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Confederate Monuments

At Schools Named For Robert E. Lee, Students Led The Way Toward Change

July 15, 2021 Coshandra Dillard, Learning For Justice. , , ,
Gertrude “Trude” Lamb, 16, describes herself as a shy person. She never wanted to be the center of attention. But, in the summer of 2020, when Trude became the face of a movement to rename Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, Texas, she was suddenly in a spotlight she’d never imagined. A friend nudged her to join a local campaign and send a letter to the school board, but she wasn’t sure why. Trude, who emigrated from Ghana in 2014, wasn’t familiar with Lee or anything related to the Confederacy. So, she began to research. “At school, they usually just teach the good part about somebody,” she says. “They don’t teach the bad part.” A star athlete on her school’s varsity cross-country team, she’d penned a letter to school board members stating she’d no longer wear a jersey that bore the name of an enslaver.

The Violent Story Of American Whiteness

December 26, 2020 Kim Kelly, In These Times. , , ,
The United States of America is a white suprema­cist nation. It always has been. Its white founders, ven­er­at­ed and lion­ized though they are in text­books and on cour­t­house lawns, explic­it­ly intend­ed the coun­try to be this way. The country’s found­ing doc­u­ments make that goal clear. Through the cen­turies, the pre­dom­i­nant­ly white rul­ing class has worked over­time to uphold this sta­tus quo, even as the goal­posts peri­od­i­cal­ly shift. A trio of new books delve into this rot­ten heart of Amer­i­can white­ness and explore how its bloody foot­prints smudged the nation’s past and con­tin­ue to influ­ence its uncer­tain future. Con­nor Towne O’Neill’s Down Along with That Devil’s Bones: A Reck­on­ing with Mon­u­ments, Mem­o­ry, and the Lega­cy...

When Impossible Becomes Inevitable: The Fall Of ‘Petty Racism’

August 14, 2020 By Bill Mosley, Washington Socialist. , , ,
The removal of Confederate statues around Richmond, Va., had a personal resonance for me, a Richmond native who once lived around the corner from the Robert E. Lee monument – the only one of the five monuments to rebel figures still (as I write this) standing on Monument Avenue. I used to go jogging on the avenue’s median starting at Lee, veering around Jefferson Davis and turning to retrace my steps as I approached Stonewall Jackson. As Leon Trotsky said, “revolution is impossible until it’s inevitable.” He spoke from experience; the socialist revolution he sought seemed stuck in neutral until the events of 1917 opened the floodgates. Suddenly, Confederate statues began to fall one by one, not just in Richmond or Virginia but wherever they stood. DC’s only public monument to a Confederate figure – General Albert Pike – was pulled down and burned by activists on Juneteenth.

Black Militia Marches On Stone Mountain, Demands Removal Of Confederate Monument

July 7, 2020 Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance. , , ,
About 1,000 heavily armed militia, all of whom were Black, marched through Georgia's Stone Mountain Park on Saturday, challenging white nationalist groups in the area to either come out and fight or join them in demonstrating against the government. Stone Mountain State Park officials said the Black militia group was peaceful, orderly and escorted by police as they called for the removal of the country's largest Confederate monument near Atlanta. The Black militia is calling for the removal of the Confederate monument etched into Stone Mountain, GA. In 1915, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It has been a site used for the racist KKK to hold rallies and where the Klan was reborn. It is the world's largest monument to white supremacy, completed in 1972 after the Civil Rights Acts were made into law. It was a way for racists to show that white supremacy still ruled.

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