• Historians Question Trump’s Comments on Confederate Monuments - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/arts/design/trump-robert-e-lee-george-washington-thomas-jefferson.html

    President Trump is not generally known as a student of history. But on Tuesday, during a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in New York, he unwittingly waded into a complex debate about history and memory that has roiled college campuses and numerous cities over the past several years.

    Asked about the white nationalist rally that ended in violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump defended some who had gathered to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee, and criticized the “alt-left” counterprotesters who had confronted them.

    Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Mr. Trump said. “So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down.

    George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the president noted, were also slave owners. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Mr. Trump said. “And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?
    […]
    Mr. Grossman [executive director of the American Historical Association] noted that most Confederate monuments were constructed in two periods: the 1890s, as Jim Crow was being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of mass Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.

    We would not want to whitewash our history by pretending that Jim Crow and disenfranchisement or massive resistance to the civil rights movement never happened,” he said. “That is the part of our history that these monuments testify to.

    How the events in Charlottesville, and Mr. Trump’s comments, will affect the continuing debate over Confederate monuments remains to be seen. Mr. Witt [a professor of history at Yale], for one, suggested that white nationalist support might backfire.

    He noted that it was the 2015 murder of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse.

    The amazing thing is that the president is doing more to endanger historical monuments than most of the protesters,” he said. “The alt-right is producing a world where there is more pressure to remove monuments, rather than less.

    • Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues in Overnight Operation | 2017-08-16

      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/baltimore-confederate-statues.html

      [...]


      Workers removed the Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson monument in Baltimore.

      Beginning soon after midnight on Wednesday, a crew, which included a large crane and a contingent of police officers, began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, tearing the monuments from their pedestals and carting them out of town.

      [...]

      Small crowds gathered at each of the monuments and the mood was “celebratory,” said Baynard Woods, the editor at large of The Baltimore City Paper, who documented the removals on Twitter.

      [...]

      The statues were taken down by order of Mayor Catherine Pugh, after the City Council voted on Monday for their removal. The city had been studying the issue since 2015, when a mass shooting by a white supremacist at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., prompted a renewed debate across the South over removing Confederate monuments and battle flags from public spaces.
      The police confirmed the removal.

      [...]

      By 3:30 a.m., three of the city’s four monuments had been removed. They included the Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson Monument, a double equestrian statue of the Confederate generals erected in 1948; the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, erected in 1903; and the Roger B. Taney Monument, erected in 1887.

      [...]

      Taney was a Supreme Court chief justice and Maryland native who wrote the landmark 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, ruling that even free blacks had no claim to citizenship in the United States. Although Taney was never part of the Confederacy, the court’s decision was celebrated by supporters of slavery.

      The fourth statue, the Confederate Women’s Monument, was dedicated in 1917. Pictures showed that it too had been taken down early on Wednesday.

      [...]

      One Twitter user, James MacArthur, live-streamed the removal of the Lee and Jackson monument as it was unceremoniously torn from its pedestal and strapped to a flatbed truck. At street level, lit by the harsh glare of police klieg lights, the two generals appeared small.

      Residents were seen celebrating on the pedestal, on which someone had spray-painted “Black Lives Matter.”

      [...]

      A team of police cars escorted the statues out of town. Ms. Pugh suggested on Monday that the statues might be relocated to Confederate cemeteries elsewhere in the state. (Although Maryland never seceded from the Union during the Civil War, there was popular support for the Confederacy in Baltimore and Southern Maryland, where Confederate soldiers are buried.)

      [...]

      trouvé en cherchant au réseau

      #Baltimore #Charlottesville #statues #États_Unis
      #suprématisme_blanc #iconoclasme #Confédération #histoire #racisme #esclavage

    • Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues After Activists Gave City Ultimatium | (#vidéo 7’15’’) TRNN 2017-08-16

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A38qI75uwQE

      [...]

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Sure, I think it’s exciting, and the culmination of intense, years-long grassroots organizing and pressure that was a flashpoint, like you said, when white supremacist violence occurred in Charleston and then again in Charlottesville, but also in response to ongoing white supremacist violence here in Baltimore City. And so Fredrick Douglass said, “Power yields nothing without demand.” And that’s exactly what happened here. It was, “Oh, this is too expensive. This will take too long,” and ultimately, when push comes to shove, the government will respond when we force the government to respond and not before.

      Jaisal Noor: And so defenders, even liberal defenders I talk to say, “This is history. We can’t remove history. It needs to be preserved. We shouldn’t take them down.” How do you respond to those arguments?

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Sure. The Lee/Jackson monument is not history. It’s a false narrative. It’s the Lost Cause mythology. It was put up in the 1940s, not to honor fallen Confederate veterans like some of the older monuments supposedly were alluding to, but it was put up as a triumphant symbol of rising white supremacy and resurgent white power. And so leaving the Lee/Jackson statue in place is the erasure of history, not the removal of it. If you look at the way Nazi Germany, for example, has dealt with their past, they do not leave statues of Hitler and Eichmann in place. They remove them and put up plaques and said, “Jewish families lived here,” and that’s the way to remember history. Not to leave up triumphant statues of genocidal maniacs.

      Jaisal Noor: Yeah, and you didn’t hear those same people defending the statues of Saddam in Iraq.

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Exactly. Exactly. It’s a false logic, and it’s a defense mechanism of people who can’t grapple with either their own privilege or internalized white supremacy, and so we can remember history without celebrating slavery and genocide and rape.

      Jaisal Noor: And so is the work now done now that this is down?

      Owen Silverman Andrews: Columbus is next. There are two Columbus statues in Baltimore, One in Druid Hill Park, and another in Little Italy. And if those don’t come down based on government action from the City, then they’ll come down based on #grassroots_action. So those are the next two, Columbus in Druid Hill and Columbus in Little Italy. Columbus started the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He brought syphilis to the hemisphere. He was a rapist who took indigenous women to Europe and had sex with them against their will, and so we’re planning a funeral for Columbus to lay him to rest, and to move onto the next chapter so we can celebrate people like Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and hold up those leaders who struggled against that type of oppression instead of honoring those who initiated it.

      ||

      trouvé en cherchant dans le réseau

      #air_du_temps #goût_du_jour
      #bouleversement
      #séquelles #activisme