They did their best 2 9, 2:24am

Look, people. The purpose of Confederate statues is not to honour the war dead -- it's to send a message to Southern blacks, saying, "This is not your land." How do we know this? Because almost all of those statues were put up during the Civil Rights era. Links: http://theweek.com/speedreads/718507/striking-graphic-reveals-construction-confederate-monuments-peaked-during-jim-crow-civil-rights-eras and https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/15/16153220/trump-confederate-statues

There was also, directly after Brown vs. Board of Education, a spate of renaming schools (especially majority-black schools) after Confederates.

To everyone who says, "Well, why don't they just put the statues in museums?" -- those statues are cheap, mass-produced crap that's not worth putting in a museum. Notice how, in the videos of people pulling down Confederate statues, they fold like taffy? There's a reason for that: https://qz.com/1054062/statues-of-confederate-soldiers-across-the-south-were-cheaply-mass-produced-in-the-north/

Oh, also? The Civil War was about slavery. How do we know this? Because each state's Articles of Secession says so. The ones that don't say it baldly say they're seceding because of "states' rights"... but when you read further to see which rights, it turns out that it was the "state's right" to own slaves. Some links: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/04/582468315/why-schools-fail-to-teach-slaverys-hard-history https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1030256938834165760.html