Confederate statues should be removed, and the fact they even stayed up for this long is a shame for this country.
Many confederate statues have already been removed recently, but the holdouts need to be taken down. The statues only stand for slavery and racial oppression and nothing else. Whenever someone sees a statues like that, they think of the confederacy and slavery, and them standing today just communicates how racism is acceptable in certain places.
One of the arguments people have against the removal of these statues is that they stand to remind us of the past and not to glorify it. A statue of a general on horseback does not remind someone of their faults, but glorifies them and their actions. Second of all, people are going to forget about slavery if they are taken down, people still remember what Hitler did even through stautes glorifying him and his ideals were taken down.
Most confederate statues were created during the 1900s, when many black Americans were fighting for their rights as human beings and while the southern states were pushing against that. These statues were put up to scare black Americans away from the southern states. These statues were put in front of capitol building and other major government locations to show that the government there still supported racism. These statues aren’t just a way of paying respect to those who dieed, but are meant to glorify those who fought for slavery and rasicm.
Recently, there have been people trying to get Christopher Columbus statues taken down, too. These statues represent, to most of America, the discovery of North America. To others though, these represent the ignorance of his horrible actions: he raped, murdered, and tortured thousands of Native Americans, and that is represented to them in the existence of that statue. It shows that those actions are acceptable because he found America.
These statues should be taken down and either put in museums or recycled to make other monuments of prominent black figures. These symbols of racism and slaverly should not stay up for any reason.