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Charlottesville said in a news release that the equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as well as a nearby one of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will be removed Saturday. Designated public viewing areas for the removals will be established in both parks where the statues are located, the news release said. — PBS
The city had been planning to take at least the Lee statue down since 2016, which in part prompted the deadly 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. A number of laws and local ordinances had put the removal in question before a court ruling earlier this year ultimately cleared the way. The... View full entry
Vestiges of racism and oppression, from bricked-over segregated entrances to the forgotten sites of racial violence, still permeate much of America’s built environment. — The New York Times
For the NYT, photojournalist Richard Frishman shares powerful images of sites, buildings, and places throughout the United States along with their almost forgotten, sometimes preserved, stories from America's segregated past. "All human landscapes are embedded with cultural meaning," Frishman... View full entry
Over the holiday weekend, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new "National Garden of American Heroes" that will contain statues depicting "historically significant Americans" and other historical figures like Christopher Columbus. The order comes as protest movements and... View full entry
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has issued a statement in support of the removal of Confederate monuments in American public spaces following a concerted effort to rid memorial sites of these installations. The statement comes as the National Trust for Historic Preservation and... View full entry
In the weeks since nationwide protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have erupted, dozens of monuments and statues celebrating the confederacy, Christopher Columbus, and other anti-Black and anti-Indigenous individuals and groups have been toppled across the country and around the... View full entry
After the tragedy, [a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va.] and another honoring Stonewall Jackson were shrouded, but only temporarily. Around the country, similar monuments have been removed. In some cases, only their pedestals remain.
We asked artists to contemplate these markers of our country’s racist and violent history — the space they take up, physically and psychically — and imagine what should happen when they are gone.
— The New York Times
Around the US many statues and monuments celebrating racism in our country's history have been removed, either partially or fully. The question currently remains on what we as a culture should do concerning the spaces these historical monuments inhabit[ed]. The New York Times asked artists to... View full entry
Slated to open in 2018, the Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama will seek to tell the truth. Six acres of land owned by the Equal Justice Initiative—the legal services nonprofit Stevenson founded in 1989—will memorialize the more than 4,000 victims of what Stevenson calls racial terror lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. A nearby museum will tell the history of slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration as a single narrative. — Citylab
Designed by MASS Design Group—which has previously worked on the Kigali Genocide Memorial—the memorial stems from a comprehensive report on lynchings released in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative. The memorial will feature six-foot columns, each representing counties where lynchings took... View full entry
“You can argue that any sculpture is art in some way, but it’s a loose argument,” Schoonmaker said Tuesday. “I don’t know that these statues are worthy of preservation as art objects so much as historical objects – made to preserve a lost cause, a lost war. They weren’t made with great artistic intent, but with political intent. And intent matters in this case.” — The New Observer
With the tragic events occurring in Charlottesville, much ink has been spilled over the topic of Confederate memorials: Should we keep them? Should we take them down? Is keeping them up a celebration of slavery and is taking them down erasing an important part of our past that we must face? With... View full entry
As many onlookers cheered Friday, a crane hoisted the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from the top of a monument in New Orleans.
It is the fourth, and final, Civil War-era landmark the city has removed since late April.
The effort to remove New Orleans' monuments has been part of a nationwide debate over Confederate symbols, which some argue represent slavery and injustice and others say represent history and heritage.
— CNN
On Friday, the final Civil War-era landmark in New Orleans, a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was taken down. This was the fourth, and final, Civil War monument that the city has removed since late April after voting in 2015 to remove the Confederate markers. Many have argued that... View full entry
The question of the monuments’ removal comes after several US states...have withdrawn the Confederate flag, acknowledging it as a symbol of racial hate...The [statues] are on public land 'which means that African American tax money is being used to maintain them', [says Carol Bebelle, co-chair of the Mayor’s committee for racial reconciliation]. 'What does it mean to be a city that pays tribute to part of its history that was about oppressing the major portion of its population?' — The Art Newspaper
More on Archinect:That new Texas Confederate Memorial on Martin Luther King Jr. DriveDocumentary to Explore Racial Discrimination in Transportation PlanningBuilding the First Slavery Museum in America View full entry
In Orange, Texas, the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans just built a large Confederate memorial park, complete with a classical-ish monument featuring 13 columns—one for each of the states in the short-lived, and utterly defeated, Confederate States of America. [...]
And this being Confederate sympathizers, they did not hesitate to build the memorial where the highway meets Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
— citylab.com
Related:Building the First Slavery Museum in AmericaHow America is failing to preserve its historic slave markets View full entry
