President Donald Trump recently spoke out against removing statues and monuments honoring the Confederacy by declaring that we as a country must “build upon our heritage, not tear it down.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Trump but instead of glorifying the Confederacy with statues and monuments of its generals in heroic poses of them riding their noble steeds, we should have statues and monuments that show the true face of the Confederacy — a rebellion of slaveholders against the United States.
The horrific reality of slavery in the United States can be shown by statues of a white man holding a whip, a black child in shackles, a black woman with child on an auction block, and many other grisly spectacles.
If we want to honor our “heritage,” we must acknowledge that our nation, for the first 77 years of its existence, allowed a segment of its population to enslave people based on the color of their skin. We should have memorials to these victims of this atrocity as a replacement for the statues and monuments of traitorous slaveholders’ Confederate generals.