26 August, 2017
They have been removed in other cities such as Baltimore, but the city of Charlottesville has not yet removed them. There are no good Nazis, and there are no good Klansmen, as many have recently said. As CNN reports, the mayor added that the City of Charlottesville must deny the "Nazis and the KKK and the so-called alt-right" the "lightning rods" that the Confederate monuments have become.
William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, the great-great-grandsons of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, wrote a letter to the mayor of Richmond, Va., asking for the removal of all Confederate statues along the city's Monument Avenue. They worked to stitch the union together, not tear it apart.
"The vast majority of these statues and memorials were built during periods in American history - roughly speaking, 1900-1960 - in which African Americans were legally segregated (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896), relegated to second-class status and generally regarded as inferior", Ward said.
After the Compromise of 1876, Ward said American leaders were obsessed with the idea of "reunifying" the country.
"We've been told that if we take them down tonight, we're going to be personally sued", councilor Wes Bellamy said Monday night, the Daily Progress noted. But it did not stop people in power from enacting laws and codes to subjugate black people.
Erecting Confederate statues long after the end of the war was the attempt to erase history. I had to ask him what he was referring to, and he then explained people in the north call it the "Civil War" but it was really not a civil war but an attack by the North against the South. There are many others who don't share that opinion, however, and so the statues are coming down, one by one.
Both men believe the people of each municipality should be left to decide the fate of Confederate monuments, rather than leaving the issue up to demonstrators who flock to flashpoints from hundreds of miles away. In fact, most Confederate soldiers came from families that did not own slaves.
As of May 2017, Alabama passed laws against altering, renaming, or removing any monuments, streets or buildings made or named as memorials if they're 40 years or older, which puts the majority, if not all, of the Alabama Confederate memorials under its protection.
