Twitter erupted this week at a video of a controversial Georgia congresswoman touting the idea that Black people should be proud when they see statues of Confederate leaders.
The elected official says these markers should remind African Americans of how far their people have come.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene released a video on social media with her thoughts about removing Confederate monuments and statues, stating that because they are historical, they have value.
The Patriot Takes Twitter account reposted the clip and within days received millions of views.
“We don’t want our statues taken down in our country. I don’t think you remove or erase history. So, I do agree those statues shouldn’t be taken down,” she said.
Taylor Greene argued that those statues, erected mostly in the early 1900s, after Southern states enacted segregation and pushed a variety of Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Black Americans, have historical relevance.
Greene said, “They’re part of our history. We should learn from our history. We don’t erase it.”
She also argued that her desire to preserve the statues is about preserving history and does not make her a racist.
However, Karen Cox, a historian, University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor and author of numerous articles and books on Southern history and culture, including “Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture,” states that the people who commissioned the statues had no intention of preserving history, but reshaping it.
“The UDC was very focused on the future. Their goal, in all the work that they did, was to prepare future generations of white Southerners to respect and defend the principles of the Confederacy,” Cox shared with FiveThirtyEight.
Another wave of these statues being built coincided with the emergence of the Blacks forming organizations like the NAACP, Blacks being allowed to fight…
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