person:robert e. lee

  • Bill to allow removal of Confederate monuments dies in subcommittee

    Tension filled the room Wednesday as a House subcommittee voted to kill a bill that would have let localities decide whether to remove or modify Confederate monuments in their jurisdictions.

    Del. David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, introduced House
    House Bill 2377, which sought to change the current law that makes it illegal to disturb or interfere with war monuments. His bill would have given cities and counties authority to remove Confederate or Union monuments. This is the second year Toscano has sponsored such legislation.

    “We give localities the ability to control the cutting of weeds. But we haven’t yet given them the control over monuments that might have detrimental effects on the atmosphere and the feeling of the community,” Toscano said. “If you weren’t in Charlottesville in August of 2017, it would be hard to understand all of this.”

    He said people across Virginia want the ability to decide what to do with the monuments in their towns.

    Toscano said the monuments were erected during the “lost cause” movement, which viewed the Confederacy as heroic and the Civil War as a conflict not over slavery but over “states’ rights.”

    He addressed a subcommittee of the House Committee on Counties, Cities and Towns. The subcommittee’s chair, Del. Charles D. Poindexter, R-Franklin, gave those on each side of the debate five minutes to state their case. With a packed audience filling the small committee room, each person had little more than one minute to speak.

    Supporters of Toscano’s legislation held up blue signs with messages such as “Lose The Lost Cause” and “Local Authority for War Memorials” printed in black ink.

    Lisa Draine had tears in her eyes as she spoke of her daughter, Sophie, who was severely injured when a white supremacist, James Alex Fields Jr., drove his car into a crowd of people demonstrating against racism in Charlottesville.

    Fields, who was sentenced to life in prison last month for killing Heather Heyer, was part of the “Unite the Right” rally protesting the city’s plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a local park.

    “I couldn’t imagine that a statue had brought this to our town,” Draine said. “My daughter could have been your daughter.”

    A member of the Charlottesville City Council, Kathy Galvin, spoke in favor of the bill, citing the need for local legislators to have authority over the monuments.

    Matthew Christensen, an activist from Charlottesville, said it was an issue of “basic human decency” and the right of local governments. “They own the land, they own the statue, they should be able to decide what to do with it,” he said.

    Ed Willis, an opponent of Toscano’s bill, said it violates provisions in the Virginia Constitution prohibiting discrimination. “It’s painfully clear discrimination based on Confederate national origin is the basis of this bill,” he said.

    Like other opponents, Willis said his ancestors served in the Civil War. Some spoke of their families’ long heritage in Virginia and opposed what they felt was the attempt to sanitize or alter their history.

    Frank Earnest said he blamed the “improper actions” of the Charlottesville city government for the mayhem that took place in August 2017.

    “Just like the other socialist takeovers,” Earnest said, “it’ll be Confederate statues today, but don’t think they won’t be back next year to expand it to another war, another time in history.”

    The subcommittee voted 2-6 against the bill. Dels. John Bell and David Reid, both Democrats from Loudoun County, voted to approve the bill. Opposing that motion were Democratic Del. Steve Heretick of Portsmouth and five Republicans: Dels. Poindexter, Terry Austin of Botetourt County, Jeffrey Campbell of Smyth County, John McGuire of Henrico County, and Robert Thomas of Stafford County.

    Supporters of the bill met with Toscano in his office after the meeting. He said he knew the bill’s defeat was a “foregone conclusion.” HB 2377 was heard last in the meeting, giving little time for debate or discussion.

    People who want to remove the monuments asked Toscano, “How do we make this happen?”

    Toscano picked up a glass candy dish from his desk and placed a chocolate coin wrapped in blue foil in each person’s hand. This represented his desire for a Democratic majority in the House of Delegates, where Republicans hold 51 of the 100 seats.

    Toscano said he fought for years to get from 34 Democratic delegates to the 49 now serving. He urged the group to vote for those who share their concerns this November.

