Wednesday, December 14, 2022
The Lost Cause
Richmond, VA, the capital of the Confederacy, has finally removed the last statue of a city-owned Confederate Civil War general. Confederate statues of Civil War generals were placed around the town in defiance during the Jim Crow era. They were PR symbols of a Southern culture that vowed never to forget its way of life. They were paeans to a society built on slavery and a commitment to states rights over the union. As long as they stood, African-Americans had to tolerate visible insults to their drive to become equal members of society. It is good they are gone and the false nostalgia of a better time exposed for what it is -- racism. It is also a lesson to communicators. It takes a long time to change culture -- in this case, more than a 150 years --, and there are millions still in the US who subscribe to the old way of life.
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