WordPress database error: [The table 'wp_yoast_indexable' is full]UPDATE `wp_yoast_indexable` SET `object_id` = '5158', `object_type` = 'term', `object_sub_type` = 'post_tag', `permalink` = 'https://virusreports.net/tag/confederate/', `blog_id` = '1', `primary_focus_keyword_score` = NULL, `is_robots_noindex` = NULL, `is_public` = NULL, `open_graph_image` = NULL, `open_graph_image_id` = NULL, `open_graph_image_source` = NULL, `open_graph_image_meta` = NULL, `twitter_image` = NULL, `twitter_image_id` = NULL, `twitter_image_source` = NULL, `canonical` = NULL, `primary_focus_keyword` = NULL, `title` = NULL, `description` = NULL, `readability_score` = NULL, `inclusive_language_score` = NULL, `breadcrumb_title` = 'Confederate', `open_graph_title` = NULL, `open_graph_description` = NULL, `twitter_title` = NULL, `twitter_description` = NULL, `is_cornerstone` = '0', `is_robots_nofollow` = NULL, `is_robots_noarchive` = NULL, `is_robots_noimageindex` = NULL, `is_robots_nosnippet` = NULL, `object_published_at` = '2020-06-01 03:21:31', `object_last_modified` = '2020-09-08 23:21:13', `version` = '2', `permalink_hash` = '41:868b4fe23f8be1d30b1b98b2b1af8586', `updated_at` = '2026-09-06 01:20:02' WHERE `id` = '30707'
WordPress database error: [The table 'wp_yoast_indexable' is full]UPDATE `wp_yoast_indexable` SET `object_id` = '5158', `object_type` = 'term', `object_sub_type` = 'post_tag', `permalink` = 'https://virusreports.net/tag/confederate/', `blog_id` = '1', `primary_focus_keyword_score` = NULL, `is_robots_noindex` = NULL, `is_public` = NULL, `open_graph_image` = NULL, `open_graph_image_id` = NULL, `open_graph_image_source` = NULL, `open_graph_image_meta` = NULL, `twitter_image` = NULL, `twitter_image_id` = NULL, `twitter_image_source` = NULL, `canonical` = NULL, `primary_focus_keyword` = NULL, `title` = NULL, `description` = NULL, `readability_score` = NULL, `inclusive_language_score` = NULL, `breadcrumb_title` = 'Confederate', `open_graph_title` = NULL, `open_graph_description` = NULL, `twitter_title` = NULL, `twitter_description` = NULL, `is_cornerstone` = '0', `is_robots_nofollow` = NULL, `is_robots_noarchive` = NULL, `is_robots_noimageindex` = NULL, `is_robots_nosnippet` = NULL, `object_published_at` = '2020-06-01 03:21:31', `object_last_modified` = '2020-09-08 23:21:13', `version` = '2', `permalink_hash` = '41:868b4fe23f8be1d30b1b98b2b1af8586', `updated_at` = '2026-09-06 01:20:02' WHERE `id` = '30707'
The post Confederate statues in jeopardy as Mississippi counties put ‘cancel culture’ to vote appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>GULFPORT, Miss. — Tempers flared and guns were drawn in a face off in the courthouse square over Black Lives Matter, ancestry and the fate of a 100-plus-year-old statue memorializing Confederate war dead that carries the inscription “Lest We Forget.”
And yet this wasn’t a mob spontaneously tearing down statues linked to the Confederacy or otherwise deemed offensive, which has become an almost routine occurrence in cities across the U.S.
In Mississippi, individual bronzed Confederate sentries have spent decades standing mute watch over the county courthouse in some 50 of the state’s counties. But the process has been more genteel, despite the gunplay in Gulfport last week, with county boards of supervisors putting “cancel culture” to a vote.
Indeed, public opinion has managed to accomplish what unconditional surrender to the Union Army seemed unable to — remove the Confederate soldiers from public life. That’s the goal of activists in Harrison County on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, who led Thursday’s rally urging elected officials to vote the statue down.
“We can come together as people, or we can perish as fools,” the Rev. John Whitfield of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church said, addressing a crowd of some 40 people in the courthouse square, nearly evenly split between supporters and opponents.
“Stop trying to win a war the South lost,” Mr. Whitfield said, addressing statue supporters. “This statue’s purpose is intimidation and to send a message to African-Americans that they are not welcome, and sends a signal that justice is not available to all races that come before this court.”
Signs featuring a black fist or a Confederate flag mixed around the base of the tall statue, erected in 1911. Several White men, some armed and some wearing bulletproof vests, stood alongside a Black protester carrying an assault rifle.
The only law enforcement official in sight was Bill Wright, a courthouse security guard.
When Jeffrey Hulum III, an Army veteran and chief executive of a local nonprofit, spoke, his voice rose as he looked at the lines of people he said were “flanking and intimidating” him.
Mr. Hulum declared, “This is not a symbol of Jesus Christ, it’s hatred.”
