should statues be removed pros and cons

There are many other people who could be represented by statues who would better represent the historical progress and diversity of the country. The civil war had been over for 30 years before most statues of Confederate generals went up. The statues were built to honor and enforce white supremacist views, and the intent or damaging effect have not been erased by time. Taney’s bust was replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall. We’re trying to let the government know we’re not going to wait any longer for our freedom to happen.” [19] Celebrations of Columbus have long been criticized due to his colonization and genocide of Indigenous people, as well as the false narrative that he discovered America when he never set foot on North America. 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. Should Statues Be Removed Pros And Cons - Stay informed with breaking news, in-depth analysis and community coverage. 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. “I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated against my colour,” she once said. Confederate Monuments Pros And Cons 587 Words | 3 Pages The American Civil War was a moment in history that everyone would like to forget. 2.The statues … View the full answer Previous question Next question Statues of Lenin have been toppled in many countries that have rejected communism, but last year in in some cities in eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian protesters rushed to protect statues at risk of being torn down. Read about our approach to external linking. There are pros and cons to removing statues. And indeed rows over statues are increasingly common. One letter writer to the Times said: "We need not be proud of a man who, for all his professional skill and dedication, committed the force to acts of destruction devoid of direct military value, of which people of humane and Christian sentiments have long been bitterly ashamed. When those values are not shared a debate needs to be started.". GREENE: Has your view on all of this changed since George Floyd was killed and we've seen such anger on the streets and such a growing movement at this moment? Where is their place in history? Earlier, this year the #RhodesMustFall movement succeeded in getting the statue of the diamond tycoon and imperialist removed from the University of Cape Town. John Daniel Davidson, “Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Right Where They Are,” thefederalist.com, Aug. 18, 2017, 37. George Martin, “Why Confederate Monuments Should Be Preserved and Honored,” charlotteobserver.com, July 6, 2017, 38. 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]. ONLY FOR REPUBLICANS. In this article we will explore the common arguments for and against the removal of the statues and how to write an argumentative essay on this topic. Stephen E. Ambrose, “Founding Fathers and Slaveholders,” smithsonianmag.com, Nov. 2002, 43. Take away anything that smacks of the sort of imperialist legacy which clearly that statue embodies. So now we've moved into a different phase. Nellie Peyton, “As the Men of Stone Fall, Who Should Rise up and Take Their Place?,” news.trust.org, July 2, 2020, 33. A 2018 investigation published in the Smithsonian Magazine found that over the prior ten years at least $40 million in taxpayer dollars were allocated for Confederate statues, other monuments, and heritage organizations. And while it is true that many of the Virginian Founding Fathers - Washington, Jefferson, Madison - all owned slaves, we put up their statues not to commemorate their slave holding but for different reasons. One of the greatest distractions when it comes to removing statues is the argument that to remove a statue is to erase history; that to change something about a statue is to tamper with history. emma.greguska@asu.edu. What you got in the interim before that happened was a kind of a battle over community values. But history is not set in stone. In June 2021, the US House of Representatives voted to remove all confederate statues and bust of Roger B. Taney (the US Supreme Court Chief Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision) from the US Capitol's Statuary Hall. This is such arrant nonsense it is difficult to know where to begin, so I guess it would make sense to begin at the beginning. Given that the statues represented men on the losing side of the civil war, they certainly didn’t represent a consensus in the country as a whole. Basic History Facts. The petitioners generally had no idea who any of them were. Take away these men who seem to be inferior to Roosevelt, but leave him. So for instance, a lot of the sort of backlash against taking down Confederate statues was precisely this. The SPLC reported at least 160 monuments were removed in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, more than the prior four years combined At last count, about 704 Confederate monuments remained on public land. Pros And Cons Of Confederate Statues - 720 Words | Bartleby Once again the editorial writers were upon us: “The saga of the empty plinth is another example of the yawning gap between the metropolitan elite hijacking this country and the majority of ordinary people who simply want to reclaim Britain as their own.”