Confederate Monuments Must Come Down

The top ten states with Confederate monuments account for over 4,000 lynchings in 73 years from 1877 to 1950. These monuments are monuments to people who stood for white supremacy and who murdered American soldiers. The people on these monuments got there because of what they did to uphold the core beliefs of the Confederacy.

There were two spikes to these monuments – 1896 to 1921 when America was about the business of putting Black people back in their place after Reconstruction. There were lynchings at a rate of more than every week. Separate but equal was the law of the land. Woodrow Wilson was screening "The Birth of a Nation" in the White House.

These monuments are coming down, and it's the first step to a true reckoning with America's racialized past. We have to tell the truth about how we got here before we can move forward.