This is NOT Conserving History!
Recently, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces recommended that statues in the city of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson remain in place. Sounds like a victory, right? WRONG! The Commission’s suggestion is conditional in that they also recommended the city council rename and redesign the public parks where these two statues stand in order to “transform” the statues’ meaning, and made other suggestions to help tell “the full story of Charlottesville’s history of race.”
What!? How atrocious is this? Now they want to rewrite history to fit into their distorted politically correct agenda. When will it ever end?
Here are more recommendations given by the BR Commission:
- Replace the existing Court Square Slave Auction Block marker and commission a new memorial on or near Court Square in downtown Charlottesville.
- Support conservation of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery and the Bridge Builders Committee’s work to improve the visibility and appearance of the Drewary J. Brown Memorial Bridge.
- Provide financial assistance for the proposed Vinegar Hill Park and Vinegar Hill Monument, as well as funding for historic resource surveys of African-American, Native American and local neighborhoods and sites.
- Sponsor local history research by local institutions, such as the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society.
- Find opportunities to name new roads, bridges and other locations after ideas and people who represent the city but reject building new monuments to individuals.
- Designate March 3 as “Liberation Day” or “Freedom Day” to commemorate when the Union Army marched into Charlottesville in 1865. (This one really bothers me.)
- Urge the city to participate in the Equal Justice Initiative’s Memorial to Peace and Justice by displaying a memorial marking the lynching of John Henry James to “confront the truth and terror of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era.
- Encourage and support the teaching the history of slavery and impact of racism in African-American and Native American history classes for local public schools.
A small group has already protested the Commission’s recommendation to keep the statues in the parks. One of the leaders in the movement to removed the statues is University of Virginia professor Jalane Schmidt, who wants the statues to be replaced with statues of slaves.
“The Confederate statues need to be moved so that history can be publicly retold and physically represented so that we can change our history’s narrative around race,” Schmidt said.
Hopefully, she won’t get her way. What a tragedy it would be if she did!
This controversy has been going on for a while. Check out:
