CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS: Stay or Go...

Another subject that I feel needs some clarification because it is so divisive among us is the issue of Confederate Monuments, why they were erected and why some people say they should be taken down.

One of the arguments against taking them down is that these statues are part of history and should be left alone. As a history lover and lifelong student of history, I am all for preserving history but this is not the issue here.

I was stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi in the 60s. I grew to admire the South and its people and its way of life. As a young, Catholic Polish-American boy from the city of Detroit, I was introduced to a part of America I did not know; I learned a lot and have fond memories of my time there.

But history is history and we cannot white wash it or re-write it or sanitize it; it is what it was.

The Civil War was a terrible and costly war. Many books have been written about it and I have read many of them as a college student studying American history. Many factors led up to the war but the true goals of the Confederacy as stated by its vice president Alexander Stephens, were all about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

So why did the people who lost the war put up monuments to defeated military leaders and to a defeated cause after the war.

These statues were put up after the war to show Americans and especially African-Americans that the South was still in business; racist as ever and that nothing has really changed; the Jim Crow era had begun.

Racism, of course, was not limited to the South as we all know but in the South, in those years, it was entrenched as part of normal life.

The monuments belong to the “old” South of history and served as warnings. The “new” South is of course much different but the monuments, remnants of the old South, serve as constant reminders of the history of those days; the lynching, the burning, the beating, the murder and general suppression of countless human beings.

I just read about the opening of a National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It is the first monument to the 4,400 black lynching victims living in the South during 80 years of terror.

Yes this too is history; a history just starting to be told and remembered which needs to happen for reconciliation in America to occur.

So if people like the mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu decided to take down Confederate monuments as a show of reconciliation, I cannot object knowing what I know.