Without question, removing statues that glorify the Confederacy from public places is essential to our shared goal of achieving racial reconciliation and equality – but how far should the removal of statues and other monuments extend? There have been seriously heated debates around this question for the past several years but, to us, it’s really not that complicated.

 

First, let us be clear: We imagine Confederate statues feel like a slap in the face to most black people not only because of the horror of slavery, but also because most of these monuments were built during the time of Jim Crow in a clear attempt to champion white supremacy. Heck, some of them were erected as late as the 1950s and 1960s. Many if not all these statues were built for one reason and one reason only: To make sure that even though black people were technically free, they should never, ever forget their place.

 

​This is not our opinion it’s a well-documented fact. Most Confederate monuments were built by organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy to romanticize the Lost Cause ridiculousness – a narrative that tries to rewrite history and say that the Civil War had nothing to do with the enslavement of black people at all; rather it was about the moral and just goals of gaining economic prosperity, “state’s rights,” and preserving the “Southern way of life” (whatever that means).

 

Confederate statues and monuments born out of this mentality are nothing more than monuments to ignorance. And injustice. And hate.  And cruelty.

 

​To those who try to defend the Lost Cause nonsense you can just save it.  There is zero doubt that the reason the South fought the Civil War was to preserve slave labor. One must look no further than Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephen’s Cornerstone Speech, given in 1861, for confirmation of this: “Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

 

​Not only were Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, his vice president, and two of the most famous Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, fighting to keep human beings in bondage, they were traitors to the United States of America. Full stop.