Kevin FoleyKevin Foley

Art is interpretive of the world around us and of the people who inhabit it.

In Italy, I saw Michelangelo’s David, a magnificent tribute to the male form. I once saw his Pieta, too. The Virgin holds the body of the crucified Christ in a moving work that captures both her pathos and her hope for His resurrection. When I was in high school I saw The Burghers of Calais, a sculpture by Rodin commemorating heroic self-sacrifice.

But what do the statues honoring the Confederacy’s politicians and generals represent? After all, these are the same men who started, prosecuted and lost a horrific war to save slavery, a despicable, inhuman, immoral practice.

“We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him-- our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude,” explained Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the eve of the Civil War.

Yes, I’ve heard today’s Confederacy apologists. No, the Civil War wasn’t about “Northern aggression” or “states’ rights,” as they insist. It was about just one thing: preserving a perverse economic institution that allowed wealthy and powerful white landowners to amass fortunes on the backs of black slaves.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” said the Mississippi legislature in 1859, echoing the declaration made in every Confederate state. “We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property.”

Thus, there is nothing about the Confederate leaders worth honoring. With the help of the clergy and yeomanry, they recruited or drafted hundreds of thousands of poor white southerners who owned no slaves to fight and die for the “cause” – saving slavery.

It’s an old story: rich men sending the less fortunate off to die in the name of money. We saw it play out again as recently as 2003. While young Americans perished searching for non-existent WMD in Iraq, the share prices of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, skyrocketed.

The statues of Confederate rebels are deliberate thumbs in the eye of those who know what the Civil War was really about-- despite the oft-repeated “heritage not hate” excuse.

The monuments must be especially offensive to our black friends and neighbors, reminding them of how savagely the South fought to keep their ancestors in chains.

Like the stars and bars, the monuments are an anachronism and have no place in modern, multi-racial America, where slavery has been dead for more than 150 years and the equality between whites and blacks is settled, at least in the law if not in practicality.

Black people today are tax-paying American citizens who should not be subjected to Stonewall Jackson on horseback when they walk through a public park. Imagine how a Jew in Germany would feel if a statue honoring Erwin Rommel went up. While the general may have been a military genius, he also fought for Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime.

But the Founding Fathers had slaves! Oh, please. Unlike the Confederate leaders, the Founders actually accomplished something. George Washington won America’s independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution. James Madison supervised the Louisiana Purchase.

Davis, Robert E. Lee and all the other secessionist leaders subjected their people to a catastrophic, unwinnable war that took decades to recover from while a quarter million Confederate soldiers lost their lives.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all,” Abraham Lincoln told the South as the war was winding down. It was his invitation to re-unite the nation, an opportunity to leave the repugnant legacy of slavery behind and become part of America once again.

Ah, in Dixie old times are not forgotten. Fifty years after the war, about the time the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying a national resurgence, the statues and monuments started appearing in public places, from New Orleans to Charlottesville. Meantime, we heard “the South will rise again,” “segregation now, segregation forever,” and Jim Crow and it seemed some southerners wished to not only dwell on the past but re-live it.

Fortunately far too much progress has been made. Too many real Americans today stand for the values that make our country a beacon of liberty and equality for the rest of the world.

If we’re going to have monuments in the South, let them be to the victims of slavery. Honor the families torn apart and remember the cruelty and pain inflicted on innocent people so we never forget this shameful past.

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Kevin Foley owns KEF Media Associates, Inc., an Atlanta-based producer and distributor of electronic publicity. He can be reached at [email protected].