In Final Insult, Ghost Of Robert E. Lee Condemns Donald Trump
As you might have heard, Donald Trump got himself into a little bit of hot water yesterday.
Already under fire for waiting some 48 hours to explicitly fault white supremacists for the violence that stemmed from ... well ... from a rally organized by white supremacists, Trump turned the crazy knob up to a Spinal Tap-ish "11" at a press conference in New York on Tuesday.
You can read the full recap here, but for the purposes of this post, just note that at one point during the exceedingly bizarr
In news relevant to Trump’s national confession yesterday, Trump stated to for al to hear:
“So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down.”
And in a quiet fuck you to Trump, dateline …
“BALTIMORE – Confederate monuments in Baltimore were quietly removed and hauled away on trucks in darkness early Wednesday, days after a violent white nationalist rally in Virginia that was sparked by plans to take down a similar statue there.
“Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh told The Baltimore Sun that crews began removing the city’s four Confederate monuments late Tuesday and finished around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.
“It’s done,” Pugh told the newspaper. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.”
“Video taken by WBAL-TV shows workers using a crane to lift the towering monument to Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson onto a flatbed truck in the dark.
The monuments have everything to do with erecting monuments to black voter deprivation, segregation, discrimination, white supremacy and 20th-century racial tension. Mother Jones puts it like this:
“Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.
“No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don’t really understand this, but they should learn. There’s a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It’s because they are.”
These hulks of metal were erected to intimidate African Americans as part of an entire institutionalized form of intimidation evidenced by the behavior, actions and words of men made up White Citizens’ Councils mostly in the south, or figures like George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, or Bull Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama, who enforced racial segregation and denied civil rights to black citizens, and who directed the use of fire hoses and police attack dogs against civil rights activists and children protestors, and much worse.
I’m glad to see the comments and statement from Robert E Lee V, however don’t be fooled into whitewashing of the general’s legacy. He was a traitor to the country and a failed military tactician, on one hand. But the stories of his brutality against his and others slaves, his sitting idly by while free Northern blacks were taken prisoner by the Confederacy and immediately turned into slaves, and the consistent and deliberate breaking up of slaves families all paint a clearer picture of who he was.