Confederate statues’ removal does not erase history

The argument made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a recent interview, that Confederate statue removals are erasing history — is based on a false notion that removing the public honoring of historical figures removes those figures from the historical record or public discussion. 

Public honorings like statues and named public facilities are intended to do just that — honor the subject person for their positive service or contribution to society. To earn that honor, you should have positively contributed to society through acts of service for the greater good, or a specific good to the place bearing your name or likeness. 

The removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from the public square doesn’t mean Lee is being canceled from the history books. The removal simply undoes something that should never have never happened in the first place — the honoring a man who betrayed his country and attacked his own people. 

To use an extreme example, Adolf Hitler will never be erased from history. Yet we would not condone a statue of him in any public square, even in his hometown. 

If we must make statues, what would be just is a statue to the fallen soldiers of the Confederacy (who were sold a false narrative about what the war was about) alongside a statue of the many enslaved men and women and their abolitionist allies who resisted the slave state. 

Some have argued that this is dishonoring southern heritage. I was born in West Virginia and grew up in Virginia, and as a white Virginian I never identified with the goals of the Confederacy, which were to maintain an undemocratic feudal state founded on white supremacy. The Confederacy was antithetical to our founding principles and to the U.S. Constitution. 

The historical record shows that white southern leaders knew it then as much as we know it now — this is not a controversial revisionist take on the situation. There were plenty of people in the South who did not agree with the system and sought to abolish it, most notably the Black residents, enslaved and free, who continually resisted and rebelled in the face of white terror. 

Slavery was an economic tool of the white ruling class, of which most white southerners were not a part. Enslavement was certainly not the chosen heritage of the multitudes of enslaved people in the South and across the U.S. territories. The Confederacy was a movement of racist authoritarian rule and wage theft, not a heritage.

In the mid-1980s, the first time I drove down Monument Avenue in Richmond, then home to several statues of high-ranking members of the Confederacy, I thought it was a dystopian construct. Here was a broad, beautiful avenue in the midst of an American city with a large Black population, lined with statues of men who fought for the right to subjugate Black Americans — a city that the defeated Confederate leaders burned to the ground at war’s end as they abandoned it to the advancing Union army. 

It is right and just that the names and likenesses of these men have been confined to their rightful place in our history books and museums, as cautionary tales of betrayal. Let those statues fill halls of shame, with the names of the “Lost Cause” propagandists and Jim Crow architects alongside, and let the melting of Lee’s infamous statue be a ritual cleansing from 160 years of false history. 

Don Willson is a carpenter and industrial arts teacher living in the Pacific Northwest.