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Originally Posted by DevinHarriswillstart
But where exactly does that end? By that logic, we should just rid ourselves of anything and anyone that had a connection to slavery. Just burn New Orleans down since they were obviously pro confederacy at the time, and there was rampant slave trading in the French Quarter.
In fact, we should just forget about any good our military did in WW1 and WW2 since there was black segregation in both of those wars.
The Vietnam War was highly controversial and soldiers were spit on when they came back. Why have those memorials when that war was so unpopular?
Perhaps it's because we should remember history and the negatives that come with such history. They should serve as reminders and teach us lessons.
Statues of Beauregard and Lee can serve as reminders of what it means to fight for an unjust cause. Tearing them down though doesn't do anyone any good. You can't erase the past just because you don't agree with it.
The Civil War is such a nuanced and intricate war that it would be foolish not to have such monuments and talk about what it mean't to have leaders on both sides of the conflict. To define them as "oh they were just pro slavery so f them" is so unbelievably ignorant that it just boggles my mind.
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There's a difference between remembering history and celebrating it... We're talking about a predominately-black community choosing not to have symbols of oppression thrown in their face on the daily -- their town, their right... It's not like anyone is re-writing the history books here (
like Texas erasing Thomas Jefferson from the Founding Fathers).