The Statue Wars Begin

Luchini is insanely witty, and the best French actor of his generation, no doubt.

The hands are toooo large.

You don't think the statue is anatomically correct?

I don't know about that, but I do think that this should be considered as a viable replacement for all those confederate statues.

Other than the oversized hands.

Here's my compromise on "historical" Confederate statues.

If it was erected after 1875, it wasn't a memorial, its a stick in the eye of African Americans. Period. NO discussion.

If its not a memorial to fallen Confederate military in a real cemetery its not a memorial, its a stick in the eye of African Americans. Period. NO discussions.

If someone wants to have a Sons of the Confederacy building or a Sons of the Confederacy Park or a Confederate Military Cemetery - all public buildings, parks and cemeteries excluded - then put their traitor fetishes on display there where others don't have to see it.

Someone might want to argue about history, but what kind of history gets learned by a statue to a Confederate soldier in a town square dedicated in 1910, but that a stick in the eye hurts and its meant to stifle the political will of the majority population of several southern states.

In my memory I have the images of colored only water fountains and chain gangs all black in chains, all white with the shotguns and horses. Public displays of white power definately was served by Confederate "memorials".

Confederate Reminders is much more like it. Dixie rags are the equivalent of Nazi rags. There are no memorials outside of a cemetery Erwin Rommel, why do we need even one of R.E. Lee? Why did UT in Austin have one (just lately taken down)?

UT’s first black students faced significant discrimination on the long road to integration



http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2014/04/04/ut%E2%80%99s-first-black-students-faced-significant-discrimination-on-the-long-road-to

Leon Holland and his wife Peggy hold up a picture of Leon with Peggy and his mother at his first military commission. The Hollands are members of the Precursors, a group of some of the first African-American students to attend the University.
Photo Credit: Pu Ying Huang | Daily Texan Staff
Tags

Leon Holland Lonnie Fogle Peggy Holland University of Southern California

These tags are automatically generated. The Daily Texan does not guarantee their accuracy.
Published on April 4, 2014 at 12:28 am
Last update on April 4, 2014 at 12:34 am
By Leila Ruiz

Leon Holland could live in the dorms but was not allowed to eat in any cafeterias. Holland could attend classes but could not take part in nearly any student organizations. He could cheer for his school’s football team but could not expect to see any athletes who looked like him.

In the fall of 1956, Holland was a member of the first black undergraduate class allowed into the University.

Today, Holland is a proud member of the Precursors, a group of some of the first black students to attend and integrate the University. Lonnie Fogle, the current president of the Precursors, said the organization was originally an old group of alumni friends who used to gather for the Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays, informally calling themselves The Dudes. They changed the name to be more inclusive to women and organized themselves more formally in 2005.

Leon said he vividly remembers attending the first football game of the 1956 season, in which the Longhorns played the University of Southern California. USC had black players on its team, but UT did not.

“Throughout the game, we’re sitting here … surrounded with nothing but [the chant] ‘Kill that nigger,’ talking about the black player on USC’s team, running up and down the field, trouncing UT’s team,” Holland said. “‘Gee, who are you going to pull for?’ ‘I’m going to pull for USC.’ … That’s what set the tone for the rest of the time here.”

Peggy Holland, Leon’s wife and a fellow Precursor, began attending UT in 1958. As a female student in the business school, Peggy was even more of a minority than her husband.

“I truly hated [the way I was treated], but it wasn’t in me to give up,” Peggy said of her time at the University. “I stayed because we had a right to be there.”

Because of their segregated living situations, black students grew especially close and often passed notes about which professors to take. Peggy said certain professors, such as Seward Robb, went out of their way to help and welcome black students. Other professors refused to call on black students in courses where class participation was a mandatory part of the grade, resulting in unfair markdowns. “That’s why I sort of pointed [toward recognizing] what took place,” Leon said. “You could be bitter, yes, but you also have to know that this is building awareness, and we all have to work together to improve it and keep making progress.”

