President Trump has often spoken of General Lee’s bravery and he and others have criticis]ed the removal and toppling of Confederate monuments, saying it’s revisionist history.
White nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, triggering deadly clashes, to keep the statue from being removed. In the aftermath, similar statues sparked clashes in cities across the US.
“Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” President Trump wrote in a March executive order calling for paintings and monuments to be reinstalled.
But Mr Walker says putting Lee and Jackson on pedestals – even though they lost the war – is racist and promotes the Lost Cause ideology that argues the Civil War was a noble cause for states’ rights and not about slavery.
“States rights to do what? The reason for the Civil War was slavery,” he said, adding that it perpetuates the idea that the South was a “noble victim”, and that slavery wasn’t so terrible.
“If you could distance them from slavery, right, then you could portray them as heroes, even though they lost the war and were on the wrong side of history, fighting for something that was morally repugnant,” he says.