Editorials & Other Articles

struggle4progress

(118,294 posts) Fri Sep 16, 2016, 05:17 PM Sep 2016

No more foot-dragging on Confederate monuments (MD)

The final report by the commission that debated .. Baltimore's Confederate-related monuments makes a clear and compelling case: We should remove two statutes that don't illuminate Baltimore's history during the Civil War years and .. thereafter, and we should keep two that do, provided they are put in appropriate context. It's not that complicated, and we don't understand why Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is dragging her feet ...

Those who worry that Baltimore is on the verge of whitewashing its history .. would do well to read the commission's report. In content and context, the two statues the commission recommended keeping — the Confederate Women's Monument near the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus and the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument on Mount Royal Avenue — reflect far more poorly on Baltimore's history than do the two that would be removed ... They are going to require some heavy-duty contextualization if they are going to acknowledge unfortunate attitudes of our past without lionizing them.

Maryland's sympathies were split during the Civil War, with some 65,000 fighting for the Union and 25,000 for the Confederacy. But the Confederate monuments that remain in Baltimore are, the commission found, testaments to "lost cause" mythology that was prevalent throughout the South in the decades after the war ended. It downplayed slavery as an issue and exalted the nobility of Confederate soldiers ...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-confederate-monuments-20160915-story.html

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