Free Republic

The Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday said it will remove stained glass windows honoring Confederate generals, saying they act as “a barrier to our important work on racial justice and racial reconciliation.” In a statement, Cathedral leaders said they’ve debated for two years whether to remove the windows honoring Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. That debate concluded Tuesday, and the Cathedral Chapter voted to remove them.

The city council in Charlottesville, Va., voted unanimously Tuesday to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from Justice Park. The 5-0 vote came just weeks after last month’s violent protests in the city, sparked in part by city officials’ plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Tuesday’s vote also will expedite the relocation of the Lee statue.

Many blacks and their white liberal allies demand the removal of statues of Confederate generals and the Confederate battle flag, and they are working up steam to destroy the images of Gens. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and President Jefferson Davis from Stone Mountain in Georgia. Allow me to speculate as to the whys of this statue removal craze, which we might call statucide. To understand it, we need a review of the promises black and white liberals have been making for decades. In 1940, the black poverty rate was 87 percent. By 1960, it had fallen to 47...

The City Council in Charlottesville, Virginia, voted Tuesday night to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson from a park after a public hearing punctuated by protests and chants of "Let her speak." By voice vote, the council voted after 11 p.m. ET to ask a design firm to redesign Emancipation Park, where the Jackson statue stands — effectively ordering its removal once all court cases are resolved.

The Confederates did not seek to overturn or conquer the government in Washington DC in 1861. They simply wanted to leave it.

A descendant of Gen. Robert E. Lee has stepped down as pastor of his North Carolina church after facing blowback from parishioners and others for his comments denouncing racism and lauding the Black Lives Matter movement. As a minister and newspaper columnist, Robert W. Lee IV, the fourth great-nephew of the Confederate general, has spoken and written countless words, but the five sentences he uttered during MTV's Video Music Awards last week were just too much for some members of his congregation. ... Lee, who was pastor at Bethany United Church of Christ in Winston-Salem, has long supported removing monuments...

One of my wittier friends told me today “I’m starting a movement to ban Dixie cups.” If I’d have been less startled by his gallows humor I’d have replied – “Just wait a week. They’ll probably drop the ‘Dixie’ name themselves.” The Charlottesville syndrome is upon us. Recently in Franklin, Ohio, a quiet town a little north of Cincinnati, one of the spineless breed of careerists that run most local municipalities had a miniscule plaque depicting Robert E. Lee removed. The city leaders did their work in the usual courageous bureaucratic way -- which is to say they had a...

A bid by Tennessee’s governor to remove a bust of Confederate cavalry general, slave trader and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state Capitol building was rejected Friday. The State Capitol Commission voted 7-5 against issuing a petition to moving the bust from the Capitol to the new state museum being built nearby. It would have been the first step in a lengthy process laid out by Tennessee’s “Heritage Protection Act” that limits the removal or changing of historical memorials on public property. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam called for the removal after last month’s deadly white...

Pandering to the regressive mob, Mayor Bill de Blasio refused to give a straightforward answer on how New York City should treat monuments to President and General Ulysses S. Grant, which include a statue of Grant on horseback in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (standing since 1896), and Grant’s Tomb in Riverside Park, Manhattan (housing Grant’s body since 1897). De Blasio’s dithering comes in the wake of his declaring a 90-day review of “hate symbols” in New York City for ultimate removal. While he was a hero and was integral to the Union’s survival and victory in the U.S. Civil War, Grant...

CHARLOTTESVILLE — A judge is scheduled to hear arguments Friday on whether to dismiss a five-month-old lawsuit that has prevented this city from removing public memorials to two Confederate generals, including a statue of Robert E. Lee that was the focal point of violent clashes last month involving hundreds of white supremacist demonstrators and counterprotesters. The Lee statue, in a city park, and a nearby statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, also on public land, have become the latest epicenter in a national debate over the propriety of civic monuments honoring the Confederacy and how the history of the slaveholding Old...

