Tear Confederate Statues Down, Keep Union Statues Up, and Build New Antislavery Monuments
Confederate statues are monuments to white supremacy. Protesters are right to tear them down. But Union statues are the opposite: monuments to the antislavery cause. We should keep them standing — and build new ones commemorating freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown all over the country.
Protesters gather at Lincoln Park to demand the Emancipation Memorial be taken down, on June 23, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)
A statue is not merely a marker of some neutral historical fact. It honors those it depicts and exerts a subtle moral influence over the society that raises them in its public spaces. This is why the removal of statues commemorating Confederate figures is entirely justified.
Confederate monuments were erected to read back into history the lie that these men acted with honor and out of duty, and that their public service should be commemorated. Most were raised decades after the Civil War to mark the defeat of Reconstruction and restoration of white supremacy to the South and elsewhere in the United States. Confederate statues are idols of the order they sought to preserve and extend, one of white supremacy and black bondage.
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