About a month ago, the city of Dallas put its Robert E. Lee statue up for auction. The first bid was $450,000. It was a pretty sleepy auction at firstpic.twitter.com/2CWVKVdYB3
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Who was going to win it? Who would even want this city's discarded Robert E. L statue, and who would have *this much money* to throw at it? That's when
@smervosh started working on this article:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/confederate-statues-dallas-nashville.html …Show this thread
Ultimately, it was LawDude who'd set the highest bid. So at 11:45 am central time, on June 5, for a price of $1,435,000, he became the new owner of Dallas's discarded statue of a Confederate generalpic.twitter.com/xPkRQwPKhM
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Dallas put up its Lee statue in 1936, in a ceremony attended by President Roosevelt. “It shall stand here on this busy corner of our city as a perpetual memorial to the character, valor and achievements of this matchless leader of our own Lost Cause,” the mayor said at the time.
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It was ordered taken down in 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/lee-monument-dallas.html …pic.twitter.com/c5SG07p2HU
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But, like, what do you DO with it after it's been taken down? Cities have taken a scattershot approach to how to handle these monuments, many of which appeared during an era in the 20th century when leaders and cities sought to memorialize hate.
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Which brings us back to LawDude. He turned out to be a local lawyer named Ron Holmes. He's not spoken publicly about what he plans to do with it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/confederate-statues-dallas-nashville.html …pic.twitter.com/rRRjk0DHrk
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So
@smervosh surveyed a few other cities and academics about where we are now, two years after Charlottesville, and what's become of so many Confederate monuments around the countryhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/confederate-statues-dallas-nashville.html …Show this thread -
Many of the statues were taken down in the days and months after Charlottesville, either by protesters or by the cities themselves. Many are just ... kinda sitting in storage.pic.twitter.com/B9tcPas7xO
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Baltimore, which also took its statues down in 2017, has received requests from "pro-Confederate institutions" to buy its statue of an official said. (The city declined.) (here's a story from the day its statues came down: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/baltimore-confederate-statues.html …)
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The American Civil War Museum, in so many words, does not want your city's old confederate statues. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/baltimore-confederate-statues.html …pic.twitter.com/0dlX5lY1nt
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One professor
@smervosh talked to suggested a symbolic, if not literal, torching of Confederate statues. “That is how you take the power of it,” he said.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/confederate-statues-dallas-nashville.html …Show this thread -
Meanwhile, Richmond, Va., on Saturday (today!) is renaming a major boulevard after Arthur Ashe. The road cuts across Monument Avenue, that one with its giant statues of Confederate generals.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/sports/richmond-is-at-a-crossroads-will-arthur-ashe-boulevard-point-the-way.html …
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I don't know the ultimate fate of the Dallas Lee statue and it's mysterious buyer, or the dozens of others that have been taken down but not (yet?) destroyed. Cities are, as
@smervosh notes, still figuring that out.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/confederate-statues-dallas-nashville.html …Show this thread -
But I want to end this thread by asking you to go read this incredible essay from
@kurtstreeter about the newly named Arthur Ashe Boulevard in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/sports/richmond-is-at-a-crossroads-will-arthur-ashe-boulevard-point-the-way.html …Show this thread
End of conversation
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