Baltimore: ALL Confederate Statues Have Now Been Removed

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I'll take that as a no to the former and a yes to the latter.

… What exactly would you consider a concrete example of proactively contributing 'to establishing equality'?  Some sort of guidelines might be nice in order to give a reasonable answer...

What exactly would you consider a concrete example of proactively contributing 'to establishing equality'? Some sort of guidelines might be nice in order to give a reasonable

Ya gotta be WOKE!

Ya gotta jump up and down and scream at every opportunity, even when you only suspect that someone might only be thinking racist thoughts!

Ya gotta risk losing your job, your home, your sanity, and your very life in the interest of blaming and shaming every potential bigot you encounter.

Ya gotta convict anyone of European descent of the shared guilt of their ancestors' involvement in slavery, the subjugation of women, and imperialism by conquest and genocide!

Ya gotta confront anyone who is not doing any of these things with the harsh reality of every racist incident that has ever occurred within 3.26 light-years of your location for the past 12,000 years (even if you hafta make up a few incidents just to prove your point)!

Ya gotta...

Have I taken this past Ridiculous Speed yet? Have we already gone plaid?

I know that wasn't directed at me, but I'll answer the question. Stop sewing division by lumping people into groups -- left vs. right, etc. Stop generalizing. Stop politicizing the issue. It doesn't help at all. I've been all over the Midwest and the South in this country. I know that racism is still a problem. But you can't demonize an entire region or political persuasion, and think you are a force for good. I deal with people on a case by case basis. That's what we all should be doing.

I hope you understand what I'm trying to tell you.

Virginia is one step closer to ending its tradition of honoring Confederate generals.

This week, the Virginia House voted to strike Lee-Jackson Day from the list of state holidays. The holiday, observed on the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January, honors Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson as "defenders of causes."

Both men owned slaves and fought to preserve slavery in the US.

In its place, the House bill proposed that the state replace it with Election Day, the first Tuesday after the First Monday in November, instead.

Gov. Ralph Northam included the measure in his 2020 legislative proposals. If Election Day becomes a state holiday, he said, it'll be easier for Virginians to vote.

A conservative Republican lawmaker, irked that Democrats might mess with Virginia’s Confederate monuments, filed a bill that boiled down to a dare: If you want to take down statues, start with one of your own.

House Bill 1305 calls for ridding Richmond’s Capitol Square of a 10-foot statue of Harry Flood Byrd, the former Democratic governor, U.S. senator, kingmaker — and segregationist — who dominated Virginia politics for 40 years.
“It’s kind of like playing chess,” said Del. Wendell S. Walker (R-Lynchburg), who hoped the bill would make Democrats who just gained control of the House and Senate think twice about removing any statues. “You’re just calling somebody’s bluff.”

Turns out, some Democrats think Walker’s bill is a great idea. Byrd, a towering figure who modernized state government and observed strict budget discipline as governor from 1926 to 1930, was also the architect of Virginia’s policy of “massive resistance” to school desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s.

Now Walker wants to kill his own bill, fearing that Democrats may not only pass it but use it as justification for the removal of other monuments. Last week, Democrats moved to keep his legislation alive — at least for now.

This year could usher in sweeping changes, with Democrats in control of the General Assembly and Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who nearly resigned a year ago after a racist photo surfaced in his 1984 medical school yearbook, pledging to devote the rest of his governorship to promoting racial equity.

Northam supports legislation giving localities the right to relocate Confederate monuments and wants to find a replacement for the Lee statue that represents Virginia in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol.

That’s not to say all Democrats are on board with removing monuments, most notably in the state Senate, where the party has a slim 21-to-19 majority.

“I’m very uncomfortable with a lot of what’s going on,” said Sen. Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax City), whose great-great-grandfather was Lee’s quartermaster. He pointed out that George Washington, whose statue looms over Capitol Square, owned hundreds of slaves.

“This is a far more interesting and complicated issue that people are (reducing to): ‘Let’s tear down this statue. Let’s tear down that statue,’ ” he said.

Byrd, who died in 1966, engineered the state’s opposition to that ruling, which included denying funding to integrated schools, authorizing the governor to close them and providing tuition grants to students attending segregated private academies. In 1958, the state seized and closed several schools in Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk to prevent their integration. Prince Edward County shuttered its schools for five years rather than admit black students.
Byrd, a Winchester newspaper publisher and apple grower, is nevertheless lauded by some for creating the state’s highway system and adhering to “pay as you go” budgeting as governor. He was a prominent budget hawk in the U.S. Senate from 1933 to 1965.

His statue, created by sculptor William McVey and erected in 1976 with private funds, portrays Byrd holding a copy of the federal budget.

The sum total of this one life has had a larger and more lasting effect upon the history and destiny of Virginia and her people than any other in the Twentieth Century,” a plaque accompanying the statue reads. It praises Byrd’s “personal integrity” and “devotion . . . to governmental restraint and programs in the best interest of all the people of Virginia.”
A member of the Capitol Square Preservation Council argued in a Washington Post op-ed last year that the plaque’s “misleading and incomplete narrative” needs to be replaced with one that tells the “true story.” Others would like to go further.

“I would love to see that statue come down,” said Del. Jerrauld C. “Jay” Jones (D-Norfolk), whose father was greeted by racist taunts when he integrated Norfolk’s Ingleside Elementary School as a 6-year-old in 1960. “It’s the statue that makes me most upset. . . . You think about being the mastermind of racist policy and segregationist policy in the 20th century. We’re not that far removed.”

