Small crowds gathered at each of the monuments and the mood was “celebratory,” said Baynard Woods, the editor at large of The Baltimore City Paper, who documented the removals on Twitter.
“The police are being cheerful and encouraging people to take photos and selfies,” Mr. Woods said in an interview.
The statues were taken down by order of Mayor Catherine Pugh, after the City Council voted on Monday for their removal. The city had been studying the issue since 2015, when a mass shooting by a white supremacist at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., prompted a renewed debate across the South over removing Confederate monuments and battle flags from public spaces.
I've always been confused why we tolerated Confederate 'heroes' to be lionized with statues throughout our country. They were an insurgent confederacy that was defeated to preserve our Union. It'd be akin to allowing Germans to keep Hilter and Himmler statues all over Germany. It never really made sense to me.
Anyway. I think this is a smart move by the Baltimore mayor and the city council.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: It'd be akin to allowing Germans to keep Hilter and Himmler statues all over Germany.
I suspect you don't mean to give the impression that any other country has the right to 'allow' Germans to retain statues or not.
Over the last seventy years the Germans have worked extremely hard to remove all vestiges of Hitler's ideology from their country, and they have succeeded to an enormous extent. An attempt to erect any such statue today would lead to great crowds of ordinary people turning out to pull it down with their bare hands. Any German who has been to school is all too aware of the appalling disaster Hitler brought upon their country, let alone the other countries who suffered because of him.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: It'd be akin to allowing Germans to keep Hilter and Himmler statues all over Germany.
I suspect you don't mean to give the impression that any other country has the right to 'allow' Germans to retain statues or not.
Over the last seventy years the Germans have worked extremely hard to remove all vestiges of Hitler's ideology from their country, and they have succeeded to an enormous extent. An attempt to erect any such statue today would lead to great crowds of ordinary people turning out to pull it down with their bare hands. Any German who has been to school is all too aware of the appalling disaster Hitler brought upon their country, let alone the other countries who suffered because of him.
Well. Sure. I should've said:
It'd be akin to Germans to allowing nostalgic Nazis to keep Hilter and Himmler statues all over Germany.
That said, the US could've and should've done a better job at educating our kids about the Confederacy, the slave culture, the sheer brutality of life under that system for minorities and non-landowning Whites. Then again, I suppose if we taught the truth to our children about the South we'd probably be facing another secessionist movement with actual teeth.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
Am I right in recalling that the erection of a significant number of these statues does not date back to the 19th century, but to the early 20th century, as a reaction to a sense in the south that unquestioned black subordination by Jim Crow laws etc. might at last be under threat?
Is that just a fantasy on my part, or is there evidence to support that notion?
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Chap wrote:Am I right in recalling that the erection of a significant number of these statues does not date back to the 19th century, but to the early 20th century, as a reaction to a sense in the south that unquestioned black subordination by Jim Crow laws etc. might at last be under threat?
Is that just a fantasy on my part, or is there evidence to support that notion?
They did a pretty serious write up after the Dylan Roof thing and you can read that in my link. If you scroll to page 12-13 you will see a timeline of what went up and when with some historical reference points.
"If you consider what are called the virtues in mankind, you will find their growth is assisted by education and cultivation." -Xenophon of Athens
Going out on a limb here, how bad would it be if states took these statures and other Civil War artifacts and put them in their museums? Maybe that would calm the blow back from the opposition? They are, after all, historical artifacts.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
The CCC wrote:Museums probably, as long as they don't glorify the Confederate Traitors. Public square memorials not so much.
Yeah, I'm only talking about moving them to museums. I've long wondered why this isn't being done. I think preserving history, no matter how repugnant it is, is more effective than breaking it apart, tossing it away, and essentially editing out evidence of the narrative.
I think these should be preserved not to honor what they represent, but because it happened.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb