This Independence Day weekend, I’ll take a stand and say that confederate statues erected during the Jim Crow era to celebrate slavery and intimidate blacks should be torn down. But the decision to tear down a statue should be made democratically, not by mob rule.
When mobs started tearing down Confederate statues, people asked what would come next: would statues of Jefferson and Washington be torn down as well? Then statues of Jefferson and Washington were toppled in Portland.
Washington and Jefferson probably contributed more to human freedom than all but a handful of other people in the history of the world. But they owned slaves, so their statutes probably deserved it, right? Continue reading