. [47] Do we exclude the achievements of these figures from public display because they displayed controversial behavior? Richard Allen Greene, “King Leopold II Statues Are Being Removed in Belgium. Jack Jenkins, “How the Charleston Shooting Is Linked to the Confederate Flag, According to A South Carolinian,” thinkprogress.org, June 19, 2015, 3. And there was a real concern about assimilating these immigrants into … you can call it Americanization, but what it really was was an assimilation into white, Protestant culture. People might not want to take their cue from the medieval Christians who gleefully melted down bronze equestrian statues of pagan Roman emperors and reused the metal. A common type of monuments in this situation are the Confederacy monuments. But while our sense of who we are, what is acceptable and what is possible changes with time, statues don’t. A: My first book (“A City of Marble”) was about the Roman emperor Augustus and how he used the built environment to shape civic identity at a time of great change for Rome. They just didn’t want him to be revered. Following the murder of George Floyd, I think we started to see a broader recognition of how statues in civic spaces can exclude certain people. The substantial African American population of the city would hardly have been pleased to see them up there. None of these figures were particularly known for riding horses either. Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen? NPR Morning Edition, “For Stanton, All Women Were Not Created Equal,” npr.org, July 13, 2011, 46. A century later a group of MPs campaigned to have it melted down. ProCon.org. The problem with statues is that stone or bronze is meant to last forever, but reputations crumble much more easily. Despite Nicole Douglas' team-leading 14th goal of the season, the Sun Devil soccer team was unable to claim its first Pac-12 victory of the season after falling to the Oregon State Beavers, 2-1 on Thursday night. Half of the monuments contested over the past year were erected between 1889 and 1919. [35]. But you’ve just shown that this is not a particularly effective way to remember people.”. 9 Jun 2021. One claim for not bringing down certain statues of people who committed egregious acts is that we should not judge people of another time by today’s standards. When a labour party took control of Richmond city council in the late 1880s, a coalition of blacks and working-class whites refused to vote for an unveiling parade for the monument because it would “benefit only a certain class of people”. Opponents said, well, if you're going to take down Jefferson Davis, the next day you're going to take down George Washington. Indeed, if the people removing a statue are trying to erase history, then they are very bad at it. In mid-August last year, the jury voted 10-4 to keep a memorial monument to the soldiers who died defending the Confederacy in the civil war. The trouble is that his intention was that he would be remembered fondly. The movement against him is part of a wider drive to get rid of monuments to figures who are now intensely controversial. We see this in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol. GREENE: Oh, so actually edit the arrangement of the statues. Now there is intense controversy over whether the statue should be removed. )” Inside, an editorial asked whether our committee “would really respond to the national mood and agree a memorial in Trafalgar Square”. The statues represent the country’s history, no matter how complicated. Michelangelo's David is not only a statue of a man, but also a statue of God. Who, I asked, is responsible for this forgetfulness? The line is subjective, difficult to draw, and easy to reinterpret, leaving no memorial protected. Also removed from the monument’s base was a 133-year-old copper time capsule containing artifacts and ephemera related to the Confederacy. Beyond building monuments to honor black Americans, monuments could employ and elevate living black artists, such as Kehinde Wiley, whose 2019 “Rumors of War” statue depicts a black man on horseback in a pose reminiscent of statues of Robert E. Lee. They did, though, own slaves. Harris was criticised for having masterminded saturation bombing of areas of Germany that cost large numbers of civilian lives. Proper citation depends on your preferred or required style manual. Why every single statue should come down - The Guardian Certainly, a public remembrance to the very brave British airmen is long overdue, so long as the names of the instigators of the barbarity are not mentioned. [31], In Louisville, a statue of Confederate soldier John Breckinridge Castleman was removed. Sarah Fling, “The Formerly Enslaved Household of the Grant Family,” whitehousehistory.org, Apr. Petition Pushes for Parton Statues,” arkansasonline.com, June 23, 2020, 30. Evan Andrews, “How Many U.S. Presidents Owned Enslaved People?, history.com, Sep. 3, 2019, 45. Lawrence A. Kuznar, “I Detest Our Confederate Monuments. