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1/x I've spent years teaching countless law students about the history of slavery, the confederacy, & Reconstruction. That history is
2/x complicated but one who studies it critically can fail to see where and how the moral levels ne was drawn in the civil war. The fact
3/x that in 2017 the President of the United States refers to confederate statutes that as "beautiful" when they were erected post
4/x Reconstruction to symbolize the rebirth of the confederacy is, to me, a clear statement of where he wants to take the country. This much
5/x cannot be denied: at the end of Reconstruction former confederate states took several steps to reassert confederate power. First they
6/x convened new state constitutional conventions to rewrite white rule into their constitutions. Second, their legislatures enacted
7/x sweeping laws, including ding voting rights restrictions, to remove black political power. Third by law and custom they put in place a
8/x Jim Crow system that would last and has lasted to the present day. Fourth, they systematically rewrite the history of slavery and the
9/x war to portray their cause as noble and just. Part of rewriting that history was to erect statutes of men who chose to murder their
10/x their fellow citizens in an attempt to hold into slavery millions of other human beings. If, knowing all that, you describe these
11/x statutes as beautiful, then yes you are telling me what kind of country you want this place to be. But if I can take any measure of
12/x comfort from this obscene display by the president, it is this: perhaps now we can finally stop pretending that Dubois wasn't right
13/13 when he predicted that our problem in this country was always going to be the color line.
PS. Apologies for the typos. I was typing too fast on my phone because I was so angry at the immense stupidity and cowardice of all this.
