Signs of the Times - Uriah Fields clarifies his call for removing Confederate symbols
November 2014
Letters to the Editor: Uriah Fields clarifies his call for removing Confederate symbols
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The following was sent to Uriah Fields, at the time of our publication of his letter

Mr Fields,

We have posted your letter at http://george.loper.org/trends/2014/Oct/994.html. As a postscript in the letter, you say

Wherever any physical manifestation of the Confederacy exists let everyone who believes slavery was a holocaust and that justice should be for all people act according to his or her ability to abolish or remove every vestige of it from human view.
I'd like to clarify our understanding of your thought. Do you mean that we should physically remove, say, the statue of General Lee from Lee Park? Or do something else about it?

Clearly, "every vestige" would include books about the Civil War, etc., which would not be removed, but I'd like to know how far you would like to go, and in what way.

Thanks,

Dave Sagarin
Senior Editor

To: Dave Sagarin,

Thank you for asking for clarification on my previous letter.

The answer is "yes." Physically remove the statue from Lee Park and all other similar Civil War Confederacy manifestations from public places.

I guess the best way to explain my view is: treat the Confederacy in the same way you deal with the Holocaust. Dare anyone make light of the Holocaust or suggest that it was just something in the past that we should forget about? If the Confederacy is dealt with in a similar manner I won't complain.

Yes, we should teach about the Confederacy in the schools, but that should be factual, with no cover-up or omission of the brutality, cruelty and the emboldening of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups, after the Civil War, that contributed to and, in many cases, conducted, lynchings.

And, to make it clear that during the Civil War when there were only 34 states in the Union, including 11 of them that had seceded from the Union and 4 other slave states that were loyal to the Confederacy; that of the Confederacy, included Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy and General Robert E. Lee, supreme general of the Confederate Army never went on trial for their crimes.

Think about how many of the 2.4 million prisoners in the United States, the world's number one jailer, 44 percent of whom are African Americans, are serving crimes for, in the vernacular of the streets, using pot. Where is the fairness then and now?

Uriah (Electronic mail, November 6, 2014)

Comments? Questions? Write me at george@loper.org.