Byrd biographer Ronald L. Heinemann supported taking Byrd’s name off a suburban Richmond middle school a few years ago, but he considers the statue on Capitol Square a tougher call.
“Clearly, Byrd’s promotion of massive resistance was regrettable . . . a horrible legacy,” said Heinemann, author of the book “Harry Byrd of Virginia.” “On the other hand, Byrd was the controlling power in Virginia politics for 40 years, serving as governor and United States senator.”
Harry F. Byrd III, one of the late governor’s grandchildren, did not respond to messages left at his home in Berryville, Va.
In the elder Byrd’s complex history and Democratic affiliation, Walker saw an opportunity to make Democrats pause on monument removal, something he sees as shortsighted. After filing the bill, Walker got an earful from a few Republican friends who admire Byrd’s fiscal conservatism. Then came kudos from Democratic constituents back home.

People in Alva and the Lee County Sheriff's office want to know who vandalized graves in the Alva cemetery.

“It's a shame because it was a nice memorial, ” said Jim Tharp.

The cemetery says the damage was found Thursday morning, tombstones ripped from the ground, a statue knocked over and, flags displaced - all in an area marked to remember Confederate soldiers.

The cemetery believes the memorial was vandalized late Wednesday night.

“I’m sure a lot of people here are really good people and they don’t deserve it, ” said Tharp.

Local organizations have since come together to fix and replace the memorial.

But to the people who caused the destruction, Tharp has a very strong message,

“What comes around goes around, ” Jim Tharp.

The president for the Alva cemetery tells Fox 4 that they are currently working with the Lee County Sheriff’s department to determine what safety measures need to be taken next.

Virginia will remove a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the city of Richmond "as soon as possible," Gov. Ralph Northam announced Thursday.

"Today, we're here to be honest about our past and talk about our future," Northam said, adding: "We have to confront where we've been in order to shape where we're going."

The statue will be placed into storage, where it will remain until government leaders and the community can discuss its future, according to the governor.

The statue will be removed from Richmond's Monument Avenue, which is lined with effigies of Confederate generals. Of all the monuments, Lee's looms the largest — and unlike the others, it is owned by the state, a six-story monument on a 100-foot island of land that the state also owns.

It's up to Richmond, the Confederacy's former capital, to decide what to do with the other statues; the city is in the process of determining what their fates will be.

"It's time to put an end to the Lost Cause and fully embrace the righteous cause," Stoney said at Thursday's news conference. "It's time to replace the racist symbols of oppression and inequality — symbols that have literally dominated our landscape."

"It's time to heal, ladies and gentlemen," he added.

The Confederate statues stoked anger over the weekend in Richmond, where there were large protests following the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for an extended period of time. Protesters covered many of the statues' bases with graffiti. Last night, an image of Floyd's face was projected onto Lee's statue.

"Some conservatives condemned Northam's plans," Paviour says. "GOP state Sen. Amanda Chase — who is also running for governor — said this in a Facebook video posted last night: 'It's all about shoving this down people's throats and erasing the history of the white people.' "

The symbolism wasn't lost on residents of Birmingham, Alabama: On Monday, as state officials commemorated Confederacy leader Jefferson Davis as part of an annual state-recognized holiday, the majority-black city began the process of removing the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument from a public park.

But the action, initiated by Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, will likely come at a cost.

On Tuesday, state Attorney General Steve Marshall filed a civil lawsuit against the city, writing the move required a waiver, and without one, it has violated Alabama's monument preservation law. As such, Marshall wrote, the city is on the hook for a $25,000 fine, which would go to the state Historic Preservation Fund.

Marshall said in a statement that he warned Woodfin that the monument's removal from Linn Park "would violate the law and that I would fulfill my duty to enforce it."

The memorial, dating back 115 years, had been defaced during protests Sunday night in Birmingham — part of the larger nationwide unrest following the death of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis police custody on Memorial Day.

Woodfin said Wednesday on the "TODAY" show that he made a promise to the protesters to dismantle the monument in 24 hours, which he did, in order to cool down growing tensions.

"I chose my city to avoid more civil unrest," Woodfin said, adding that "it's probably better for this city to pay this civil fine than to have more civil unrest."

He said that while he has received personal threats, he won't bow down to pressure from people who are celebrating a "revisionist history."

"It's important to note that the city of Birmingham wasn't even a city during the Civil War," Woodfin said. "We don't have time to worry about something that's not working for our city and relegates black people to property and slavery. It's important that we take this down and move forward."

Though Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s bill allowing organizations to remove confederate statues across the state doesn’t go into effect until July 1, The United Daughters of the Confederacy have decided to get ahead of the process.

The organization notified the city of Alexandria on Monday that it would remove the 131-year-old statue today, June 2.

Private contractors took about an hour to remove Appomattox, a statue that was originally erected to represent a Confederate soldier viewing the battlefields after the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

The statue on South Washington and Prince streets was dedicated on May 24, 1889, in what is now Alexandria’s historic district.

The city provided traffic control for the statue removal but was not involved in the removal process.

Alexandria spokesman Craig Fifer told WTOP they only got one day’s notice that the statue would be removed, and they don’t know where it’s being taken.

Mayor Justin Wilson posted photos of the statue’s move on social media and wrote: “Alexandria, like all great cities, is constantly changing and evolving.”

In 2016, the city tried and failed to get permission to move the statue. At that time there was talk of placing it in the Lyceum, which is the city’s history museum.