Confederate Removal

From USA Today:

"Confederate memorial at Ky. university to be removed"

Saying it no longer has a place here, Louisville's mayor and its university's president announced that a 121-year-old Confederate monument on the University of Louisville campus is being removed. Mayor Greg Fischer and President James Ramsey of the University of Louisville gathered Friday at the monument across from the Speed Art Museum, joined by several city and university officials and students. "I recognize that some people say this monument should stay here because it is part of history, but I also appreciate that we can make our own history," Fischer said. The decision came less than two weeks after Ricky L. Jones, professor and chairman of Pan-African Studies at the university, wrote a column calling for the monument to be removed.  "We don't consider ourselves in Louisville to be part of the South," Fischer said in an interview after the announcement. In the Civil War, Kentucky was a border state. Since it became a state in 1792, residents were allowed to own slaves, and many fought for the South. But the state never joined the Confederacy.  Both Fischer and Ramsey’s offices said they had been working on moving the memorial for several weeks. Whatever motivated the decision, Jones said he is elated the monument will no longer be on campus. "Let's see the Confederacy for what it is, not some lost cause; it was a war about slavery," Jones said. "And that is fundamentally inhumane, so if that's a part of Kentucky history, place it in a part of Kentucky where people still have those beliefs." The memorial’s statues will be held in storage until an appropriate location is selected, the mayor's office said. The monument will be disassembled, and the bronze figures and embellishments will be cleaned and repaired — something that has not been done since the monument was erected in 1895. The Confederate monument has been a point of contention on U of L's Belknap campus for at least the past two decades, prompting student protests on several occasions.  In 2002, Ramsey's administration renamed Confederate Hall, which sat across from the monument, as Unity Hall. Later that same year, the university's board of trustees unanimously approved a $2 million plan to rename the area surrounding the monument as Freedom Park, honoring Louisville civil-rights leaders. A study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in April found at least 1,500 symbols across the USA honoring the Confederacy in public spaces. Most are in the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, but some are located as far away as California and Massachusetts. The law center's report said outside of the seceding states, Kentucky has the most Confederate monuments on public property with 41, far ahead of Missouri, which comes in second at 14. Removing the memorial was an easy decision and part of a larger conversation about race and symbolism in the country, Fischer said.

^ This is a great step in the right direction. There should be NO memorials to the Confederacy. They should all be removed and placed in a museum in the same way Nazi and Soviet symbols are. It's true you can not change the dark parts of your history, but you don't have to glorify them with memorials and naming things after them. ^

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/04/30/louisville-confederate-monument/83746008/