Dear educators, what is your “internal conflict” regarding Confederate history about?
Dear Educators,
Reading through your posts and your responses to posts about monuments and statues, I am very concerned about the internal conflict you feel regarding what is going on, especially when it comes to the removal of Confederate monuments and names of public institutions.
Your positive feelings regarding the “southern” history are misguided. Those who are being honored as heroes of the confederate might have been good American citizens before they decided to declare war on the United States of America, but once they did, they became treasonists and terrorists. Please read the Constitution because this IS the main point. The moment they “levied war against the United States,” they gave up ANY of the good they did before that point.
You also have to understand (and in many cases admit) why they declared war. The burning issue that led to the South attacking the North was slavery. People will say it was about state rights. It was. It was about the southern states wanting to hold on to their right to keep 3 million human beings in chains as slaves.
How many of you can name all the British monuments to those who fought against our new country after 1776? They ruled this country for hundreds of years. Where are their monuments?
Where is the monument to Timothy McVeigh? Wasn’t he a real American patriot? Didn’t he call for state rights? Don’t you agree that the moment he blew up that building he became a traitor? Where is his statue?
Where is the statue to John Wilkes Booth? Didn’t he try to stop the North? Isn’t he an American patriot?
Even if I am wrong about all of this, you have to understand the history of those monuments and statues. They weren’t put up by the United States. They weren’t put up in the ashes of the civil war, where 620,000 people died. They were built in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. What was going on in the south during that time?
After the civil war, southerners were blaming their financial problems on freed slaves that lived around them, and that went on and on to the boiling point of the Civil Rights Movement. This anti black, Jim Crow era lasted through the Civil Rights era. Segregation, lynchings, beatings, rapes, and other horrible things black Americans suffered in the South for generations. Those statues were erected to remind those black Americans who “owned” them. So at the very least, those monuments and statues represent, not what happened before the civil war, but what was going on after the civil war. Do you think we should celebrate segregation?
Now put yourself in the shoes of one of your black students. Do you think if they understood the entire history they would be “torn” about wanting to take down those symbols?
Put yourself in the shoes of your white students. What are we telling them with these arguments?
In regards to “stripping our history,” that’s not what this is about. I think we should have monuments and statues. I believe we should have places to reflect on what happened in our country. Do those monuments do that? Or were they meant to celebrate those traitors?
I have visited the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum. They don’t have a statue to Timothy McVeigh. They also don’t pretend he didn’t exist. They do talk about him. They try to give the visitor an understanding of who he is and why his group did what they did, but in the end, it is obvious. Timothy McVeigh was a killer, a terrorist, and a traitor to this country.
I’m all down or remembering our history. I am also against revisionary history. Just ask yourself, when did the revisionary history take place. Is it happening now or did it already happen during segregation and Jim Crow?
Now is not a time you should be “torn” about what should take place. Please spend some time objectively studying the issue. Please put yourself in the shoes of our young children. What is it that you want them to remember about the civil war and the aftermath of it? How do you want them to feel about themselves? Your students and the future of our country depend on it…
