Should we remove the Jefferson Memorial in DC?
- Thread starter LittleNipper
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MindWars
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Awww will your wittle feelings be hurt when someone from your family gets caught in something these terrorist do in your neck of the woods.
Awwww, but they are the same as you Trump haters. We won't want your wittle feelings hurt when an innocent person gets their ass beat by one of them . esp. if you just don't look right to them.
BREAKING : ANTIFA to Incite Violence in Boston Next Week!
I read about a poll that said 62 percent or more Americans want the statues LEFT ALONE.
Let's be serious. All this stupidity is for one purpose only: to stop blacks from whining (again). It's awful to allow a group that makes up 13 percent of the population to change the way we run the country or to try and change our history.
Our history is the story of our nation. We should learn from it. Not hide it. And certainly NOT destroy it to please a bunch of sniveling whiners.
oldsoul
Gold Member
And yet this is seldom taught in Public schools. Actually, I learned very little about the man, or the President. Really sad. Did he do some things we, today, would find... deplorable? Yes, he did. Did he not, also, do some things that are remembered as great, honorable and just? Well, sure. So BOTH sides of the man should be taught, and remembered. We can learn from both the good this country has stood for and the bad. What makes this country great, in part, is that we have overcome so much that is bad. We have learned, and continue to learn, from our mistakes. Many of the things, such as slavery, that we find despicable today, were thought quite normal at various times in history. Should we just lose things to history because they were not good things? No, of course not. Should the Italians tear all remnants of the Roman Empire down just because they stood for things that we, today, do not? No, of course not. The thing about monuments and statues is that they are there to help us remember the past, whether it be glorious, or evil. I have yet to talk to anyone who has been to a Nazi concentration camp that was not deeply moved and shaken to the core. For that reason alone, I am in favor of keeping these reminders of the past, lest we forget.
Remember: Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. The first step to learning FROM history, is to learn ABOUT it. Therefore, removing all monuments and statues of the past, because people find them offensive, does a great disservice to our posterity.
Much to agree with here, except that the last one spells the word "winning" wrong. And here lies the irony.
Most if not all of these statues and monuments didn't just amass over time -- they were put there in a specific period, by a specific movement, for a specific purpose. That was the Lost Cause movement, from the last few years of the 19th century into the next two decades, a push to revise the history of the Confederacy into "the War Between the States" that was waged "not for slavery but for 'states rights'" and if they had slaves well it was just the selfless (patronizing) "Christian" thing to do with "savages". In the forefront of this movement was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), founded to whitewash that history.
It is the UDC who were actually responsible for most of these monuments. They were also responsible for affixing a plaque to the building where the Klan was founded.
The social expressions of that era included a spike in lynchings, rampant racism and discrimination, emboldened Jim Crow laws, xenophobia and anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish hysteria connected to the rapid industrialization brought by World War One, a series of the worst and most intense race riots this country has ever experienced, including the infamous "Red Summer" and the re-formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Its cultural manifestations included the novel "The Clansman" (1905) and the film made from it "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), which led directly to the re-formation of the actual Klan which served to organize the above bigotry against blacks, Jews, Catholics and labor unions.
All of this is related. It was the golden age of White Supremacy. It could be said this vast 25-year flurry of monument erections was indeed done to stop black people winning. Blacks were at the time winning status and migrating to jobs -- a perfect example being the "Black Wall Street" of Greenwood section of Tulsa, wiped off the map in 1921 by the single worst and most intense race riot this country has ever seen.
>> The 1890s, when the UDC was founded and monument building began in earnest, was a decade of virulent racism across the South. Not content to disenfranchise black men, Southern whites went on a lynching spree. Ida B. Wells, the African American journalist and anti-lynching crusader, documented 186 lynchings of black people in 1893 alone — mostly men but women and children, too. As she wrote in her account “The Red Record,” these “scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land.”
Violence against blacks only increased in the early decades of the 20th century. In addition to continued lynching across the South, the Atlanta race riot of 1906 demonstrated how seriously white men took their supremacy over African Americans: An estimated 10,000 white men and boys in the city went after black men, beating dozens to death and injuring hundreds more.
Amid that brutality, the pace of Confederate monument construction quickened. The UDC and other like-minded heritage organizations were intent on honoring the Confederate generation and establishing a revisionist history of what they called the War Between the States. According to this Lost Cause mythology, the South went to war to defend states’ rights, slavery was essentially a benevolent institution that imparted Christianity to African “savages,” and, while the Confederates were defeated, theirs was a just cause and those who fought were heroes. The Daughters regarded the Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded to resist Reconstruction, as a heroic organization, necessary to return order to the South. Order, of course, meant the use of violence to subdue newly freed blacks.
During the era of Jim Crow, Confederate monuments could be placed most anywhere. Some were in cemeteries or parks, but far more were erected on the grounds of local and state courthouses. These monuments, then, not only represented reverence for soldiers who fought in a war to defend slavery, they also made a very pointed statement about the rule of white supremacy: All who enter the courthouse are subject to the laws of white men. << -- Karen Cox, Professor of History, UNC Charlotte, author of “Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South”
Violence against blacks only increased in the early decades of the 20th century. In addition to continued lynching across the South, the Atlanta race riot of 1906 demonstrated how seriously white men took their supremacy over African Americans: An estimated 10,000 white men and boys in the city went after black men, beating dozens to death and injuring hundreds more.
Amid that brutality, the pace of Confederate monument construction quickened. The UDC and other like-minded heritage organizations were intent on honoring the Confederate generation and establishing a revisionist history of what they called the War Between the States. According to this Lost Cause mythology, the South went to war to defend states’ rights, slavery was essentially a benevolent institution that imparted Christianity to African “savages,” and, while the Confederates were defeated, theirs was a just cause and those who fought were heroes. The Daughters regarded the Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded to resist Reconstruction, as a heroic organization, necessary to return order to the South. Order, of course, meant the use of violence to subdue newly freed blacks.
During the era of Jim Crow, Confederate monuments could be placed most anywhere. Some were in cemeteries or parks, but far more were erected on the grounds of local and state courthouses. These monuments, then, not only represented reverence for soldiers who fought in a war to defend slavery, they also made a very pointed statement about the rule of white supremacy: All who enter the courthouse are subject to the laws of white men. << -- Karen Cox, Professor of History, UNC Charlotte, author of “Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South”
The statue removed in Durham North Carolina the other day was a representation of --- nobody. It's a generic. It's there to represent the same concept described above and was erected in 1924, the same year the Klan's power was peaking, when it counted members in the millions from coast to coast and played a large part in electing (or defeating) local and state government officials from Maine to California. And the activist who took that statue down specifically described her action as a blow against "a symbol of white supremacy". Less reported is that those activists also placed a hood over another similar statue called "Silent Sam". That one went up in 1913, again by the UDC. They actually put up most of these monuments.
The Liberty Place monument, the first one removed in New Orleans not long ago, also doesn't represent a soldier, or any part of the Civil War at all. It commemorates a riot started by the White League, another of the various vigilante white supremacist groups that sprang up in the defeated Confederacy.
"Who the statues are" is missing the point. The point is the world, and the mentality, that they came from -- who put them there, and why.
Knowing this, enter the irony ----
This dark period, this "golden age of white supremacy" as I've termed it, is shunned, glossed over, neglected and forgotten in school textbooks, and further buried under tons of monuments, statues and romanticized revisionist rhetoric that we still read on this board. What the statue-topplers have done is shone a spotlight on that history and taken its mask off. So....... far from "removing history" by removing statues --- however that was supposed to have worked --- they have in effect done the opposite. If any entity has "removed history", it's arguably the monuments themselves, a century ago.
Think about it.
Peach
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Not so, Jefferson freed as many as he could. Most were mortgaged, he offered Sally Hemmings her freedom in Paris. His wife loved her half sister; on her death bed, she gave Sally a gold locket to buy her freedom.
Peach
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The history:
Throughout his entire life, Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery. Calling it a “moral depravity”1 and a “hideous blot,”2 he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation.3 Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty.4 These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.
At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition.5 In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans.6 In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories.7 But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.8
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery | Thomas Jefferson's Monticello
Washington also cursed slavery, neither man saw a way to run their plantations without slaves however. Washington:
Despite having been an active slave holder for 56 years, George Washington struggled with the institution of slavery and spoke frequently of his desire to end the practice. At the end of his life Washington made the bold step to free his slaves in his 1799 will - the only slave-holding Founding Father to do so.
Throughout his entire life, Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery. Calling it a “moral depravity”1 and a “hideous blot,”2 he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation.3 Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty.4 These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.
At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition.5 In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans.6 In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories.7 But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.8
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery | Thomas Jefferson's Monticello
Washington also cursed slavery, neither man saw a way to run their plantations without slaves however. Washington:
Despite having been an active slave holder for 56 years, George Washington struggled with the institution of slavery and spoke frequently of his desire to end the practice. At the end of his life Washington made the bold step to free his slaves in his 1799 will - the only slave-holding Founding Father to do so.
Admiral Rockwell Tory
Diamond Member
Not enough rock left for that ugly mug!
I had heard this before too. Thank you for doing the research to articulate it.
Admiral Rockwell Tory
Diamond Member
The idiot in Chicago that wanted to rename parks because the namesakes were slave owners obviously forgot the park where Obama celebrated his 2008 victory. Grant Park, named after Ulysses S. Grant, who was a slave-holding resident of Missouri at the beginning of the Civil War.
Peach
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Jefferson also committed felonies by "allowing" some slaves to escape, among them Hemmings half brother Isaac.
Washington on slavery:
In 1786 he said that he was filled with “regret” about the institution of slavery and his role in it. He said “no man living wishes more sincerely than I do to see the abolition of it.”
They were humans, not saints.
Last edited:
RoshawnMarkwees
Assimilationist
Just replace the statue with Sherman Hemsley and call it the George Jefferson Memorial.
LittleNipper
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If we try to obliterate the past and disown citizens because they are less than perfect, we lose sight of our own humanity.The reality is that without reminders (both good and bad) we will forget.
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