He then spun, pulling a handgun from his back waistband, and he and Mr. Whitfield walked quietly back to their cars.
Mr. Hulum and his cohorts would like Harrison County to follow an example already set by several Mississippi counties. Almost all of the votes came after the state legislature voted in June to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state’s banner, the last such symbol still in use among U.S. states.
“We’re trying to do it the right way, we don’t want anybody here looting or burning anything,” Mr. Hulum said.
In this summer of rage against statues, ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, at least five Magnolia State counties — Bolivar, Leflore, Lowndes, Noxubee and Washington — have voted to remove their Confederate courthouse statues.
To be sure, not all elected officials in Mississippi think the same way. In at least three counties the boards of supervisors voted to keep the statues. The stay vote was unanimous in Lafayette County, where stands in downtown Oxford arguably the most famous Confederate statue of all — the one that looms in the fiction of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
A similar butternut sentry that stood on the Ole Miss campus, on the other hand, has been banished to a cemetery in a remote corner.
“I think its civic infamy outweighs its historical and literary significance,” said Jay Watson, a professor at Ole Miss and noted Faulkner scholar. “And for me, that main significance is the harm they still do.”
Among the more infamous incidents to which Mr. Watson alluded was in 1964 when three civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia. The Neshoba County courthouse there witnessed the 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for his role in those slayings, but the Neshoba supervisors voted to keep the Confederate statue outside it.
“I grew up in Athens, Georgia, and I think the Confederate statue is just a part of your background when you grow up in the Deep South,” Mr. Watson said. “And I think until you hear the stories from people about how wounded they are at the sight of them and what they represent — and I first heard it in Oxford — that’s when you realize they don’t belong here or on this campus.”
Mr. Watson noted that Oxford’s statue, like most in Mississippi, was not put up by those who fought in the Civil War. Instead, the statues were usually erected decades later by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
In other words, the statues that were erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflect “Lost Cause” romanticism that was then engulfing the Deep South and which, according to those favoring removal, was intended to obscures the Confederacy’s chief purpose of maintaining slavery.
A massive monument behind the state capital in Jackson was erected in 1917 by the mothers, wives, daughters and sisters of the Confederacy, which features a female figure hovering over a dying soldier.
The UDC did not respond to a request for comment.
In June, the group’s Loudoun County chapter asked to take back the Confederate monument it had erected there in 1908.
It certainly represents that to Mr. Hulum, whose Extend a Hand Help a Friend nonprofit serves free meals to senior citizens.
He and Mr. Whitfield put the blame squarely on Harrison County’s Board of Supervisors for failing even to act on their demands, with Mr. Whitfield vowing to picket their homes if they do not put the issue to a vote.
“It keeps getting pushed back, but they need to take a vote on it. Don’t just wait,” Mr. Hulum said.
The five supervisors did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails from The Washington Times asking about the topic. Board President Connie Rockco is a declared candidate for tax assessor this November, and Mr. Hulum accused her of trying to delay a vote until after the election.
As Mr. Hulum noted, the consortium that wants Harrison County’s Confederate statue removed is following the law. In 2004, the legislature ruled that no “war monument may be relocated, removed, altered, renamed or rededicated,” but it does allow the governing body to move a statue to a more “suitable” or “appropriate” place.
Civic unrest is sure to follow if the calls for removal are not heeded, according to Mr. Whitfield.
“We are asking that it be removed before someone comes and defaces it or tears it down,” he said at the rally. “If justice cannot be found, you should not expect people to abide by the laws in Harrison or the other counties in Mississippi.”
His remarks drew vocal rebukes from some White pro-monument demonstrators. Many of the Whites who showed up armed declined to give their names but said they were members of the Southern Defense Force and were “neutral” on the monument.
“We’re just here in case something goes wrong,” the militia leader said.
At one point, an immense pro-monument demonstrator sitting at its base collapsed suddenly in a heap, and Mr. Hulum sprang to his assistance, helping him sit up and providing water to clean his face and arms.
Some counties have found other solutions. For instance, in Lauderdale County supervisors voted to keep the statue but did so while noting the courthouse is to be converted into a history museum and thus the location is appropriate.
Forrest County will put the issue before voters in November; in Lee County there is a move similar to that in Harrison County urging the removal.
“It’s different around Mississippi,” Mr. Hulum said. “Up in Lee County, they’ll call you the n-word to your face, whereas around Gulfport they do it with housing and job opportunities and the like.”
More broadly, Americans are divided on whether Confederate statues should come down. Although a large majority of Black Americans favor their removal, along with those of statues of presidents who owned slaves such as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, White Americans are less certain, according to a YouGov/Economist poll taken in June.
When asked about the removal of Confederate statues, 41% of Americans overall said they approved, 39% said they disapproved, and 20% said they had no opinion on the issue.
The poll found that 45% overall saw the statues as symbols of “Southern pride” and 34% as racist.
