Confederate monuments testify to the Union's unfinished victory

President Trump was back on Twitter today, writing that it’s “sad” to see so many Confederate statues and monuments removed from prominent public spaces and cast into the historical dustbin. “The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed,” the president lamented.

His tweets — coming on the heels of his insistence that “many sides” were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville — are pouring kerosene on a controversy that’s centuries in the making. Trump’s incendiary comments on the bloody clashes in Charlottesville, and for that matter even his election, were possible only because the North’s victory in the Civil War was incomplete, and the achievements of the 1960s-era civil rights movement remain circumscribed.
Both the Civil War and the civil rights movement are justifiably seen as progressive breakthroughs. They were revolutions resulting in the end of slavery and, later, the abolition of Jim Crow across the United States. But the very existence of the Confederate statues that Trump is now defending, and the white-supremacist-fueled violence in Charlottesville last weekend, also underscore what wasn’t achieved in those earlier victories, and the and limits of these revolutions.
It is remarkable that scores of monuments and statues to the Confederacy, the losing side in the Civil War, were even erected in the first place. Consider that these symbols of a regime founded to defend slavery occupy hallowed public grounds — city parks, town squares, statehouses and courthouses.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/confederate-monuments-testify-unions-unfinished-victory-195513450.html