Monuments to the Battle for the New South

By LISA RAB
September 15, 2016

Nine years ago, a driver lost control of his pickup truck and crashed into the Confederate monument on the front lawn of the Franklin County Courthouse, decapitating the marble soldier. Some locals who found the monument offensive said they were glad to see it go, but there was never much doubt that .. the soldier would be back.

The rededication ceremony in 2010 drew a crowd of about 500 people — women wore hoop skirts and men donned the gray uniforms of Confederate soldiers. “We’re very proud of it,” says Linda Stanley, managing director of the Franklin County Historical Society in Rocky Mount ... “This whole county’s very, very patriotic” ...

Mark Whitaker remembers walking by the 30-foot-tall Confederate monument in Portsmouth, Virginia, when he was a kid. Shopping at a store across the street, he resented looking at the obelisk guarded by stone soldiers; his parents had told him what it represented. “My ancestors could not say a thing in the face of that indignity,” Whitaker says.

Now, as an African-American City Council member in a city that is 53 percent black, he wants to remove the monument from the center of Olde Towne ...

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/virginia-civil-war-monuments-new-south-214248