The post Confederate statues in jeopardy as Mississippi counties put ‘cancel culture’ to vote appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Pentagon bans Confederate flags on military installations appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The Pentagon on Friday laid out a new policy on Friday that will ban displays of the Confederate flag on military installations, in a memo that avoids mentioning an explicit ban or the controversial flag itself.
“Flags are powerful symbols, particularly in the military community for whom flags embody common mission, common histories, and the special, timeless bond of warriors,” the memo, obtained by Fox News, says.
MARINE CORPS BANS DISPLAY OF CONFEDERATE FLAG
The memo, signed by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, lists the type of flags that may be displayed at military installations — including the American flag, military service flags, flags of U.S. states and territories and the POW/MIA flag, as well as flags for which the U.S. is a member such as NATO.
The Confederate flag is not included on that list. The Associated Press, which first obtained the memo, reported that the move was done in a way to ban it without angering or contradicting President Trump, who has defended the right to display it. A Defense Department official, however, said that it was to ensure the policy was apolitical and could withstand legal challenge.
“The flags we fly must accord with the military imperatives of good order and discipline, treating all our people with dignity and respect, and rejecting divisive symbols” the memo says.
Confederate flags, monuments and military base names have become a point of controversy for protesters and activists in the weeks since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS IN GETTYSBURG SPARK DEBATE AMONG HISTORIANS
In many parts of the country, state officials have taken down Confederate monuments and symbols over the Confederacy’s legacy of slavery. But many activists have since moved on to targeting past figures and symbols of U.S. history in general.
Trump has rejected the idea of changing base names, and has defending the flying of the flag as a freedom of speech issue.
“I know people that like the Confederate flag, and they’re not thinking about slavery,” Trump said in an interview with CBS News. “I look at NASCAR. You go to NASCAR. You had those flags all over the place. They stopped it. I just think it’s freedom of speech, whether it’s Confederate flags or Black Lives Matter or anything else you want to talk about. It’s freedom of speech.”
Esper’s memo says that the display of unauthorized flags — such as the Confederate banner carried during the Civil War — is acceptable in museums, historical exhibits, works of art or other educational programs.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
The Marine Corps has already banned the Confederate flag. Gen. David Berger, the commandant of the Marine Corps, directed his commanders in early June to remove public displays of the Confederate battle flag. That flag, which some embrace as a symbol of heritage, “carries the power to inflame feelings of division” and can weaken the unit cohesion that combat requires, Berger said.
The other three military services were all moving to enact similar bans, but they paused when Esper made it known he wanted a consistent policy across the whole department.
Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The post Pentagon bans Confederate flags on military installations appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post As Monuments Fall, Confederate Carving Has Size on Its Side appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — Some statues of figures from America’s slave-owning past have been yanked down by protesters, others dismantled by order of governors or city leaders. But the largest Confederate monument ever crafted — colossal figures carved into the solid rock of a Georgia mountainside — may outlast them all.
Stone Mountain’s supersized sculpture depicting Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson mounted on horseback has special protection enshrined in Georgia law.
Even if its demolition were sanctioned, the monument’s sheer size poses serious challenges. The carving measures 190 feet (58 meters) across and 90 feet (27 meters) tall. An old photo shows a worker on scaffolding just below Lee’s chin barely reaching his nose.
Numerous Confederate statues and monuments to American slave owners have come down across the South amid recent protests against racial injustice. Stone Mountain hasn’t escaped notice.
After organizing a protest where thousands marched in neighboring Atlanta, 19-year-old Zoe Bambara held a demonstration June 4 with a much smaller group — her permit allowed no more than 25 — inside the state park where the sculpture has drawn millions of tourists for decades.
“The Confederacy doesn’t celebrate the South; it celebrates white supremacy,” said Bambara, who is Black. “The people on that mountain, they hated me. They didn’t know me, but they hated me and my ancestors. It hurts to see those people celebrated and a memorial dedicated to them.”
Still, Bambara admits she’s at a loss for what should be done with the massive monument, conceived some 50 years after the Civil War ended but not finished until 1972.
The sculpture’s creators used dynamite to blast huge chunks of granite away from the mountain, then spent years carving the detailed figures with hand-held cutting torches.
Erasing the carving would be dangerous, time-consuming and expensive.
The stone is likely too durable for sandblasting, said Ben Bentkowski, president of the Atlanta Geological Society. Controlled explosions using TNT packed into holes drilled in the mountainside would work, he said.
“With the logistics, the safety aspect of it, you’d have a budget certainly north of $1 million, I suspect,” Bentkowski said. “You’ll need insurance for the project, you’ll need hazard pay for people working on the surface of it. It could easily take a year or more.”
There’s also a sizable legal obstacle.
When Georgia lawmakers voted in 2001 to change the state flag that had been dominated by the Confederate battle emblem since 1956, language to guarantee the preservation of the Stone Mountain sculpture was included as a bargaining chip.
The law states that “the memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion.”
Ryan Gravel, an Atlanta-based urban designer, noted the law doesn’t mandate maintenance. He suggested allowing nature to take its course, letting vegetation grow over the sculpture from its nooks and crannies.
