Joseph Sabino Mistick: One more Civil War battle

The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has sparked a national examination of conscience that has Americans marching in our streets and demanding an end to systemic racism.

Criminal justice and police practices are the top candidates for immediate change. But so much has been so wrong for so long that many aspects of life in America are being reexamined from our institutions to the symbols we embrace.

And while the symbols are not as important as immediate life-and-death decisions on the street, they do represent our values. Many believe that when those values change, so should our symbols. And that is why the attacks on certain statues here and around the world are more than a sideshow.

Some are easy to understand. Edward Colston was a 17th- century slave trader who made his fortune shipping more kidnapped Africans to America than any of his competitors. Last week, Colston’s statue was dumped into the harbor in Bristol, England.

Others that we have honored with monuments are more complicated because people are not binary — not all good or all bad.

A statue of Thomas Jefferson was toppled in Portland, Ore., and attacks have become common on the symbols of our nation’s founders, many of whom owned slaves. Not even our most learned historians have been able to reconcile Jefferson’s ownership of slaves with his writings about equality and freedom.

A London statue of Winston Churchill was surrounded with a box to protect it from protesters who claim Churchill was a racist. Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the moral dilemma, saying, “Yes, he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.”

Some supporters of Confederate generals’ statues argue that their heroes had nobility, too, but they are profoundly wrong. Churchill freed Great Britain from the threat of Nazi Germany, and Confederate generals committed treason. They were enemies of freedom, defeated while fighting to keep an entire race enslaved.

Most of the statues that celebrate Confederate generals were built when Jim Crow segregation laws were being imposed in the post- Civil War South to remind everybody who was in charge. At the same time, Southern propaganda began portraying the Civil War as a fight for state’s rights, when the truth is they fought to preserve slavery.

Just take them on their own words. South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession in 1860 baldly claimed that its main reason for seceding was the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery.” And all the other Confederate states made the same pro-slavery claims to justify secession.

It is no wonder those Confederate generals’ statues were erected so high. They rise above all passersby, as if to say they belong there, above the people who they believed should never be free.

And that expressionless stare they share, fixed forever, brazen and cold, looks familiar. It is the uncaring stare shared by those who would keep their knee on the neck of black Americans forever, if we let them.

It is time for those statues to go.