Just read - no comments needed

[Rsmyth]

And some other opinions. Many of you will be familiar with Harold Holzer who adds his opinion in the 4th paragraph.

Most of the Confederate monuments concerned were built in periods of racial conflict, such as when Jim Crow laws were being introduced in the late 19th century and at the start of the 20th century or during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. These two periods also coincided with the 50th anniversary and the American Civil War Centennial The peak in construction of Civil War Monuments occurred between the late 1890s up to 1920, with a second, smaller peak in the late 1950s to mid 1960s.

According to historian Jane Dailey from University of Chicago, in many cases the purpose of the monuments was not to celebrate the past but rather to promote a "white supremacist future".[18] Another historian, Karyn Cox, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has written that the monuments are "a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era". A historian from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, James Leloudis, stated that "The funders and backers of these monuments are very explicit that they are requiring a political education and a legitimacy for the Jim Crow era and the right of white men to rule."

In an August 2017 statement on the monuments controversy, the American Historical Association (AHA) said that to remove a monument "is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history." The AHA noted that most monuments were erected "without anything resembling a democratic process," and recommended that it was "time to reconsider these decisions." According to the AHA, most Confederate monuments were erected during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and this undertaking was "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South." According to the AHA, memorials to the Confederacy erected during this period "were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life." A later wave of monument building coincided with the civil rights movement, and according to the AHA "these symbols of white supremacy are still being invoked for similar purposes."

According to historian Adam Goodheart, the statues were meant to be symbols of white supremacy and the rallying around them by white supremacists will likely hasten their demise. Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale University, said the statues "really impacts the psyche of black people." Harold Holzer, the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, agreed that the statues were designed to belittle African Americans. Dell Upton, chair of the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote that "the monuments were not intended as public art," but rather were installed "as affirmations that the American polity was a white polity," and that because of their explicitly white supremacist intent, their removal from civic spaces was a matter "of justice, equity, and civic values."

According to Civil War historian Judith Giesberg, professor of history at Villanova University, "White supremacy is really what these statues represent."