“I think we’re in a moment where pushing the limits of that law is possible,” Gravel said. “And certainly the scale of the challenge at Stone Mountain warrants that.”
Other ideas — such as adding a bell tower atop the mountain in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — have failed to take hold. And Democratic proposals to strip the protective language from Georgia law have fallen flat with the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Asked whether Stone Mountain still deserves special protection, GOP Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t give a direct answer when speaking to reporters June 26.
“As I’ve said many times, we can’t hide from our history,” Kemp said, while citing the new hate crimes law he signed the same day as a significant step in fighting racial injustice.
Stone Mountain wasn’t a battle site and had little historical significance to the Civil War. But 50 years after the war ended, the exposed surface of the mountain’s northern face sparked an idea among the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
“It looked like a giant billboard,” said Stan Deaton, senior historian for the Georgia Historical Society.
The group hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum — who later would carve Mount Rushmore — to design a massive Confederate monument in 1915.
That same year, the movie “The Birth of a Nation” glorified the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan and Stone Mountain played a key role in its resurgence, marking its comeback with a cross burning atop the mountain on Thanksgiving night.
Budget problems plagued the Stone Mountain project and work on the sculpture languished until the state bought the mountain and surrounding land in 1958 for a public park. Finishing the monument gained renewed urgency as the civil rights movement brought unwanted change to defiant Southern states.
“It became the centerpiece of the park,” Deaton said. “There was never any doubt that the state’s intention of finishing this was of a piece with massive resistance.”
An estimated 10,000 people attended the monument’s dedication in 1970. Another two years passed before its official completion.
Five decades later, the park at Stone Mountain markets itself as a family theme park rather than a shrine to the “Lost Cause” mythology that romanticizes the Confederacy as chivalrous defenders of states’ rights. Its website highlights miniature golf and a dinosaur-themed attraction while downplaying the Confederate carving, Confederate flags and brick terraces dedicated to each Confederate state.
Paula and Michael Smith of Monticello, Georgia, visited Stone Mountain on Monday so their 10-year-old grandson could see the monument for the first time.
“The mountain itself is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful and the carving is an engineering marvel,” said Paula Smith, a 70-year-old white woman who dismissed talk of removing or altering the carving as an attempt to “steal American history.”
Jarvis Jones climbs the steep hiking trail on the back side of Stone Mountain several times a week. The 29-year-old Black man said he tries to avoid seeing the carving.
“I definitely understand everyone wants their history to be represented,” Jones said. “But when it comes to the oppression of other people, I think it needs to change.”
The post As Monuments Fall, Confederate Carving Has Size on Its Side appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Removing Confederate statues does not erase U.S. history appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Confederate statues are coming down across the country as Americans grapple with national conversations about racism in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.
By the weekend of June 19 (Juneteenth), when Americans celebrate the emancipation of the last slaves in 1865, calls for systemic change in policing now also encompass the 1,747 monuments, place names and other public symbols that honor the Confederacy — including cemeteries, portraits and the names of U.S. Army installations.
Controversies surrounding Confederate monuments aren’t new, but this time, something feels different. A new Quinnipiac University poll even found that a slim but significant majority of Americans, 52%, now support removing Confederate statues.
In response, President Trump announced Tuesday that he plans to issue an executive order to “make the cities guard their monuments” against the specter of a left-wing mob. The order would be in keeping with Mr. Trump’s poor track record on race, but it would also strip state and municipal governments of the chance to address this moment in their own way.
In the past and at present, conservatives like Mr. Trump have argued against removing Confederate statues, claiming that it “erases” the country’s history. But taking down statues that venerate white supremacists is not at all the same thing as burning books. The facts of American history are unchangeable, but not every piece of history deserves a venerable monument in the public square.
As historian Stephanie McCurry recently wrote, the Confederacy was “an explicitly white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and antidemocratic nation-state, dedicated to the principle that all men are not created equal.” To defend Confederate statues today also ignores that undeniably wicked legacy and, indeed, makes one a party to it.
The claim that removing Confederate monuments erases American history fails to grasp an important distinction between statues in places of public prominence and the stories we tell ourselves about the past. Simply put, regardless of which statues are placed upon pedestals, the historical record — and how it’s taught — is entirely separate.
As Annette Gordon-Reed, a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian of law at Harvard, explained in a recent interview, “History will still be taught. We will know who Robert E. Lee was. Who Jefferson Davis was. […] There are far more dangerous threats to history. Defunding the humanities, cutting history classes and departments. Those are the real threats to history.”
Those threats abound, but Ms. Gordon-Reed’s broader point is that America’s people — and its historians in particular — are not so forgetful and ignorant as reactionary arguments make them out to be. Indeed, calls for removal do not mean that Confederate statues will be thrown down Orwell’s memory hole.
History is not so malleable.
