Racist public symbols in the US go far beyond the Confederate flag

[struggle4progress]

... The majority of racist symbols submitted by readers were, unsurprisingly, monuments to Confederate soldiers, generals and politicians. Such statues have caused conversations and petitions to erupt in many cases, especially in New Orleans, where Mayor Mitch Landrieu has called for the removal of all Confederate monuments from the city. In other cases, statues like those of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson at the University of Texas, Austin, have been defaced in protest of Confederate imagery.

It is also interesting that Confederate monuments also dot the landscape of states that were never part of the Confederate states. This is especially true in border states like Maryland and Kentucky, but also true in states like Washington – a state that did not exist until after the end of the civil war ...

In this group of monuments, Native Americans are depicted in a position of weakness, usually at the feet of white settlers. One such example is Pioneers Monument in San Francisco’s Civic Center, in which a missionary and settler stand over a powerless Native American. Another example, which depicted a Catholic priest standing over two Native Americans, was recently removed from the campus of St Louis University ...

Again, public symbols and spaces denounced as racist are in no way limited to former Confederate states or former Confederate leaders. In New York City’s Tompkins Square Park, a bronze statue of Samuel Sullivan Cox commemorates the notoriously racist congressman. In 1862, speaking on race in the House of Representatives, Sullivan claimed that the Founding Fathers “never intended, by anything they did, to place the black race on an equality with the white” ...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/17/public-symbols-landmarks-racist-confederate-flag

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R