Do you support renaming roads/schools/bridges to eliminate references to Confederate Leaders?

[el_bryanto]

20. It would depend on how it was done

I am very upset at neo-confederates and the fact that history is often taught so as to make them seem partially in the right. I don't know what would have happened if Lincoln had survived; what I do know is we lurched from Johnsons mollycoddling of the south to the Republican congress's more firm stance to pretty much forgetting about the whole thing. In particular the fact that we didn't preserve Black Civil Rights in the South is one of our national cancers.

That said, a blanket change imposed by the federal government would cost a lot of political capital, and I'm not sure it would have the desired effect. Republicans are never going to support such a program, and the South, by and large, isn't going to either. My guess is that even many Liberal Southerners would resent that action. People largely remember History the way they want to remember it, unfortunately. If we are going to spend a lot of political capital fighting and uphill battle, I'd rather we threw our efforts into reforming our law enforcement mechanisms, weeding out the murderous racism that is going on right now.

Turning back to changing the names of schools and the like, the best approach, in my mind, would be to pick one particular Confederate officer who was active in the Klan following the Civil War or who was guilty of killing blacks during the war and underline what he did; and ask why we celebrate this person. That could lead to a teachable moment, where we could discuss how all of the Confederates were fighting for the right to own slaves (regardless of what they want to pretend the civil war was really about).

Bryant