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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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As much as I am all for inclusive art, I would have not melted that statue and instead put it in a museum as a memorial to who the south once thought of as a hero. Maybe add some context like how he shouldn't be celebrated, but still provide historical context as to his person and insight into how people back then thought of him.
Don't worry, it's the south. They have about a thousand more statues of that traitor at least.
Plus everyone and their cousin-sister has the middle name Lee.
Why? They're a dime a dozen and were put up in the 1900s largely due to the Daughters of the Confederacy and to reinforce Jim Crow laws.
They aren't really worth preserving. A picture can be taken to explain how awful these things are.
Museums don't store this sort of thing though. Since it's not from the civil war, it's not sensible to store and exhibit such a thing. Imagine if people started telling the Louvé to display paintings inspired by the Mona Lisa, because it's basically the Mona Lisa. Museum curators would have no reason to do so, despite what the public thinks.
Edit: Also the statue is a piece of propaganda rather than actual history. There's honestly not much to say about the statue itself. The bulk of what could be said is about Lee, and actual historic pieces of his life do exist in museums. Displacing those real historic exhibits in exchange for this statue would be a shame.
Propoganda + Time = history.
The statue doesn't say much about the civil war. But it does say alot about the Jim Crow era in which it was built. Personally I think this is even more important because the Jim Crow era is far less well understood by most Americans, and far more relevant to the race issues we see today.
Exactly this. Plus, unfortunately, there are plenty of Confederate monuments and statues erected way after the Civil War whose sole purpose was "scare those black people into knowing their place." Some of those can find new homes in museums displaying the history of racism (with added context), but we can't preserve all of them. So melt the rest down and reuse them in ways that uplift people instead of oppressing them.
It's absolutely history but just not Civil War history. This is the Charlottesville statue and it's iconic of our contemporary far right nationalist problem. Imagine things like this being a part of an exhibit laying out the turmoil our country is going through.
Edit: A lot of key pieces of history are missing because people didn't look to the future. I think some of it should have been carefully stored in a basement somewhere. Out of sight for at least 20 years.
That would be one huge museum of equally bad similarly looking statues. No need to preserve them all, because there are so many of them, a couple will do.
That doesn't sound like a fun place. Hey honey want to take the kids to the museum of poorly made statues of hate today?
Yeah, the caption should be segregation now, segregation forever. And if we are legally forced to stop scratching, we will make their place clear by building statues to the people that fought to keep them slaves when they get their rights from the federal government. The statues were about sending a message to those that believed segregation was done. The stairs being melted is the right move to send a message to those that built them.
Unless the statue was erected by George Wallace, that caption is irrelevant. Put a caption of Lee's written words:
This passage is commonly cut off after the full sentence before you get the full context in which Lee actually cares about how bad slavery is for white people and how slavery was good for the enslaved.