Confederate Monuments: “Relics of a bygone era” or “indicators of the one we’re still living in?”

Over at The New Yorker, public intellectual Jelani Cobb reflects on the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans.  It includes a reminder about the period of Reconstruction in the American South, an era that started out as a “bold experiment in actual democracy” and ended in white terrorism.

Here is a taste:

As with much else in Trump’s version of America, the protesters who lined up to defend the monument wish to maintain an à-la-carte relationship with history. They have cloaked their defense of the monuments by presenting it as a recognition of the valor of the men who fought for the Confederate cause. But that excuse falls flat when recognizing, for instance, that there is no monument in New Orleans to the mass slave revolt that took place in 1811, when some two hundred men who had endured the brutality of bondage marched on the city, killing two white men and burning plantations as they went. This is not the version of valor recognized by the crowd before the Lee memorial, or those phoning in death threats to Landrieu’s office.

At the same time, there is a valid, if lesser, risk in removing the Confederate monuments: the possibility that their absence is too neatly exculpatory—that future generations may know little about the acts of inhumanity that took place in the South, and even less about the misguided impulse that glorified those incidents for more than a century. The monuments are not relics of a bygone era; they’re indicators of the one we’re still living in.

Read the entire piece here.