It’s no small irony, then, that the Trump administration has time and again expressed revisionist attitudes toward history. In mid-May, for example, when CBS’ Catherine Herridge asked Attorney General William Barr to explain how historians will describe his decision to dismiss all charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Mr. Barr sidestepped the question and quipped, “Well, history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”
Mr. Barr’s comments reveal the Trump administration’s hypocrisy while also clarifying a broader point: If history was written by the winners, then why on Earth would the winners permit statues of Confederate losers to stand in public squares? In reality, it is historians (winners in their own right but also professional scholars equipped to examine the past) who write histories — and, as I’m sure all historians can attest, having Confederate statues in places of public prominence is decidedly not a prerequisite for the writing process.
The question of what statues communities should celebrate and commemorate in public spaces — often by literally putting people on pedestals — is a less complicated question. Confederate statues represent men who fought to tear the Union asunder by maintaining a racialized caste system in which countless men and women were denied the very rights declared unalienable in the American founding.
What is more, many of these statues were constructed alongside Jim Crow laws and civil rights tensions as monuments to white supremacy. This is a horrific fact of our history, but it is recent history: older African-Americans can still recall their grandparents’ firsthand accounts of slavery, descendants of slave ship survivors are still sharing their ancestors’ stories.
History, which we are prone to think of as the past, is ever-present with us today; as James Baldwin wrote, “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
Today, then, we are faced with the challenge of reimagining how our history should be commemorated in public spaces. Crucially, it’s left to communities to decide which historical figures to celebrate: No statue, once erected, is entitled to stand forever.
Rather than upholding statues that honor the failed Confederacy’s racism, today citizens can draw from history to design new monuments that celebrate the black community’s brilliance and resilience. Communities responding to this moment will make history, I only hope they do for the right reasons.
• Jacob Bruggeman is a current graduate student in history at the University of Cambridge, an incoming Ph.D. student in history at Johns Hopkins University, and a contributor at Young Voices. You can follow him on Twitter @jacob_bruggeman.
The post Removing Confederate statues does not erase U.S. history appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Protesters Fell Confederate Monument In D.C., Provoking Trump’s Fury appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Another Confederate monument has fallen — this time in a city where such memorials were understandably rare to begin with: the nation’s capital.
Protesters on Friday night toppled a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike, the only outdoor Confederate memorial in the city. They yanked it down with rope and later set it ablaze as law enforcement looked on.
It was an abrupt end for a controversial monument, which has attracted criticism and often outright confusion from residents.
Born in Massachusetts, the nativist attorney and author fought for the Confederacy and spent much of his time after the Civil War supporting the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. The international fraternal organization commissioned the statue in his honor around the turn of the 20th century.
But, lately, even the Freemasons haven’t resisted calls to have it removed.
Last year the District’s nonvoting congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, introduced legislation seeking its removal — which, due to D.C.’s unique position, requires federal approval. The bill has so far languished in the House.
President Trump, however, made it clear that he was upset to see it fall.
A statue commemorating Confederate Gen. Albert Pike sits on the ground moments after protesters toppled it late Friday night in Washington, D.C.
Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images
A statue commemorating Confederate Gen. Albert Pike sits on the ground moments after protesters toppled it late Friday night in Washington, D.C.
Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images
“The D.C. Police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn,” he tweeted. Trump also tagged the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat with whom he has clashed repeatedly in recent weeks. “These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
There is little love lost between the president and the mayor.
They have starkly diverged in their public statements about the widespread protests catalyzed by recent killings by police of Black Americans. After Trump cleared peaceful protesters in order to stage a photo op at a church near the White House, for instance, city authorities rebuked him by naming a nearby stretch of street Black Lives Matter Plaza and splaying the protest slogan across two city blocks.
The anger directed at Confederate statues has not been unique to Washington, D.C.
Protesters on Friday also partly dismantled a Confederate monument in Raleigh, N.C., pulling down a couple of small statues incorporated into its design.
Both monuments are just the latest items on a growing list of controversial statues and other symbols of the slaveholding Confederacy that have been removed from public spaces recently — despite the president’s objections.
And it has not just been the work of those without formal permission. City officials authorized the removal of Confederate monuments in Birmingham, Ala., and Decatur, Ga., while a statue of controversial explorer Christopher Columbus came down by formal decree in Columbus, Ohio.
The post Protesters Fell Confederate Monument In D.C., Provoking Trump’s Fury appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Push to remove Confederate battle star from Mississippi state flag renewed appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Support to change the Mississippi state flag appeared to build this week, as religious representatives and Democratic lawmakers pushed for the legislature to act.
At present, Mississippi’s flag contains what is widely regarded as a Confederate battle star, which opponents say is an everyday reminder of the state’s racist past. With Confederate monuments toppling across the South, and many American cities gripped with protests over the death of an unarmed black man in police custody, the time for a change is propitious, leaders say.
This week members of Working Together Mississippi, an interfaith organization, held a press conference on the steps of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Jackson, with representatives from Jewish and Protestant denominations joining Catholic figures in a call for the legislature to approve a change.
