New Orleans is removing its monuments to slavery; should Boston do the same?

and all of the battlefield monuments at places like Bull Run, and Gettysburg? What should become of the monuments to the Southern regiments and battalions who fought and field there? Each one has their own monument. Should we remove monuments from national parks as well?

And while we are at it - Universities should get ready for a name change - if not a total restructuring. Look at this report regarding Harvard and its history with slavery...

It reports that three Harvard presidents owned slaves; that slaves worked on campus as early as 1639; that among the first residents of Wadsworth House (built in 1726) were two slaves, Titus and Venus; that slave labor often underwrote the success of Harvard’s early private benefactors; and that the connection between College donations and slave-related industries persisted until the Civil War.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/harv...

sad that this is where we are...

I do not see these memorials to confederate soldiers as memorials at all. I.e. to remember the figures depicted in them. Many were not erected until well after the civil war and, rather, were erected well into the early 20th century in the full assault of Jim Crow. They were not so much memorials as they were reminders to blacks in the South that the Civil War had changed almost nothing as far as who was in charge. These statutes were erected in a time when black people were prevented by Jim Crow laws from voting, in areas with high concentrations of black people, none of whom had any say in whether or not to erect the monuments. I see there removal less as a repudiation of the figures depicted in the memorials, or what they might have done during their lives, and more of a repudiation of the vestiges of the system that erected them and the long witheld vote of black people on whether to put them up that they were deprived of in the first place. By contrast, I do not believe any of the memorials to Washington, Winthrop, etc. were erected for these types of purposes, but rather were erected as true memorials to the people depicted in them. For example, although Washington was a slave owner, we did not erect statues of him to remind people about slavery. This does not mean that we should not examine their flaws and acknowledge the role that slavery and bigotry played in Boston and elsewhere in the North. But I do not see the same motivation to consider removing memorials in Boston.

Read New England Bound by Wendy Warren to find more names of early Colonialists in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other parts of New England who had off-shore plantations in Jamaica and who also practiced chattel slavey. You'd be surprised, and many of these people have statues, too, not to mention that Brown University was founded by slave owners, not too different from The University's (aka Jefferson's university) origins. I am so reminded of how the Taliban went after the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan and how ISIS has destroyed temples and artifacts in Palmyra, Syria, just because they can. We've seen this before, and the implication now is that leaving statues up is idolatrous because they attract the faithful vs. those who say, let history, for ill or good, stand as a teacher.

I'm a bit sad, for example, that the statue of Lenin in Seattle is coming down. We need one somewhere in the world to remind us that he really did exist since he has been all but excised from Russian history. If we don't remember, then we won't repeat mistakes, right?

Moreover, Jefferson was not a traitor (like Lee). Ask King George and Tory Americans. Their slant is slightly different. Yes, he and George Mason (Bill of Rights) produced glorious documents that give all of us the rights we share to go back and forth at each other in this forum or in person. Let us not be blind though. African and American-born slaves, Indians (and women) were not `equals in the minds of these founders. At, least though, amendments to the Declaration of Independence were allowed, possibly (and I say possibly because how can I really know), these "oversights" could be taken care of after the slave-master generation had passed on.

And yes, John Winthrop (and his son in off-shore plantation), John Cotton, and even Cotten Mather owned slaves and used them for profit making and life-style issues even before the building of the Cotton Gin. Survival of New England amongst "colonialist" adventurers depended on slave economies and chattel slavery. MANY prominent Americans descend and/or are related to these New England colonialists, just as the do from Jefferson, George Mason, and yes, Robert E. Lee ( General George Marshall, Patton, Adlai Stevenson, Muhummad Ali, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Brad Pitt, Teddy Roosevelt, Joanne Woodward, et.al. ? And the point. Perhaps the most sanctimonious among us re. the statues are alive because of the people we now decry. Irony of Ironies.

Lee's statue could have been taken down during the tenures of Obama or Carter or George Bush. All in the fullness of time, though, and LIKELY for political expediency. The timing IS interesting.