Down Goes Silent Sam

Many of those statues go up in the early 20th century?

Deacfreak07 said:

Many of those statues go up in the early 20th century?

Click to expand...

No. I understand that you're being intentionally obtuse and it shouldn't surprise you that people weren't building statues to the contributions of enslaved farm workers 50 years after the Civil War.

Deacon923 said:

Think about it this way. If you were the grandson of a Holocaust survivor living in Germany, how would you feel if you had to walk to school every day past a statue of a Hitler Youth with that plaque? Does generic wording somehow sanitize the message of that statue?

Note: Germany has no such statues, because they understand that the attempt to build a society on the dehumanization of an entire race of people is something to be ashamed of, not glorified.

Click to expand...

And the statue of a Hitler Youth with that plaque was erected in 1993.

I will say in response to those statues you mentioned, good on a lot of cities for teaching their history. It's great to see that many cities are beginning to highlight (or at least acknowledge) the [continued] struggle for liberation/equality.

The Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston is great, and gives a lot of context: from the history, to the action, to the aftermath of the revolt, including showing how the Citadel was born out of the effort to police Black freedmen.

This doesn't really change the fact that many (most) of these Confederate monuments/memorials were erected for the purposes of either intimidation, or to rewrite the history of the period, uplifting the narrative of The Lost Cause.

Deacon923 said:

Think about it this way. If you were the grandson of a Holocaust survivor living in Germany, how would you feel if you had to walk to school every day past a statue of a Hitler Youth with that plaque? Does generic wording somehow sanitize the message of that statue?

Note: Germany has no such statues, because they understand that the attempt to build a society on the dehumanization of an entire race of people is something to be ashamed of, not glorified.

Click to expand...

You are simpleton, where history is concerned. In Germany there are statues all over to people who were serf owners, and the serfs were hardly better off than slaves.

Racerdeac deserves a statue in the tailgating parking lot for when he exposed Lectro as the pussy he really is.

sailordeac said:

You are simpleton, where history is concerned. In Germany there are statues all over to people who were serf owners, and the serfs were hardly better off than slaves.

Click to expand...

lol a great defense of Confederate statues here

BiffTannen said:

Do you even know the first damn thing about Robert E. Lee an his family beyond he was a Confederate general and they owned slaves ? Like, the Revolutionary War might not have gone so well without Lee's father ?

Click to expand...

I know we took his dang house to inter the actual heroes

Deacon923 said:

let's not act like the average southerner didn't have any choice in the matter.
https://www.ncpedia.org/union-volunteer-regiments



It is amusing to me that attitudes toward the Confederacy are markedly more positive in Wilkes County today than they were in 1863.

Click to expand...

Yeah, and it's not just Wilkes, there were plenty of counties in the NC foothills and mountains which voted against secession, and contained many people (in Wilkes it was probably a majority) who remained loyal to the Union instead of the Confederacy during the conflict. I believe in August 1863 a pro-Union rally was held in Wilkesboro and the Confederate flag was taken down and the US flag was raised over the courthouse. Union POWs who escaped from the Union POW camp at Salisbury knew if they could make it to Wilkes, there were plenty of local loyal citizens who would hide them until they could continue to travel north.

Today, though, the county is filled with rebel flags and is probably more pro-Confederate than it was during the war. There's a Civil War monument in Wilkesboro (erected by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, of course) in honor of the soldiers from Wilkes who fought for the Confederacy, there is no such monument to the ones who fought for the Union, who have been largely forgotten (it was a substantial number.) The Confederate monument reads:

IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE WILKES COUNTY VETERANS OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, WHO DEFENDED THEIR SOUTHERN HOMELAND AGAINST NORTHERN AGGRESSION MAY THEIR BRAVERY, LOYALTY, HONOR AND CHRISTIAN VALUES CONTINUE TO LIVE IN ALL WILKES COUNTY CITIZENS.

Stuff like this is why I'm always amused when people who support these statues and monuments claim that the ones who want to remove them are trying to "erase" Civil War history, as if the above wording on the Wilkes Confederate memorial isn't itself a gross whitewashing and misreading of Civil War history. I have little doubt that there are some proud "Rebels" in the foothills and mountains of NC who would be shocked to learn that one or more of their beloved ancestors actually opposed secession and the Confederacy, hated the Confederate flag, and may have even fought for the Union.

IamThunderbolt said:

I will say in response to those statues you mentioned, good on a lot of cities for teaching their history. It's great to see that many cities are beginning to highlight (or at least acknowledge) the [continued] struggle for liberation/equality.

The Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston is great, and gives a lot of context: from the history, to the action, to the aftermath of the revolt, including showing how the Citadel was born out of the effort to police Black freedmen.

This doesn't really change the fact that many (most) of these Confederate monuments/memorials were erected for the purposes of either intimidation, or to rewrite the history of the period, uplifting the narrative of The Lost Cause.

Click to expand...

Savannah also has a statue of a guy who wrote an anti-slavery tract (and the brother of the GOAT english-language hymnodist).

TuffaloDeac10 said:

I know we took his dang house to inter the actual heroes

Click to expand...

He also played a fairly significant role in establishing the idea of business schools... all-around Bad Guy

Wakeforest22890 said:

And the statue of a Hitler Youth with that plaque was erected in 1993.

Click to expand...

By Nazis who controlled local government and business and found ways to continue to make life miserable for Jews

2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:

But the motive behind the statue doesn't make the statue racist on its own. If I dance around a KKK hood and put an apple in the street, I may be a racist but it doesn't make the apple in the street a racist symbol.

This is/was the plaque on Silent Sam:

How is that any different than pretty much any plaque on any other memorial to soldiers? You could unbolt it from Silent Sam and bolt it to a Civil War statue at the University of Vermont and it would mean the exact same thing. Would it be racist there? If you changed the years and put it on a Vietnam Memorial, would it be racist there?

