I’m amazed, lately, that some of my liberal friends have come out in support of President Trump’s opinion that removal of Confederate statues is rewriting history, or that we are destroying the historical record.

The fact is, most, if not all, of these statues – such as the Stonewall Jackson statue in Baltimore, the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, and the Stone Mountain carving in Georgia – were done during the shameful Jim Crow era.

Most white Americans know nothing about these works. For instance, Stone Mountain, with its depiction of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, was a memorial donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy, not a municipal monument.

Private funding paid for the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville in 1924, and the Stonewall Jackson statue was finally dedicated in Baltimore after funding from a private donor in 1948. All of these were installed during the height of Jim Crow. What an insult to African-Americans.

These monuments rewrite history. After all, the Confederacy lost the war while supporting a totally untenable moral belief, and all those wonderful generals were on the wrong side of history. It’s due time that we set the record straight over these statues glorifying traitors.

Donald Gray

Rockland

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