“It is time,” Bishop Brian Seage of Mississippi’s Episcopal Diocese said at the rally. “It is time for a new flag that truly represents us all. We call for our legislative leaders to act now.”
“As the modern lynchings of black people by police have risen to the forefront of the national consciousness, we can no longer claim that this issue is merely one of historical significance,” noted Rober Glazer, a member of Jackson’s Jewish community at the event. “To be complacent on this issue is to be complicit.”
The Southern Baptist Convention, which is Mississippi’s largest religious group with more than 1 million estimated members, did not have a representative at the Jackson event. In 2016, however, the group voted to stop flying the flag and urged others to discontinue its use “as an act of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters.”
Mississippians last voted on the flag in 2001 and voters by a 2-to-1 margin supported the current design, but a movement to change it is has simmered ever since. That push was given renewed prominence this month when George Floyd died while handcuffed and pinned to the street by former Minneapolis cops, an incident that precipitated demonstrations that sometimes spilled into rioting across the U.S.
Since that 2001 vote, a series of Republican governors and legislative majorities have insisted the flag should only be changed as a result of a statewide vote, and current GOP Gov. Tate Reeves had adopted that same position this week when repeatedly pressed about the flag issue at press conferences.
But Democrats in the Mississippi House are moving to force a legislative vote in the current session. However, Democratic Rep. Robert Johnson made it clear the current proposal would not specify a replacement and instead simply seeks to remove the Confederate symbol.
“The legislature in 1894 adopted this flag,” Mr. Johnson told The Clarion-Ledger prior to an appearance on CNN Thursday. “The legislature in 2020 needs to take it down.”
It’s unclear how much Republican support the measure would enjoy in the legislature, although indications are that it is growing. The Republican speaker of the house, Philip Gunn, is on record as supporting changing the flag.
“It is indeed a hopeful sign that a multiracial bipartisan effort in the state legislature to change the current flag has commenced, and we encourage all Mississippians of good conscience to contact their legislators and voice their support for change, progress, and justice,” Melissa Garriga, a board member of the Mississippi Rising Coalition which is dedicated in part to abolishing the current state flag, said in an email to The Washington Times.
It is not clear what flag Mississippi would approve should the current one be rejected. One commonly referenced option is the so-called Stennis Flag, a large blue star circled by smaller blue stars and designed by Laurin Stennis, the granddaughter of an arch segregationist, the late Sen. John C. Stennis.
The Mississippi Rising Coalition has not thrown its support behind any specific alternative.
“We continue to firmly believe the State of Mississippi should abolish the current state flag like the constitution abolished slavery,” Ms. Garriga said. “We also strongly believe the process in which Mississippi chooses the next state flag should be inclusive and center our Black and indigenous communities in the design and selection process.”
The post Push to remove Confederate battle star from Mississippi state flag renewed appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post The Confederate flag long has flown in the face of NASCAR’s hopes for broader appeal appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>More than any other sport, auto racing is driven by corporate sponsors, whose investments fund high-priced race teams in exchange for using their racecars as rolling billboards. From the time NASCAR set its sights on becoming a major league sport with national reach, the Confederate flag has been part of a Southern heritage that the sport’s executives have tried to shed.
Until this week, NASCAR had tried to walk a fine line between discouraging the contentious symbol, which offends many potential fans and corporate CEOs, without driving off a segment of its core fans, who view the flag, and their right to fly it, as a proud declaration of heritage. But Wednesday, the sport took its strongest stance yet on the issue, prohibiting anyone from displaying the flag at its events.
NASCAR executives haven’t spoken publicly about the process by which they reached their decision. The announcement came 48 hours after Bubba Wallace, the lone full-time African American driver in its elite ranks, called for the change on CNN amid the third week of nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd while in police custody.
NASCAR’s three-sentence statement announcing the policy change made no reference to Floyd, the unarmed black man whose death was captured on video as a Minneapolis police office knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. It did not mention Black Lives Matter or allude to racial justice, nor did it characterize the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate or oppression.
The statement in full: “The presence of the confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry. Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties.”
According to a person familiar with NASCAR executives’ deliberations, banning the flag outright was the logical and necessary next step. If NASCAR truly wants all potential fans to feel welcome at its tracks, as its rhetoric and diversity initiatives have suggested over the past two decades, the consensus was that it was time to “walk the talk” in a more emphatic way.
Amid stock-car racing’s boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the sport abandoned short tracks in the South for gleaming new superspeedways in Las Vegas and suburban Los Angeles, NASCAR banned images of the Confederate flag on its racecars, drivers’ uniforms and official merchandise. Following the 2015 slaughter of nine African American churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C., NASCAR went further, asking fans not to display the flag at its tracks. But it stopped short of an outright ban, deeming that a step too far.
Ramsey Poston, who was NASCAR’s managing director of communications from 2004 to 2011, was part of several closed-door conversations about how the sport could strike that balance.