    “It’s all about the General Assembly,” he said.


    https://www.wdbj7.com/content/news/Bill-to-allow-removal-of-Confederate-monuments-dies-in-subcommittee-505136791
    #monument #mémoire #monuments #USA #Etats-Unis #statue #histoire #Etats_confédérés #confédération #toponymie #paysage_mémoriel #guerre_civile #Charlottesville #Virginia #Virginie

  • 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

  • La liquidation de Robert E. Lee
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/la-liquidation-de-robert-e-lee

    La liquidation de Robert E. Lee

    16 août 2017 – ... Au fait, qui était Robert E. Lee, ce salopard fasciste dont on abat dans la plus extrême jubilation les statues encore en service dans certains État du Sud, et celle de Charlottesville qui fut la cause hautement progressiste-sociétale de l’attaque des Antifa contre la crapule nazie réunie dans cette ville pour menacer l’avenir de la Grande République ? C’est en effet un des grands mouvements culturels en cours, cette liquidation des symboles du Sud venus de la Guerre de Sécession, bien dans les habitudes des révolutionnaires de notre “déchaînement de la Matière” favori, avec comme première application le néantissement du passé effectué par la Terreur de 1793 dont la France fait une si grande fierté... (*)

    A mon sens, le portrait que fait de Lee le Général (...)

  • Nouvelles de Charlottesville
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/nouvelles-de-charlottesville

    Nouvelles de Charlottesville

    Une séquence brutale a eu lieu vendredi et samedi dans la ville de Charlottesville, en Virginie, État où naquirent notamment Thomas Jefferson, rédacteur de la Déclaration d’Indépendance de 1776 et troisième président des USA, et Robert E. Lee, général commandant en chef de l’Armée de la Virginie du Nord, en réalité de facto principal officier général de toutes les forces armées de la Confédération des États sudistes durant la Guerre de Sécession. C’est autour d’une statue de Robert E. Lee sur le point d’être abattue et du Parc Lee qui doit être rebaptisé Parc de l’Emancipation (des esclaves, supposerons-nous), qu’eurent lieu les bagarres entre deux groupes, l’un des AltRight (autour de 300, qui avaient organisé la manifestation initiale) et l’autre des Antifa (en (...)

  • Internet Makes White Supremacists Regret Participating In #Charlottesville Violence
    http://secondnexus.com/politics-and-economics/internet-makes-white-supremacists-regret-participating-charlottesville-

    A #Twitter account called Yes, You’re Racist has been publicly outing white supremacists who attended “Unite the Right” demonstrations following a decision by the city of Charlottesville to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The user of the account asked followers to send the names and social media profiles of anyone they recognized at the protests.

    [...]

    Yes, You’re Racist @YesYoureRacist
    UPDATE : Cole White, the first person I exposed, no longer has a job ?‍♂️ #GoodNightColeWhite #ExposeTheAltRight #Charlottesville

  • It’s Not Romantic Anymore to Say That Plants Have Brain-like Systems - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/its-not-romantic-anymore-to-say-that-plants-have-brain_like-systems

    Last week, researchers found, in the dormant seeds of the small rockcress plant Arabidopsis, a “decision-making center” that they believe resembles “some systems within the human brain.”Photograph by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / FlickrLast month, when the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, presided over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, he gave a speech that would go viral. In it, he rebuked the South’s long-nurtured tendency—expressed in slogans like, “Heritage, not hate”—to romanticize the Confederacy. “We shouldn’t romanticize Confederate monuments,” read a recent letter to The Buffalo News. “The romantics may say that the average Confederate didn’t own slaves. But like most people, they hoped to be rich, and what did most rich people [in the South] have at that time? Slaves.” (...)

  • Female Spies and Gender-Bending Soldiers Changed the Course of the Civil War | Collectors Weekly
    http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/female-spies-and-gender-bending-soldiers

    After 150 years, America is still haunted by the ghosts of its Civil War, whose story has been romanticized for so long it’s hard to keep the facts straight. In our collective memory of the war, men are the giants, the heroes remembered as fighting nobly for their beliefs. Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, has achieved the status of legend, the moment a broken country started to reunite, even though that’s not exactly true.

    “A Lincoln official was completely flummoxed when he said, ‘What are we going to do with these fashionable women spies?’”

    What’s been largely lost to history is how remarkably influential women were to the course of the Civil War—from its beginning to its end. Without Rose O’Neal Greenhow’s masterfully run spy ring, the Union might have ended the months-old war with a swift victory over the Confederates in July 1861. Instead, the widow leaked Union plans to Confederate generals, allowing them to prepare and deliver a devastating Union loss at the First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Battle of Manassas, which caused the war to drag out for four more years. Elizabeth Van Lew, another woman running a brilliant spy ring who also happened to be a feminist and a “spinster,” was instrumental to the fall of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, on April 1, 1865, leading to Lee’s surrender eight days later.

