Take Them Down

Good on you, Durham ...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/protestors-topple-confederate-statue-north-carolina

And talk about changing Mississippi's flag has gotten started again. Hopefully this time they'll do it. They're going to eventually, that's pretty much certain, but some stubborn (and embarrassing) dead-enders are holding out as long as they can. A lot of Southerners seem addicted to losing battles. Dumb.

Terrorist honoring terrorist. If a statute of Bin Laden was put on public land honoring a terrorist against America, who would give a second thought against someone tearing it down. Once the Civil War was over, there was a period called the military reconstruction where American troops were deployed to make sure all citizens could vote and not be intimidated. As soon as the military withdrew, former members of the terrorist organization began wearing white hoods to hide their identity as they terrorized American Citizens and called themselves the KKK. All you have to do is think about those four little girls in church who were blown up by dynamite to understand the Jim Crow south where terrorism abounded. The biggest problem I have is that these groups are proven terrorists, yet an organized network on the internet which espouses violence against American citizens, and then acts on that has not been attacked by the justice department. Make America great again is dog whistle for bring back the time we can blow up little girls in church, or pull a person out of their house and lynch them under the guise of white supremacy. Good vs Evil in the public square. The Civil war terrorists belong on private property and in Museums. Enough with the excuses

http://act.democracyforamerica.com/sign/take-down-confederacy/?t=1&refcode=g-RemoveCSA0814.d-20170815.m-9651.s-34349&akid=9651%2E1290442%2Ex2n03X

What many people do not realize is that these statues aren't Civil War memorials, they are in reality, monuments of white supremacy ...

Reconstruction is generally dated from 1865 to 1877 when the federal government withdrew federal troops and allowed the restoration of so-called ‘home rule’ in the South. But black political power and biracial political coalitions didn’t disappear overnight. Though the sheet anchor protecting black citizenship was withdrawn, it took the better part of a generation for what we now recognize as the Jim Crow system to be firmly entrenched throughout the South. To note but one example, the judicial cornerstone of Jim Crow, ‘separate but equal’, only became the law of the land with Plessy v Ferguson in 1896.

That statuary which is only beginning to come down in our day dates largely from this era and constituted a celebration and affirmation of this victory. Not the victory of the Civil War, which was of course a defeat but the sectional victory to define the post-war settlement.

Consider some dates: Lee Circle in New Orleans, 1884; Lee Statue on Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia, 1890; Robert E. Lee Monument (Marianna, Arkansas), 1910; the Robert Edward Lee sculpture in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Virginia, commissioned 1917, erected 1924. All of these statues date not from the Civil War Era but from the decades of the establishment of Jim Crow, to celebrate the South’s ability to establish an apartheid system on the ruins of the Antebellum slave South. A statue of Lee in uniform, mounted on a horse in a southern town square has only ever had one meaning: white supremacy. These statues didn’t come to be associated with racism and Jim Crow only after the Civil War had receded into memory. They were created, from the start, to mark and celebrate the foundations of Jim Crow, uncontested white rule. More mythically, but to the same end, they were built to glorify a vision of the South in which her black citizens had no place.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/some-thoughts-on-public-memory

Well, I may be in the minority here, but I don't think public lawlessness helps the cause of justice in any way. It's barely one step removed from rioting. The taking down of that statue should've been accomplished via lawful processes.

Once any person or group is commended for defacing public property without due process, it's a slippery slope. Who will decide what should come down next, and who will decide which individuals or groups should be prosecuted (or, again, commended) for doing so?

Just a bad idea. Leaves me very uneasy and ashamed for the anti-supremacist demonstrators. Why lower themselves to that level??

Nails it!