Matt Wuerker, the leftwing editorial cartoonist for the leftwingPolitico, was met with almost universal condemnation Wednesday for a ‘toon that not only mocked the victims of Hurricane Harvey, but mocked the victims in most desperate need, those requiring rescue from rooftops. Utilizing that form of bigotry and hate that will always be acceptable among the Beautiful People, Wuerker managed to lump all Texans into a single GodTardingRacistSecessionist. Ugly, ugly stuff. [...] In summation… In the middle of a historic hurricane devastating God knows how many thousands and thousands of Texans, the cultural supremacists at Politico are stereotyping those very same Texans in the...

Malcolm X, as a member of the Nation of Islam, preached anti-Semitism and called the white man "devil." After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X dismissed the murder as a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." In Spike Lee's biographical drama, "Malcolm X," a white teenage girl approaches the angry activist and says, "Excuse me, Mr. X. Hi. I've read some of your speeches, and I honestly believe that a lot of what you have to say is true. And I'm a good person, in spite of what my ancestors did, and I just -- I...

"The Bard," William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing. In Shakespeare's tragedy "Julius Caesar" -- a story adopted from Plutarch's "Parallel Lives" -- a frenzied Roman mob, in furor over the assassination of Julius Caesar, encounters on the street a poet named Cinna. The innocent poet was not the conspiratorial assassin Cinna, but unfortunately shared a name with the killer. The terrified poet points out to the mob this case of mistaken identity: "I am Cinna the poet." The mob answers: "Tear him for his bad...

If U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., gets her way, the names of three Confederate generals will be removed from street signs in Hollywood, Fla., and the statue of a Confederate general representing Florida will be removed from the National Statuary Hall in Washington.

The monument with a confederate soldier looking out over the town has stood for 100 years in front of the Bryan County Courthouse. As monuments like it are coming under fire around the country, it is finding help from an unlikely ally. “I’m trying to at least hold on and to claim the history and the heritage that is mine, not just white folk. But, that heritage belongs to me, too,” said Arlene Barnum. If you see Barnum, you might do a double take. She’s a black woman wearing a confederate flag on a necklace. “I’ve been run off the...

Asked how she could debase herself to the level of playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniel replied, “I’d rather play the maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7.” Now McDaniel’s iconic performance, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first and only black winner in that category until 1990, stands under threat of being erased from the cultural memory. A Memphis theater that screens Gone with the Wind annually announced that it is withdrawing it from future showings. At this moment that decision may look like...

God Bless Robert E Lee Johnny Cash When Robert E Lee surrendered the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was upset about it He said how dare that man resent an order From the president of the Confederate States of America Then somebody told him that General Lee had made the decision himself In order to save lives because he felt that the battle comin' up Would cost about twenty thousand lives on both sides And he said two hundred and forty thousand dead already is enough So this song is not about the North or the South but about the bloody brother...

RUSH: Get this. Have you all heard of the controversy at USC? The USC mascot is the Trojans, which some might say is a condom. But actually a Trojan is a soldier. Well, the Trojan mascot at USC football games rides a white horse. Do you know the name of the white horse, traditionally, whatever the horse is, there might have been a bunch of horses over the many generations that the Trojan has ridden a horse, it’s required a lot of horses, always a white horse. The horse’s name is Traveler. Well, guess who else’s horse was named Traveler?...

JACKSON, Miss. — The U.S. Supreme Court is asking attorneys for Mississippi's governor to file arguments defending the Confederate battle emblem on the state flag. The court on Tuesday set a Sept. 28 deadline for the filing. Mississippi has the last state flag featuring the Confederate battle emblem. Critics say the symbol is racist, and supporters say it represents history. Carlos Moore, an African-American attorney in Mississippi, filed suit in 2016 seeking to have the flag declared an unconstitutional relic of slavery.

It’s not just about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The national soul-searching over whether to take down monuments to the Confederacy’s demigods has extended to other historical figures accused of wrongdoing, including Christopher Columbus (brutality toward Native Americans), the man for whom Boston’s Faneuil Hall is named (slave trader) and former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo (bigotry). Historians interviewed by The Associated Press offered varying thoughts about where exactly the line should be drawn in judging someone’s statue-worthiness, but they agreed on one thing: Scrapping a monument is not a decision that should be made in haste during political fervor....