Historic Statue Removal – Top 3 Pros & Cons

Con 1

The statues represent the country’s history, no matter how complicated. Taking them down is to censor, whitewash, and potentially forget that history.

Of the calls to take down Confederate monuments, President Donald Trump states, “This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose a new oppressive regime in its place.” Trump argues the plight to save the statues “is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” [9] [34]

Citizens of the United States have the right to hold controversial opinions and build statues to honor their beliefs. The First Amendment protects everyone’s speech, not just the speech approved by the majority. [35]

The history of the United States is multi-layered, complicated, and ever-evolving. Those who disagree with the beliefs upheld by the statues should work to understand the history these monuments represent, rather than trying to simply remove them and the history from sight.

John Daniel Davidson, Political Editor at The Federalist, explains, “That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight—and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off… A more mature society would recognize that the past is always with you and must always be kept in mind. There’s a reason Christians in Rome didn’t topple all the pagan statues and buildings in the city, or raze the Colosseum.” [36]

Each Confederate monument is a reminder not only of the Civil War and the end of slavery, but the assertion of the federal government’s dominance over states’ rights, as well as the persistence of systemic racism. [37]

Lawrence A. Kuznar, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, states, “removing Confederate statues amounts to whitewashing our history, turning our heads away from the inconvenient truths of our past. We should let them stand and use them to remind ourselves of what we are and are not, the cost our forebears paid for our freedom and to educate our children.” [38]

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Con 2

Removing statues is a slippery slope that could lead to the brash removal of monuments to any slightly problematic person.

During the protests following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, many Confederate statues were damaged or toppled, as were statues of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ulysses S. Grant. [10] [11] [12]

Washington, Jefferson, and Grant had undeniable ties to slavery. Washington owned over 300, Jefferson over 600, and Grant worked on his wife’s family plantation and inherited one slave upon his father-in-law’s death. [39] [40] [41]

However, Washington led the Continental Army to victory over the British, held together the country as the first President over two terms, resisted calls to become King of the country, and, in his will, freed his slaves upon his wife’s death. [42]

Jefferson is the author of two of our most dear principles as a country: equality and religious freedom. He was also an abolitionist, though a hypocritical and pragmatic one who understood the country would not give up slavery so easily. While he hoped the next generation would abolish slavery, he wrote in 1820 that maintaining the institution of slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” [40]

Grant came from an abolitionist family, freed the one slave he owned in 1859, supported Black enlisted Army men, led the Union Army in the Civil War to abolish slavery, and was endorsed by Frederick Douglass for president. [41]

Should we not honor the contributions of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant to the United States because they owned slaves, as did many men of their standing at the time, even though they struggled with the institution?

Annette Gordon-Reed, Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University, explains, “There is an important difference between helping to create the United States and trying to destroy it. Both Washington and Jefferson were critical to the formation of the country and to the shaping of it in its early years… No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery… I think on these two, Washington and Jefferson, in particular, you take the bitter with sweet. The main duty is not to hide the bitter parts.” [43]

Eight US presidents owned slaves while in office, with an additional four owning slaves while not in office. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the white suffragists purposefully excluded Black women. Martin Luther King, Jr. regularly cheated on his wife. [44] [45] [46] [47]

Do we exclude the achievements of these figures from public display because they displayed controversial behavior? Where do we draw a line? Do we protect Confederate graves and battlefields? [48] Or should those also be destroyed? The line is subjective, difficult to draw, and easy to reinterpret, leaving no memorial protected.

The slippery slope goes further, allowing anyone to destroy any statue they disagree with. For example, a statue of Black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass was damaged over the July 4, 2020 weekend in Rochester, New York. And a statue of Black tennis star and Civil Rights activist Arthur Ashe was tagged with “white lives matter” graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. [9] [49]

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Con 3

The statues do not cause racism and could be used to fight racism if put into historical context.

Author Sophia A. Nelson, who notes she is the granddaughter of a slave, states that she does not ”fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men.” Nelson argues that her classmates at Washington & Lee University “didn’t hate [Black students] because there were statues of Robert E. Lee or George Washington (our nation’s first President and a slave owner) on campus. They didn’t like having black classmates because they had racist hearts. They honored racial prejudice. They harbored cultural bias. That, my friends, is what we must work toward eradicating.” [50]

Ellis Cose, Senior Fellow at the ACLU, states that the statues should remain, with “plaques and other material in place that point out that these men were traitors, not American heroes, and that their ugly legacy haunts us still. In illuminating how vulnerable Americans have long been to ugly racial appeals, and how willfully blind we have been to racial injustice, those statues could remind us of the catastrophic consequences of not putting bigotry aside.” [51]

Some jurisdictions have chosen to put explanatory plaques beside Confederate monuments to teach a more complete history. The plaques can not only detail the history of slavery and the Civil War, but also the white segregationist history that promoted the building of such statues to promote the revisionist Lost Cause history. [52]

Next to the Peace Monument in Atlanta, Georgia, a plaque reads, “This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood; rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights.” [24]

Sheffield Hale, President and Chief Executive of the Atlanta History Center, stated of the plaque, “I do think it gives [people] a starting point, which is sorely needed right now, in our society, as a way to deal with contentious issues. Let’s argue about the facts, let’s put them down on paper – or on a marker – and have a conversation about them.” [24]

Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first Black professor, who disagrees with taking down the statues, warned against being distracted by the simple, concrete action of taking down statues: “We don’t want to leave this so that people looking back in 50 years will say: you know, they took the statues down, why didn’t they do something about racism?” [53]

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