    #historicisation #femmes #soldates #espionnes

    • Abbott says she would have loved to have featured African American women more prominently in the book, but by and large, she was not able to find enough source material revealing their perspectives. The one exception was Harriet Tubman, who also used her slave escape route known as the Underground Railroad, where African American hymns spread messages through coded lyrics, to operate a spy ring herself. But Tubman’s story was much too large to be contained within the scope of the Civil War.

      #Harriet_Tubman

    • Edmondson was actually one of 400 known women who passed as men to serve in the military during the Civil War. While the War Department required that Union recruits undergo a full physical exam, which would including stripping naked, most doctors were so overwhelmed by the flood of potential soldiers they cut corners and approved the volunteers with a quick glance. Very few of the women posing as soldiers were living as men before the war. Some female privates were fleeing abusive parents or husbands. Some women didn’t want to be separated from their husbands who were enlisting. Others, like Edmondson, felt deeply committed to their sides’ cause. Most of them, Abbott speculates, were impoverished and in desperate need of the military stipend, $13 a month for Union privates and $11 for Confederates. Abbott was most puzzled by how few got caught.

      “I came to the conclusion that they were getting away with it because nobody had any idea what a woman would look like wearing pants,” she says. “People were so used to seeing women’s bodies pushed and pulled in these exaggerated shapes with corsets and crinoline. The idea of a woman in pants, let alone an entire Army uniform, was so unfathomable that they couldn’t see it, even if she were standing in front of them. Emma had such a great advantage over the other women: Here’s somebody who already honed her voice and her mannerisms. She was already comfortable as Frank Thompson, who was a real person to her. She wasn’t going to make any of the rookie mistakes, like the woman who, when somebody threw an apple to her, reached for the hem of her nonexistent apron, trying to catch the apple. My favorite story is the corporal from New Jersey who gave birth while she was on picket duty, like, ‘The jig is up!’”

      While Abbott considers Edmondson “gender fluid,” she decided to write about her with a “she” pronoun, as a woman, as opposed to writing about her as a transgender man with a “he” pronoun, in part because Edmondson abandoned her Frank Thompson persona after she deserted the Army—out of fear she was about to be exposed and arrested—on April 17, 1863, and never brought him back. She changed her name to Emma Edmonds and started living as a woman again.

      “After the war, Emma ended up getting married and having children,” Abbott says. “Frank Thompson was just as legitimate a person, I think, to Emma, but somebody that she also decided ultimately that she was not. He was, I think, somebody who was convenient to her in that time. She was clearly attracted to men during the war because she fell in love with a fellow private, but who knows if she was bisexual. That’s certainly a possibility that she might not have felt comfortable exploring or even knew how to acknowledge in that time period. She was definitely gender fluid, and Belle was probably as well.”


      Frank Leslie’s 1863 cartoon “The Art of Inspiring Courage” shows a woman threatening to join the Union army if her husband doesn’t. (Courtesy of Karen Abbott)

      Part of Emma’s impulse to create Frank Thompson came from a desire to escape the dreary life as a farmer’s wife she saw laid out before her in New Brunswick, Canada, before the war: She suffered at the hands of her abusive father; she saw how miserable her sisters were as farmer’s wives; and at 16, she was set to be married off to a lecherous elderly neighbor. Men seemed to be the source of her misery; but they also had all the power to be free. In her writings, she described men as “the implacable enemy” and wrote how she hated “male tyranny.”

      According to Emma’s memoir, she was inspired by a novel she bought from a peddler, Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of Revolution, which told the story of a woman who disguised as a man and became a pirate to liberate her kidnapped lover. After Fanny freed him, she continued to pose as a male pirate for several weeks, as the pair had more adventures on the high seas. Supposedly, this story fueled Emma to cut her long hair, run away from home, and start living as Frank in the United States.


      The title page of “Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of Revolution,” the book that inspired Emma to start living as a man. (Via Harvard University, Houghton Library)

      “She was very much like a second-wave feminist, way before the second wave,” Abbott says. “She recognized that men had the power, and the way for her to attain any of that was to become a man. But she definitely felt comfortable as a man, and I think that that was a vital, integral part of her personality.”

      What’s surprising throughout the book is the way old men, like Emma’s neighbor, would openly ogle teenage girls. Back then, the age of sexual consent was right after puberty, which could be as early as age 10 or 12. By age 17, a rival of Belle Boyd’s already dubbed her “the fastest girl in Virginia or anywhere else for that matter.”