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Are you even tangentially familiar with US history? US citizens have historically been right up there with Nazi level hate. Racism didn't just go away. It just became illegal to own slaves.

The vast majority of these statutes, including this one, were erected decades after the Civil War and have no historical value beyond being physical representations of Jim Crow. The guy that commissioned it purchased land and oversaw the creation of a whites only park on the site where it was erected. They were rallying points of hate when they went up and they still are.

It would be nice it it was just now, but those things were built as symbols of hate from the start.

Plus everyone and their cousin-sister has the middle name Lee.

Propoganda + Time = history.

The statue doesn't say much about the civil war. But it does say alot about the Jim Crow era in which it was built. Personally I think this is even more important because the Jim Crow era is far less well understood by most Americans, and far more relevant to the race issues we see today.

Exactly this. Plus, unfortunately, there are plenty of Confederate monuments and statues erected way after the Civil War whose sole purpose was "scare those black people into knowing their place." Some of those can find new homes in museums displaying the history of racism (with added context), but we can't preserve all of them. So melt the rest down and reuse them in ways that uplift people instead of oppressing them.

It's absolutely history but just not Civil War history. This is the Charlottesville statue and it's iconic of our contemporary far right nationalist problem. Imagine things like this being a part of an exhibit laying out the turmoil our country is going through.

Edit: A lot of key pieces of history are missing because people didn't look to the future. I think some of it should have been carefully stored in a basement somewhere. Out of sight for at least 20 years.

Unless the statue was erected by George Wallace, that caption is irrelevant. Put a caption of Lee's written words:

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.

This passage is commonly cut off after the full sentence before you get the full context in which Lee actually cares about how bad slavery is for white people and how slavery was good for the enslaved.

There was this kid in my 4th grade class obsessed with Hitler and Nazis apparently because he thought they were like James Bond villains or Darth Vader.

Yeah, I’m from the south but I love to shit all over the confederacy, and fuck Lee for being a traitor and siding with racists, but he was an extremely competent tactician. He shouldn’t be exalted for it at all but to say otherwise isn’t telling an accurate history of the Civil War.