Click to expand...

Cause it is phony balony. The war was about economics, and free labor is the shit, beeyotch. They built a whole belief system around it with pretty words and whatnot.

IamThunderbolt said:

I will say in response to those statues you mentioned, good on a lot of cities for teaching their history. It's great to see that many cities are beginning to highlight (or at least acknowledge) the [continued] struggle for liberation/equality.

The Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston is great, and gives a lot of context: from the history, to the action, to the aftermath of the revolt, including showing how the Citadel was born out of the effort to police Black freedmen.

This doesn't really change the fact that many (most) of these Confederate monuments/memorials were erected for the purposes of either intimidation, or to rewrite the history of the period, uplifting the narrative of The Lost Cause.

Click to expand...

Another fact: The Confederate monuments largely remain in front of courthouses and other prominent locations, while the civil rights icons get a monument in the "black part of town" or in some other out of the way place. Denmark Vesey is in a park in North Charleston, while the Battery is full of Confederates.

Regardless, the purpose was to honor Confederate veterans.

Junebug said:

I think that, in many cases, the “original intent” of the people who put the statue up is not discernible, nor should it be dispositive. Even putting aside the problem of ascertaining the motivations of a multi-member body, for a statue honoring the confederate dead, for example, unless there is a plaque describing the purpose of the statue, how could we possibly say it was to remind black people of their place, rather than commemorate the confederate dead? Sure, the timing matters, but but reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era coincided with the death of many confederate veterans (I agree that the 1960s did not), and, in any event, actions often have dual motivations, and how could we, 100 years later, possibly say with any assurance, which one predominated for a statute erected, say, in the late 1800s?

Moreover, in cases involving religious displays, like carvings of the 10 commandments on government property, the SCOTUS has said, for displays that have been up for scores of years, whatever the religious motivations of the people who put up the display, that motivation has to be considered against the backdrop of the evolution of the purpose of keeping the display up. On that point, if the legislative body with decision making authority comes out and says something like “we recognize that this statue may have been put up for improper purposes, but we roundly reject any such purpose, and we keep the statute up to commemorate the confederate dead,” it is hard for me to say the original, rejected, intent must be the only one we focus on. The meaning of displays like this evolve over time, and focusing only on the original intent obscures that fact.

Click to expand...

Shouldn't this be balanced against the impact it has on people today. This the reason why Aycock Middle School changed its name in Greensboro - because of the impact, a predominantly Black middile school (or any middle school) shouldn't bear/honor the name of a man who participated in a white supremacist movement, advocated for the disenfranchisement of Black folks, and was a champion of segregation.

Junebug said:

I think that, in many cases, the “original intent” of the people who put the statue up is not discernible, nor should it be dispositive. Even putting aside the problem of ascertaining the motivations of a multi-member body, for a statue honoring the confederate dead, for example, unless there is a plaque describing the purpose of the statue, how could we possibly say it was to remind black people of their place, rather than commemorate the confederate dead? Sure, the timing matters, but but reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era coincided with the death of many confederate veterans (I agree that the 1960s did not), and, in any event, actions often have dual motivations, and how could we, 100 years later, possibly say with any assurance, which one predominated for a statute erected, say, in the late 1800s?

Moreover, in cases involving religious displays, like carvings of the 10 commandments on government property, the SCOTUS has said, for displays that have been up for scores of years, whatever the religious motivations of the people who put up the display, that motivation has to be considered against the backdrop of the evolution of the purpose of keeping the display up. On that point, if the legislative body with decision making authority comes out and says something like “we recognize that this statue may have been put up for improper purposes, but we roundly reject any such purpose, and we keep the statute up to commemorate the confederate dead,” it is hard for me to say the original, rejected, intent must be the only one we focus on. The meaning of displays like this evolve over time, and focusing only on the original intent obscures that fact.

Click to expand...

This is not statutory construction. You cannot dictate the one correct way for a statue to be viewed or interpreted like you can with setting forth how a statute will be enforced. In theory, I agree with you that the intent should not be controlling. However, different people interpret statues in different ways, and you cannot simply tell them that they're wrong for accounting for the original intent in their views.

Junebug said:

I could be wrong, but I believe most such statues purport to honor confederate dead.

Click to expand...

i thought we couldn't tell why they were put up?

Calhoun, Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis did not die in the war, but they have plenty of statues, streets, and schools named after them. There are also monuments to post-Civil War white supremacists. Two that come to mind are the Nathan Bedford Forrest monument removed from Nashville last year, and the Aycock middle school in Greensboro, renamed this year.

In any event, I generally agree with your posts to the extent they imply that the fate of such monuments should be individually democratically determined, based on what the modern population feels they represent. Of course, with respect to North Carolina, the real question is which "legislative body" gets to make the decision. If left up to the municipalities or the UNC chancellors to respond to their constituents, your wish would be granted and the current mood of the electorate would govern. See, e.g., the removal of the Confederate statues in New Orleans.

Junebug said:

Sure, that should weigh into the calculus, but I personally don’t put much stock into the ersatz “oppression” created by a statue, which, by the way, explains my view on why we shouldn’t glorify people taking the law into their own hands and tearing these statues down. This isn’t actual oppression — no one is being held back by these statues. That said, I think changing school names is different from bringing a statue down.

Click to expand...

I'm sure the black students of UNC-CH will appreciate your white man's view of how they should or should not feel.

Junebug said:

I’m not telling them how they should or should not feel. That’s up to them. I’m saying that in a society with people of different views, backgrounds, and experiences, there are going to be some hurt feelings that have to be lived with.

Click to expand...

And you’re saying it’s black people who have and should always have those hurt feelings.