From Pine View Farm

Limitations of Statues 0

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Maureen Downey looks at efforts to change the names of schools honoring the Secesh and the obstacles those efforts are encountering. A snippet:

After the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which nine African Americans were murdered by a gunman radicalized by white supremacist websites, the Southern Poverty Law Center began to catalog all the Confederate symbols in public spaces across the country. In an update last month to its “Whose Heritage?” report, the center counted 1,747 Confederate monuments, place names and other symbols still in public spaces, including 195 schools. Georgia leads the nation in schools named for Confederates, followed by Texas with 40 and Alabama with 22.

The SPLC inventory revealed the effectiveness of a campaign by United Daughters of the Confederacy to rebrand the events of the Civil War as heroic, especially through the naming of Southern schools. “These names are living symbols of white supremacy, and there is a difference between remembering history and showing a reverence for it,” said Lecia Brooks, chief of staff for the SPLC, during a recent media briefing. “Removing namesakes that celebrate a revisionist Confederate past does not erase history; it corrects it.”

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