Commuting one day last week on Route 66 in Northampton, I passed a pickup truck with a huge Confederate battle flag mounted on its bed.
Why would someone in Massachusetts boldly display the battle flag of a short-lived separatist movement that waged the bloodiest war ever against the United States in defense of the right to enslave human beings?
Has the driver considered what a gross insult this display is to the memory of the 146,730 Massachusetts veterans who fought to preserve the union, whose names are inscribed on the local memorials and headstones that he is driving by?
Moments later, I drove past an African-American man walking down a village street. If I felt disgusted, what would this man feel as a fellow citizen proudly displayed a banner celebrating the “good old days” of the old South when almost four million people were enslaved?
Americans have many things to be proud of but surely not slavery and the “heroes” who unsuccessfully led its bloody defense. The removal of monuments that romanticize champions of slavery is not erasing history — it is eliminating a form of propaganda intentionally designed to perpetuate segregation and inequality.
I have ancestors from both sides of the Civil War. While we can respect some of the personal qualities of our Confederate ancestors, we have to acknowledge the simple truth that they perpetuated, defended and benefited from a barbaric and unjust system; we cannot glorify them.
Should you be unconvinced of the need to remove Confederate monuments from the public square, please read New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s speech on the subject in its entirety. Here is an excerpt:
“To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future … And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity, seems perverse and absurd.”
Christopher Morris
Williamsburg