Wilmington panel debates fate of Confederate monuments (NC)
Posted: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 6:32 pm
Updated: 6:37 pm, Tue Apr 26, 2016.
Wilmington Times-News
... Philip Gerard, a UNCW professor of English, noted that most Confederate monuments were erected in a narrow time frame from 1890 to 1925, when white supremacists were imposing a Jim Crow regime on the South. The monuments, he said, imposed "a political narrative" ...
Earl Sheridan, a Wilmington City Council member and a political scientist at UNCW, said he was "bothered" by some Confederate monuments. "My question is, how much political capital do we want to spend on monuments," he asked, when problems such as poverty, criminal justice and voting rights are more pressing ...
Wilmington native Chris Fonvielle, an associate professor of history at UNCW, noted that when his father was young, the town still celebrated Confederate Memorial Day as a legal holiday and that when he was a schoolboy, a portrait of Robert E. Lee hung on the classroom wall close to President Eisenhower's. "We've come a long way since then" ...
History librarian Beverly Tetterton cited the example of a plaque she had seen in a German city, on the site of a former synagogue, honoring the memory of Jews killed or driven away. Tetterton, who grew up in Minnesota, said she couldn't imagine a similar monument to Native Americans in her home state ...
http://www.greensboro.com/news/wilmington-panel-debates-fate-of-confederate-monuments/article_cde578fa-4b94-592d-be6f-acefc5333efd.html