“We had very frank conversations internally at NASCAR in the early 2000s, and there was really no resistance [to dissociating from the flag],” recalled Poston, now president of Tuckahoe Strategies, a D.C.-area crisis communications firm. “The executives got it; they understood. The sport was transitioning. It wanted to be more attractive to corporate sponsors. The one eyesore continued to be the flag that some fans had.”
“We talked a lot about, ‘What do we do with fans?’ ” Poston added. “The thinking was: ‘If NASCAR loses some fans because of its position on banning the flag on [racecars, uniforms, merchandise and other] things it controls, then so be it.’ They were absolutely comfortable with that.”
Poston recalled an instance in 2012, when Phoenix International Raceway officials invited golfer Bubba Watson to take a prerace lap in the “General Lee,” the car — which has an image of the Confederate flag on its roof, and which Watson had recently purchased — from “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show. NASCAR shut down the idea, citing its policy, and was castigated by former U.S. Rep. Ben Jones (D-Ga.), who had played the character “Cooter” on the show.
“He gave them hell, but NASCAR stood their ground,” Poston said.
No doubt, the decision to ban any display of the flag will come at a cost that’s difficult to quantify beyond the heated rhetoric on social media. NASCAR’s moves this week were endorsed by several star athletes and celebrities, including LeBron James, Deion Sanders and Reese Witherspoon.
TV ratings for Wednesday’s 500-lap race at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway were up 104 percent, more than doubling the audience that tuned in for the “comparable race last season,” a Fox Sports executive said. It’s an imperfect comparison; there was no midweek race in June 2019, nor was there a pandemic that stripped the airways of other sports broadcasts.
But Facebook and Twitter teemed with blowback for NASCAR, including a screed from the wife of a part-time Truck Series driver from Ellicott City, Md., who wrote that her husband was quitting the sport at season’s end in protest.
Nonetheless, NASCAR executives concluded that the upside of banning the Confederate flag outright was worth it — whether because it meant standing on the right side of history, reflecting prevailing sentiments as the nation re-examines its legacy of racism, sending a message that all are welcome at its tracks, appealing to a broader array of corporate sponsors or some portion of all of that.
In the view of brand strategist Paul Jankowski, CEO of the Nashville-based New Heartland Group, NASCAR’s action is worth applauding.
“It’s a bold statement for them as a brand to show what they really believe and align with their stated core value of inclusion,” Jankowski said. “If you talk about the value of inclusion, well, you know what? It’s time to stand up.”
But if it was taken only after a risk-vs.-reward analysis, he said, it was for the wrong reason.
“This decision shouldn’t be based on calculating the downside; it should be based on staying true to your brand values,” said Jankowski, who believes that’s what NASCAR did. “You will lose people, but you will gain people by taking a stand — an overdue stand — on this issue.”
The post The Confederate flag long has flown in the face of NASCAR’s hopes for broader appeal appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Confederate statues: In 2020, a renewed battle in America’s enduring Civil War appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>One hundred fifty-five years after the end of the Civil War, a sculpture of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was toppled in the Virginia city that American secessionists called their capital. In Alabama, a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most honored general, was knocked over in front of a Montgomery high school that bears his name. In a blitz that burst out of the anti-police-brutality movement, protesters this month have vandalized and removed dozens of monuments to Confederate politicians and soldiers.
Across the South — from Virginia, where the Democratic governor embraced the removal of symbols that many whites once considered sacred, to Alabama, where Republican lawmakers recently made it illegal to relocate or remove any Confederate memorials — dramatic scenes of destruction recalled the fall of the Soviet Union, when crowds tore down statues of Lenin, Stalin and other icons of totalitarianism.
This country’s seemingly eternal conflict — born in slavery and kept alive through a century and a half of battles over race, civil rights and American identity — has flared once more, focusing yet again on the symbols of the only war ever fought on U.S. soil, a war between brothers.
It took less than two weeks for the grass-roots response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who was asphyxiated when a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into his neck, to morph from peaceful protests, bouts of burning and looting and nationwide demands for reform of police behavior into a concerted attack on symbols of the Confederacy. But that shift is now plain to see in places large and small, in numbers well beyond similar actions that followed the 2015 mass murder at a black church in Charleston, S.C., and the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.
“It does look like there’s critical mass now and maybe people are listening in a way they didn’t before,” said Karen Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who is writing a book on Confederate monuments.
But advocates for removing the statues and those for maintaining them agreed that the wave of attacks is unlikely to be the final battle over symbols of the Confederacy.
“This isn’t the end,” Cox said. “There’s over 700 of these monuments left. And I can’t say this is a unique situation. There’s a long history since the civil rights movement of actions against the monuments, especially after the Charleston massacre and after Charlottesville. This is the same exact debate we’ve seen since the end of the Civil War, and we still have the same national divide over immigration and race and what kind of South we will have.”
