Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 08:51:08 -0500
From: Brad Page
Subject: Judge’s order to remove
Removing the statue has been a revealing process in Pittsboro and, for me, an educational process such as outlined by Mark Stinson in his post. Recently a letter by Carol Good appeared in the Letters to the Editor in the Chatham News and Record to which I wrote two replies. I include them here:
I recently wrote a comment to a letter posted in the Chatham News and Record in which Carol Gene Good claims the removal of statues to the Confederacy is a violation of Southerners civil rights.
When U.S. law covering hate crimes was voted into existence, surely there was a list explaining the actions that were considered a hate crime. It is my personal opinion that there is no greater hate crime than the attempt to eliminate the Civil Rights of U.S. citizens because they happen to be born in the South. I’m totally surprised Southerners in immediate danger of losing their Civil Rights to keep their history, keep Stone Mountain as is, and to display Confederate monuments haven’t filed a Class Action lawsuit charging a hate crime against the parties trying to eliminate their Civil Rights. Every U.S. citizen should be protected by the same laws, even those of us born in the South.
Carol Gene Good
Conover
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Brad Page
For my comment I insert a rather long quote from Wikipedia that examines the statue issue from a number of points of view. Personally, I don’t see this as perpetrating a ‘hate crime’ against Southerners who prefer these monuments remain as reminders of their heritage. In fact, they are reminders of the Jim Crow era (1877-1964) and its violence against blacks both physically and psychoogically. Many of them were erected after the Civil Rights movement began.
The quote:
Dell Upton, chair of the Department of Art History at the University of
California, Los Angeles, wrote that “the monuments were not intended as
public art,” but rather were installed “as affirmations that the American
polity was a white polity,” and that because of their explicitly white
supremacist intent, their removal from civic spaces was a matter “of
justice, equity, and civic values.”[11] In a 1993 book on the issue in
Georgia, author Frank McKenney argued otherwise; “These monuments were
communal efforts, public art, and social history,” he wrote.[25]
Ex-soldiers and politicians had difficult time raising funds to erect
monuments so the task mostly fell to the women, the “mothers widows, and
orphans, the bereaved fiancees and sisters” of the soldiers who had lost
their lives.[26] Many ladies’ memorial associations were formed in the
decades following the end of the Civil War, most of them joining the United
Daughters of the Confederacy following its inception in 1894. The women
were advised to “remember that they were buying art, not metal and
stone;”[27] The history the monuments celebrated told only one side of the
story, however—one that was “openly pro-Confederate,” Upton argues.
Furthermore, Confederate monuments were erected without the consent or even
input of Southern African-Americans, who remembered the Civil War far
differently, and who had no interest in honoring those who fought to keep
them enslaved.[11] According to Civil War historian Judith Giesberg,
professor of history at Villanova University, “White supremacy is really
what these statues represent.”[28]
To read the full citation go to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Confederate_monuments_and_memorials
Brad Page
5 DAYS AGO
Brad Page
If you will allow me to add a comment in response to Carol Gene Good’s “No
greater ‘hate crime’ than eliminating rights of Southerners” letter…
If these public monuments represent a heritage rather than a tragic era in
which black slaves and ex-slaves suffered so miserably they would most like
serve that purpose on an actual Civil War battlefield.
My disagreement with Ms. Good’s view is strongly driven by the need to
answer its obvious one-sidedness. If the monuments as exhibited point to
one thing it is this biased characteristic. Rather, can we not as
Southerners open the dialogue and the full history of the Civil War, a kind
of Truth& Reconciliation activism instead of relegating the entire struggle
and its aftermath to shouting groups who hope to capitalize on this by
generating fear and hatred for their own purposes?
I am alarmed that men carrying sidearms in Pittsboro while rallying around
Sam White’s battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and is the only
voice for the Southern families who lost sons and daughters, aunts and
uncles, fathers and mothers, and close friendsn and never to know what
happened to them in that terrible war. Who really speaks for the 600,000
dead? Who really speaks for the grieving? Who really speaks for the
murdered black POWs?