I do not believe statues commemorating the leaders of the Confederacy belong in the public commons. The people who led the secession and who fought against the Union were traitors. The war they fought was to preserve the institution of slavery, an institution as dreadful as any the world has seen. The statues that were erected years after the Civil War were meant to celebrate the white males who fought for the South and to sanitize the sordid reasons for the war. As such these statues enshrine the values of white supremacy and serve to intimidate people of African American heritage. At the same time the statues are an affront to those people who reject the institutions that motivated secession. That the traitors who led the Confederacy were neither imprisoned nor hanged, that they were welcomed back into the Union with full rights and privileges is bad enough; they should not further be honored with statues in the town square.
If we want to commemorate the people from the Civil War era we should commemorate people who engaged in honorable activities such as the slaves themselves upon whose backs and by whose uncompensated labor the economy of the South and the wealth of the white elite was built. We can also commemorate those who were active in anti-slavery activities and who sought to defend the rights of the freedmen. We could join The Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama and The National Memorial of Peace and Justice and install memorials to people lynched after the Civil War and into the 1950’s. If we show we value black bodies by honoring them with statuary, maybe there will be fewer instances of perfunctory killings of blacks by whites in power.
It is certainly important to remember the Civil War and to know who the principal actors were on both sides and what they stood for. That can be done with historical markers or museums devoted to an explanation of the causes and consequences of the dispute. Traitors, their foot soldiers, and those who sought to oppress a race of people do not deserve a place of honor in the public square. The statues should go someplace where the full narrative of white supremacy can accompany them and where their presence doesn’t serve to continue to intimidate those groups whom the actual historical figures intimidated when they were alive.