Fogle said he recalled participating in a sit-in at Kinsolving residence hall to protest the treatment of black students on a Friday night in October 1961. The following morning, the dean called every black student on campus into his office and individually questioned them. All of the students refused to answer or name any of their peers as participants in the protest.

“He said, ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ ‘What does it mean?’ ‘You’re on probation.’ ‘Well, OK, what does that mean?’ ‘It means you can’t participate in varsity athletics, you can’t run for student office.’ … He listed a bunch of things,” Fogle said. “We already couldn’t do that because we were black.” Fogle said that when he graduated, the disciplinary probation was nowhere on his transcript, having been a scare tactic used by the dean.

Looking at the University now, Fogle said he would also like current students to actively stand up for others who are discriminated against.

“It’s part of every college experience — it’s so important to be socially active,” Fogel said. “It’s part of the education, and we acted because it just wasn’t right.”



The RE Lee statue and four other Confederate "memorials" were erected by a local businessmen between 1911 and 1920.

I like this one too.



Michelangelo, the Rebellious Slave.

Good timing:


More Than 4,000 Black People Were Lynched in the South—Where Are Their Monuments?
A new video from Equal Justice Initiative argues we need more memorials devoted to remembering racial violence.
By Jessica Wang / BillMoyers.com
August 26, 2017, 2:33 PM GMT

Recent events in Charlottesville have renewed the debate around whether to take down Confederate memorials and statues, but the latest short film from the Equal Justice Institute’s Lynching in America project shows that much more is needed to truly confront the bitter legacy of slavery and racial injustice.

Abbeville chronicles the unveiling of a historical marker dedicated to the brutal death of Anthony Crawford a century ago. Lynched in the town square of Abbeville, South Carolina, Crawford was a successful African-American farmer who argued with a white merchant for a fair price for cottonseed. For his “crime,” he was publicly stabbed, shot and hanged by a white mob, and his family was subsequently run out of town. Crawford’s murder counts as just one of the 4,084 racial terror lynchings identified by EJI in 12 Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, and yet is one of only a handful of deaths recognized today by public markers.

In fact, the Abbeville memorial is one of six lynching markers erected by EJI as part of an effort to force Americans to face our history of racial terror and reshape the national narrative about race. The other five can be found in LaGrange, Georgia, and four cities in Alabama. EJI is working with communities to install more. But it’s still a far cry from the more than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces that the Southern Poverty Law Center has mapped:

In addition to the more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public property throughout the country, there are at least 109 public schools named after prominent Confederates, many with large African-American student populations.

Not surprisingly, the Abbeville lynching marker stands alongside a monument to South Carolina statesman and noted white supremacist John C. Calhoun, and within steps of a Confederate memorial that praises the “right cause” of the Southern forces.

As researchers at EJI said in the organization’s latest report on lynching, “Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and monuments that memorialize the Civil War, the Confederacy and historical events during which local power was violently reclaimed by white Southerners. . . . There are very few monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of lynching in particular or the struggle for racial equality more generally. . . . Only when we concretize the experience through discourse, memorials, monuments and other acts of reconciliation can we overcome the shadows cast by these grievous events.”

I didn't know about that one. I've not been to France, much less the Louvre..
That must be a treat, preferably not in the summer vacation season.

Yes indeed!

I agree.

Yes!

Oh no, not a black guy... no way...

A Chinese dude or an illegal immigrant, but not a black guy... forget about it.

Why you want to remember such ugly scenarios?

What is wrong with you?

Build statues with symbols of hope, not so of misery.

What a shadowed personality of the dudes who want to build statues remembering the suffering of others... drink sodas... you need sugar or more sex with your partner to be more active, still being up...

Typical liberal use of the word compromise.

The liberals will back down on their current hate campaign once a truck full of good old boys drives up from the south and shoots up that big MLK statue in DC.

I bet a few rounds of .50 BMG would do some real damage to a stone statue.

So you believe in breaking laws and acting like a KKK night rider. Pretty brash talk for someone who seem to never leave his bunker.