As the Black Lives Matter movement galvanizes the nation, there are renewed calls to remove the names and statues of prominent Confederate leaders from the Capital (and the Capitol) as well as from Army bases throughout the South. As I have written in these pages— and as one young African-American woman put it recently on TV — this isn’t even primarily a case of black and white, even though the issue is pretty much black and white. The Confederacy lost, and the losers don’t get to dictate either the terms of their surrender or the trophies of their defeat. There are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin.
Still, as President Abraham Lincoln said, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.” The monuments and names of the Confederacy should belong to schools and museums — or at least photographs of them should be. We can’t preserve every one. There they can be curated and studied, so that present and future generations can understand how they came to be erected in the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras as a way to reassert white supremacy.
The issue of works of arts and entertainment is a more complex matter, however.
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