Charlottesville

[L Verge]

For nearly a decade right after the war, the conquered Southern states were under federal and military control, so such efforts at recognizing their native sons would have been near to impossible. The creation of most of these statues came after their rights were returned to the Southern states. It was a way of taking back their lives and their dignity, imo.

The second wave of statues have a little less "respectability" in my mind because they came about in the 1900s as an answer to the growing civil rights movement. If we uphold the principles of free speech, however, works of art or sentiment can take the place of words in many cases.