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On June 22, in the dead of night, the Confederate soldier monument in Greenville, N.C., came down. It offended people. The next day, one of the leaders for getting the city to take down, said it was just the start In cities across the co monuments are being remove for “storage in a safe place” as one official put it. Others are being vandalized and damaged with police standing by doing nothing despite laws saying the activity is illegal because they have been told to “stand down.” Many statues have nothing to do with the Civil War, slavery, or the Confederacy. Even a U.S.
Grant statue was toppled and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (the “Glory Regiment”) was vandalized. CWN is not covering the destruction, vandalism, and sudden removal of multiple Confederate monuments as individual stories. The topic is so extremely contro versial,and there are so many ex amples, that coverage would not only take up the entire monthly CWN issue, it is a no-win topic. Our coverage would anger and raise the blood pressure of
TO THE EDITOR: I was struck by the lead arti cle in your June issue: Fact or Fiction? Black Confederates. I’ve seen this matter discussed in a wide variety of venues and with an almost equal number of flat denials and fervid assertio Frankly, the subject is simply irrelevant!
Now we know that there were black soldiers in gray whatever their status, slave or free. have the testimony of Frederick
Douglass—hardly an advocate of the Confederacy—who commented upon seeing them as he
gazed across the lines. And ther is other equally credible testim ny on the subject to put the mat ter to rest if permitted! But, a
noted, if the whole subject is i relevant, why the need to pursue
it by both sides? Simple: there an understanding, especially by advocates of the South, that the
to present a balanced view. We recognize that this destruction of symbols is occurring and that it represents a dangerous shift in attitudes and official complicity, but to continually beat the horse would not be in anyone’s interest to rail against anonymity and would serve to keep the issue alive and that seems to be w one faction wants. For many of us, this is destruc tion of history, not my history, o our history, but just simply history. When these monuments are gone, as the one in Greenville, where do the rallying points and teaching moments appear? A lesson can be seen in more recent German history. Many extermination and forced labor camps are
still there, albeit in reduced for precisely because they serve as reminders of something truly evil. They are visited every year by student classes who are told, in precise language, exactly what happened there, and made to confront their past, a past within li ing memory, a past that must be repeated. The narrow minded, rush to judgment, do it now, demonstrators fail to see how important these monuments are to them and their crusade for justice. They ar so off the mark! They seem to fear the past; but the monuments should serve to remind them,
“never again!” in the words of the Jewish Defense League comment about the Holocaust. What if, in-
stead of tearing down a monument to a county’s dead Confederates, they moved to erect a monument to the U.S. Colored Troops, some
existence of blacks fighting for the Confederacy legitimizes their cause. Nonsense! It no more validates the cause of the South than do blacks fighting in blue validat the cause of the North. A cause is not vindicated by the people who fight for it.
It is the same regarding secession. The States of the South
who fought in Union regiments. The teaching moment is here but they are missing the point. There’s another aspect to this; Americans tend to joke about the crook, rustler, or ancestor hung for piracy because it stands out. hundred years ago, people used to joke about having an Irish, Italia Hungarian, Yankee, or adopted ancestor. Note that I’ve deliberately not said Native American or African ancestor, even th they might well have influen family’s lineage, and vice versa, because political correctness and personal sensibilities might be af fronted. That omission is telling, but it really is a teaching moment for both sides of the political co rectness prism. More importantly, once it is recognized, confronted, and dealt with, it becomes another thread that helps hold our na-
tion together. At the same time, the silent ma jority does little or nothing, jus sitting by, knowing that school curricula are no longer talking about slavery and America’s past. One letter writer said Black Confederates are irrelevant, but they really are relevant; they show that a national people have a great many variations and that nothing is either black nor white; they form a crazy quilt of emotional highs and lows. For the future, it is time to stop tearing things down and start building things again and teaching about our national failures just so we
don’t repeat them. If there is no rallying point to call attention t some part of our past that was
wrong, or really bad, how can focus be brought to bear on the problem? Larry Babi
“union” that had become a burden to them and their citizens just as the New England States had the right to secede during the war of 1812. That they chose not to do so in no way nullifies the fact that they met in convention and voted on the issue. It is said
that the Constitution is silent on secession. Not so! When three of the States—Virginia, New York,