Do statues tell us anything about history?

@Snowvixen No one is proposing banning Confederate museums. If that ever happens you can chime in and oppose it. I will oppose it too. Public statues are celebratory monuments. Museums are a walk through history.

And in case you didn't know, in my area, the erection of Confederate statues was the result of a push by the White Men's League, beginning in the 1870s. The White Men's League was a white supremacist, paramilitary organization formed to help deny blacks and Republicans the right to vote, end the Reconstruction government, and put governing power back in the hands white men and white men alone. They were closely allied with the KKK. Their goal was taking political power away from black people and instituting white supremacy.

The entire point of raising Confederate statues in my area was to celebrate white supremacy and intimidate black people. The statues begin to be erected in the 1890s when legislation and jurisprudence had once again given white people legal supremacy 8n the south.

Blacks were 40% to 47% of the population in Louisiana in the first 30 years after the Civil War. Mississippi and South Carolina had absolute black majorities. Four other southern states had populations that were over 40% black. In the 1870s, many whites were not allowed to vote due to their association with the Confederacy and waging war against the United States of America. So, in many places in the south, black people ruled due to having a majority of the vote. That's called democracy.

The White League instituted an intimidation campaign, including armed skirmishes with police and federal troops. Their tactics bore fruit by the turn of the century. They disenfranchised black voters by passing a new constitution in Louisiana in 1896 (or around 1896). Before 1896 Louisiana had over 130,000 black voters. By 1900 that number dropped to 5,000.

The US Supreme Court handed down Plessy v Furgeson also in 1896 legalizing segregation. By 1900, the south was the Jim Crow South, white men ruled again, and blacks were once again subhuman in the eyes of the law. All of this was due to the concerted campaigns of segregationist ideology and the intimidation of blacks by the violence of the White League and KKK.

Erecting those statues was a STRATEGIC move by white supremacist organizations. Their purpose was to let Negroes know they were once again under the thumb of white men and the United States government wasn't going to help them.

Any questions?