SPLC: Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy

[inanna]

June 04, 2018

The Civil War ended 153 years ago. The Confederacy, as Mitch Landrieu said, was on the wrong side of humanity. Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people.

It’s past time for the South – and the rest of the nation – to bury the myth of the Lost Cause once and for all.

<snip>


President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of “beautiful” monuments “foolish” and tweeting that it is “[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”

In New Orleans, a multicultural city steeped in Southern history, the political leadership took the opposite tack. In 2017, then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu powerfully defended the city’s removal of three prominent monuments and denounced the “false narrative” promoted by the “Cult of the Lost Cause.” That cult, he said, “had one goal – through monuments and through other means – to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”

....

https://www.splcenter.org/20180604/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy

Mitch Landrieu's speech on Confederate monuments (from 2017) can be read here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/mitch-landrieus-speech-transcript.html

[Phoenix61]

1. Landrieu's speech is excellent

I learned a lot. I mistakenly assumed the statues were erected immediately after the war.

[inanna]

2. I think many learned from that speech.

And yes, it was excellent.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. In Germany it is generally illegal to popularize WWII "heroes"...

Ain't no statues of Rommel out there.

Why not the same here?

[inanna]

4. According to this article from the SPLC...

there are more than 1700 symbols of the confederacy in public spaces...

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Yeah-- more than 1700 too many. As a nation, we did not fullyrepudiate slavery...

and the Confederacy, we effectively continued it with Jim Crow in the South.

And we are still paying for that.