean and safeguard it ...

The memorial drew controversy at its installation in 1977.

Charlotte City Council discovered the monument, funded by the Charlotte Confederate Monument Association, had been erected on city property without the council’s approval. Former Mayor Harvey Gantt – then a City Council member – criticized it, saying displaying the memorial at City Hall would be offensive.

“I don’t think placing a monument in a place in this city ... to honor soldiers who fought in the defense of slavery is right,” he’s quoted saying in the May 17, 1977, Observer. “I think my opinion is shared by most black Americans and many white Americans...and I will say it as loud and as clear as I can” ...

http://www.greensboro.com/rockingham_now/news/confederate-monument-in-reidsville-vandalized/article_48f9662c-8ef9-52c3-9528-ed92d25b28d1.html

[marble falls]

1. This:

“I don’t think placing a monument in a place in this city ... to honor soldiers who fought in the defense of slavery is right,” he’s quoted saying in the May 17, 1977, Observer. “I think my opinion is shared by most black Americans and many white Americans...and I will say it as loud and as clear as I can” ...

[struggle4progress]

2. It's interesting that the neo-confederates simply erected the monument on public property

without prior permission in 1977 -- over a century after the war ended -- and that the city council then decided to approve it: that strange provenance, with such a late date, is itself good reason to toss the monument into the rubbish bin at the earliest convenient time

[marble falls]

3. Just once I want to hear exactly what memory of the past they claim to be "honoring".....

just one time, please. They never, ever enumerate it specifically, at least in the sunshine.

I may be white but it brings out the angry black person in me. I am a direct decedent of a Kentucky governor who found himself in federal custody over his pro-slavery actions as the civil war started. I know exactly that the war was fought over: slavery and that the Dixie rag is used to remind racists everywhere of that exactly. The monuments are used to keep blacks in memory of it, too. Of who is in charge in parallel and in the dark. They are implicit threats, particularly the ones that were raised after the Reconstruction.

Every single one them need to be turned to gravel and forgotten.

[struggle4progress]

4. ... Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history;

we haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history” ...

Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney

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5. It is finally changing. Clementa Pinckney (and all the victims murdered with him) were the ....

best of the best and had added so much to the world we all share. I still get emotional over the horrible waste that racist, Root, made. And I've never been prouder of the President than in his eulogy. And this is a President who's done much to be proud of.