The Issue of Confederate Statues

The #GeorgeFloyd protests have also put the spotlight on statues of historical figures that are the ugly vestiges of a racist past. 

Besides, Christopher CoIumbus – I blogged about him yesterday – the other favorite target is statues of Confederate personalities because they remain painful reminders of America's dark legacy of slavery. 

And so, a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee outside a high school named after him was knocked off its base in Montgomery, Alabama on June 01, 2020.

Lee's “fall from grace” coincided with the dismantling of a Confederate memorial obelisk about ninety miles away in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. 

To the north-east, in Virginia, a bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865) that waged civil war with the rest of the US was torn down in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy on June 10.

Other statues of Confederate military figures in Richmond’s Monument Avenue such as JEB Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Matthew Fontaine Maury and Gen Robert E Lee are also not spared – they were graffitied on the same day too. 

Four days earlier, protesters defaced the statue of Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham in the city’s Monroe Park, which sits on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus, before using ropes to pull it down. According to reporting by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one person even urinated on it.

In Oxford, Mississippi, a statue of the common Confederate soldier that sits at the entrance to the University of Mississippi was tagged with the words "spiritual genocide". 

And in Mobile, Alabama, another statue of a soldier was vandalized. 

If you’re familiar with the history of the Civil War, you'll understand that the Confederate states attempted to secede from the United States so they could hang on to their white supremacy beliefs as well as keep enslaving black people. If you didn’t know already, their actions against the US government were, in fact, treason.

Al-Jazeera reports that there are currently 771 Confederate statues and monuments in the US, with the majority located in former Confederate states including South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. 

It’s really time for Americans to completely do away with these hated monuments that celebrate white domination and black oppression!