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, almost 500 monuments to the Confederate cause went up between 1885 and 1915. Glenn Foster, founder of The Freedom Neighborhood, stated of the Emancipation Memorial, which depicts Lincoln over a kneeling freed slave, “When I look at that statue, I’m reminded my freedom and my liberation is only dictated by white peoples’ terms. “It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten … We are much more than we are told. Everybody knows who won . But it should probably come as little surprise that the statues that anti-racist protesters wanted to be taken down were those erected when Jim Crow segregation was firmly installed in the US, and at the apogee of colonial expansion. Because by the time they realised their hatred of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which loving him was in their own self-interest. The same cannot be said of statues of people. Then you’re asking museums to do a lot of work they don’t want to do and maybe shouldn’t be doing. There are statues being targeted of people like Ulysses S. Grant, of people like President George Washington, who were not involved in the Confederacy. Accessed May 30, 2023. https://www.procon.org/headlines/historic-statue-removal-top-3-pros-cons/, Whose Heritage: Public Symbols of the Confederacy, 1. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa.” So we should not be surprised if the descendants of those so-called natives, the majority in their own land, do not remember him fondly. They wanted him, and his crimes, to be remembered. He delivers the annual Aneurin Bevan Lecture at Hay Festival 2021, free online this Friday 4 June at 2pm. Luckily for me, it turned out that, if there was a gap between anyone and the ordinary people of the country on this issue, then the Daily Mail was on the wrong side of it. Parks was not the first to plead not guilty after resisting Montgomery’s segregation laws on its buses. Our views on women’s suffrage, sexuality, medicine, education, child-rearing and masculinity are not the same as they were 50 years ago, and will be different again in another 50 years. Students at the University of Missouri also asked for a statue of Thomas Jefferson - third president of the US - to be taken down as he was a "racist rapist". Should Statues Be Removed and Destroyed? | Guest Contributor - Patheos Monuments of people – statuary – I think come out of a tradition of imitation. Southerners had to forget the reality of the civil war before they could celebrate it. Answer: We have to distinguish what kind of monuments we’re talking about. If they did, they would not be challenged as they are. "He represents the former colonial representation of this country - supremacy, racism, misogyny," said student representative Ramabina Mahapa. 17, 2020, 42. Hannah Natanson, “There’s a New Way to Deal with Confederate Monuments: Signs That Explain Their Racist History,” washingtonpost.com, Sep. 22, 2019, 53. A more honest appraisal of why the removal of these particular statues rankles with so many is that they do not actually want to engage with the history they represent. “Iconoclasm is not new; it’s been going on for thousands of years in different circumstances,” Lamp said. And that was simply not correct. The trouble is that they are not his only legacy. A black resident of Richmond, Virginia, Tommye Finley, remarked of the city’s Monument Avenue, which is home to five Confederate statues, “When I first moved here from Mississippi, I thought these statues were ridiculous. For many years people have been arguing whether certain controversial monuments, such as statues, should be destroyed or removed. 720 Words 3 Pages Open Document Gersh Kentzman in the New York Daily News gave the reasonable and understandable reason of why the federate statues should be removed. Calls for the removal of statues have also raised the charge that longstanding works of public art are at the mercy of political whim. What that signals is a shift in power.”. The reason for that was a movement called City Beautiful. [32] [33], Of the calls to take down Confederate monuments, President Donald Trump stated, “This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. Oliver Cromwell is credited by many with being a key figure in the development of Western democracy. GREENE: You said something interesting. Cecil Rhodes: Oriel College faces teaching boycott over refusal to remove statue. In his book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, the American historian Kirk Savage writes of the 30-year period after the civil war: “Public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus, not to prolong conflict … Even now to commemorate is to seek historical closure, to draw together the various strands of meaning in an historical event or personage and condense its significance.”