Even as this extraordinary wave of topplings and defacings of statues continues, more Confederate monuments are being built — more than 30 in the past two decades, Cox said — and at least seven Southern states have passed laws in recent years making it tougher to get rid of existing statues. Alabama’s 2017 law, for example, prohibits the “relocation, removal, alteration, renaming or disturbing” of monuments that have been standing for more than 40 years.
The battle lines couldn’t be more familiar.
In Portsmouth, Va., on Wednesday night, after the city council delayed a decision to remove a Confederate monument, protesters used ropes and bricks, bolt cutters and hammers to behead and tear down four statues. A brass band played. One man was seriously injured when a piece of statuary fell on him.
“I’m so happy that I’m alive to see it come down and to see black people take it down — not the city, not your mayor, nobody important,” said a black woman who was interviewed at the monument by Norfolk TV station WVEC. “Black people are taking down this hate.”
But defenders of the monuments have not budged.
“You can’t satisfy some people,” said Samuel Mitcham Jr., the heritage operations historian for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who wrote a book, “It Wasn’t About Slavery,” arguing that the South left the Union for strictly economic reasons. “These monuments belong to our history. The only way we can come together is with tolerance, but Black Lives Matter isn’t very tolerant.”
Mitcham, like many who believe the monuments should remain in honored places such as town squares, school entrances and state capitols, maintains that the artworks are “Southern heritage.”
“We can’t agree with some of the things that were done back then, but that’s true of all history. They were put up because the widows and orphans of the Confederate veterans loved their husbands and fathers. It wasn’t about hatred,” he said.
Most of the Confederate statues that dot the Southern landscape were erected, however, not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but half a century later. The Southern women’s groups that paid for most of the statues in the early 20th century said they wanted a place to honor their fallen loved ones, but the groups that paid for the monuments sought to send a message at a time when they were pushing for — and winning — Jim Crow laws to codify racial segregation.
Many Southern towns bought cheap zinc statues from Monumental Bronze Co. in Bridgeport, Conn. The company offered representations of Civil War soldiers, Union or Confederate, whichever the customer preferred, for $450. The United Daughters of the Confederacy raised the money to fund an unprecedented monument boom.
“The white Southerners will always say this is about heritage, and the black Southerners will always say that the monuments are an insult,” said Cox, the historian, who has titled her forthcoming book on the subject “No Common Ground.”
Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who went on write some of the most important narratives of American bondage, said in 1870 that tributes to Confederate warriors “will prove monuments of folly” amounting to “a needless record of stupidity and wrong.”
But the presence of many whites in the crowds that attacked statues this week, and the decision by NASCAR to ban Confederate symbols from its races and property, has led some supporters of the protests to think that a corner has been turned, that a consensus is developing across racial lines that the icons must go.
In Jacksonville, Fla., Mayor Lenny Curry this week ordered the removal of all 11 Confederate monuments and markers in the city, and at the University of Alabama, the board of trustees approved removal of three plaques honoring students who served in the Confederate military.
And in Bentonville, Ark., the state division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy said it would move a monument of a Confederate soldier from the town square to a private park.
But even after his defense secretary said he’d consider renaming U.S. military bases that honor Confederate military leaders, and after the Marines announced a ban on Confederate symbols in public spaces at its facilities, President Trump on Wednesday lashed out against such re-examinations of how history is told.
“My Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations,” Trump tweeted. “Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”
However thorough this wave of removals turns out to be, historians warned of a possible backlash in the coming months.
More than 100 Confederate memorials were taken down after the Charleston church attack, but in the years that followed, several Southern states tightened restrictions on such removals. South Carolina added a requirement that two-thirds of its legislators approve any removal of a Confederate monument. North Carolina gave its legislature control over “objects of remembrance.”
And Virginia made it illegal to “disturb” war monuments. But later, after a Democratic majority won control of the state’s legislature, Virginia passed a law that takes effect next month allowing localities to make their own decisions about memorials.
A judge in Richmond on Monday temporarily blocked Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) from relocating a prominent statue of Lee away from the city’s landmark Monument Avenue. The judge made his decision in a lawsuit filed by the great-grandson of two signers of an 1890 deed that required the state to keep the statue and its site “perpetually sacred” and to “affectionately protect it.”
In the end, these battles are not as much about law as about who owns history. In Birmingham, despite Alabama’s new law prohibiting removal of the monuments, protesters tried but failed to tear down a Confederate obelisk, but Mayor Randall Woodfin stepped in and had city workers take down the 50-foot-high memorial. That led the state’s attorney general to file suit against the mayor, saying that the city had violated the Alabama law.
Some battles over monuments will be resolved in courtrooms, some in state capitols, some at the ballot box. This week, they are being resolved on the streets.
Read more Retropolis:
The post Confederate statues: In 2020, a renewed battle in America’s enduring Civil War appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post Poll: Should Confederate names be taken off U.S. military bases? appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Comments
Please read
our comment policy before commenting.
The post Poll: Should Confederate names be taken off U.S. military bases? appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post NASCAR bans Confederate flags at all races, events appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>“The …
Read More
The post NASCAR bans Confederate flags at all races, events appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>