A Historian's Plea for the Removal of Confederate Statues
Posted: Monday, July 27, 2015 10:30 pm
Gregory D. Smithers
... It’s this darker, more brutal past, that made the South’s Confederate statues possible. Those monuments, like the Confederate battle flag, helped to galvanize white opposition to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Where statues to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or J.E.B. Stuart represent monuments to men who fought to entrench the racial divide between black and white Americans, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. worked to breach that divide.
Still, more than a few white Southerners actively worked to prevent integration and stop the prospect of future generations mixing and marrying across the color line. During the 1950s and 1960s, most white Southerners saw the world through the lens of what the journalist Robert Sherrill called “scrotum sociology.” Sherrill’s provocative phrase sought to highlight the obsessive paranoia that whites (both men and women) had with idea of young black boys raping white girls in public schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ...
To say Confederate statues mean different things to different people is as misinformed as it is willfully ignorant of the history that led to their erection. So, it is in America’s museums and historical societies we can overcome this misguided view and learn about the heritage these Southern men bequeathed to the modern United States. The secessionist fight to perpetuate slavery, to monumentalize their racist cause, is a story that can teach generations of Americans some important historical lessons about the moral wrong of slavery, the folly of racism and the demagoguery of Jim Crow segregation.
Perhaps, then, I should give the last word to John Mitchell, a former slave and the editor of the Richmond Planet. Mitchell wrote in 1890 what many Americans are thinking in 2015 when he editorialized on the unveiling of the Robert. E. Lee Monument in Richmond: “He (the Negro) put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, will be there to take it down” ...
http://www.richmond.com/opinion/their-opinion/guest-columnists/article_9875f60c-b9c7-5132-a3b0-17b7713cb390.html