. “Most monuments I'm aware of attest to conquered people and lands, including my people.”, The Robert E. Lee monument, erected several decades after the Civil War to commemorate the Confederate general, was recently removed following more than a year of protests for racial justice. On July 13, 2022, Florida erected a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune to replace their confederate soldier statue. The First Amendment protects everyone’s speech, not just the speech approved by the majority. Starting with the Reconstruction, we see them being used as a way to control public spaces and maintain white supremacy alongside other things like lynching, controlling school curriculums, etc. Source: Abdazizar. ", ProCon.org. Should Slavery's Statues Be Preserved? On Transitional Justice and ... Rhodes's statue stands on the building named after him at Oriel College, Oxford, Students at the University of Cape Town celebrate the removal of Cecil Rhodes's statue in April, Jefferson Davis's statue was removed from the University of Texas-Austin in August 2015, The controversial statue of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris in central London, Oliver Cromwell's statue outside Parliament was put up with private money, The Voortrekker monument in Pretoria, South Africa. In short, it attempts to set our understanding of what has happened in stone, beyond interpretation, investigation or critique. ], ProCon.org, "Historic Statue Removal – Top 3 Pros & Cons,", ProCon.org, "Historic Statue Removal – Top 3 Pros & Cons. Bailey, of SUNY Binghamton, suggests a very specific subset of Black heroes: she says the U.S. should erect more monuments to the nearly 200,000 Black Americans who fought for their own freedom in . As such they represent the value system of the establishment at any given time that is then projected into the forever. They didn’t like having black classmates because they had racist hearts. How? It is also arrogant. But that’s incredibly problematic. But I think a better idea there would have been to actually remove the statues of the African American man and the Native American man and maybe let Teddy Roosevelt be there to commend him for his support of conservation and his support for the Natural History Museum. I think in general in this country, statues have held up a very white, male virtue. [1] [2] [3] [4], The issue rose to prominence again in 2017 after an Aug. 12 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent and deadly. The shooter was said to have glorified the Confederate South, posing in Facebook photos with the Battle Flag of the Northern Virginia Army (also known now as the “Confederate flag,” though it never represented the Confederate States) and touring historical Confederate locations before the shooting. A statue is just a historical artifact and nothing more. Additional reporting by Meghan Tinsley, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Chloe Peacock and Sadia Habib. During this period, ethnicities we now consider to be white — Irish and Italian, for example — were not considered to be white. Latisha Jensen, “Portland Man Describes Tearing Down Thomas Jefferson Statue: ‘It’s Not Vandalism,’” wweek.com, June 20, 2020, 12. It is a living discipline, subject to excavation, evolution and maturation. These are the people who made it happen. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position. New York Times, “From 2017: Confederate Monuments Are Coming down dcross the United States. So what should be the standard for taking down a statue? The statue was defaced, there was a lot of graffiti that dealt with defunding the police, and there are some incredibly powerful images that were taken during that time, some of which are going into the new time capsule. 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], 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. Nobody thinks that when Iraqis removed statues of Saddam Hussein from around the country they wanted him to be forgotten. Four decades later, when Barack Obama unveiled a memorial to King in Washington DC, 91% of Americans approved. Keep reading for all the pros and cons of removing Confederate statues. In the words of Nye Bevan, “That is my truth, you tell me yours.” Just be aware that if you tell me your truth is more important than mine, and therefore deserves to be foisted on me in the high street or public park, then I may not be listening for very long. This, however, was simply the most insistent attempt to find a human occupant for the plinth. Photo courtesy of Getty Images/iStockphoto, (480) 965-9657 And the issue was never confined to the statue itself. In the small town of Lake Charles, Louisiana, nature presented the local parish police jury with a challenge.

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