[plurinshael]

Well, yes. It was unmitigated praise for men like Jefferson for a lot of years, which sent the message that those flaws you mentioned were nonexistent or unimportant. Now our society is attempting to demonstrate to people of color that those flaws as you say, which constitute extremely egregious crimes against humanity no matter how commonplace they were amongst the aristocracy of the time, were in fact real and were in fact important. The country remains rather divided on the subject but it sounds like these city officials are trying to say that black lives do, in fact, matter.

[chrisco255]

The country fought a bloody war 160 years ago to settle that dispute and it was pretty resoundly settled.

Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past. But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won. And their philosophy won. There's nothing inevitable about the destruction of monarchy. We might have been ruled by Kings and lords for another 2000 years. Who the hell knows?

The people aggravating other people for celebrating American heritage have sick aims. No amount of time or human sacrifice will be enough until all pride in U.S. is snuffed out. And then, what are we left with?

[pulisse]

> The country fought a bloody war 160 years ago to settle that dispute and it was pretty resoundly settled.

And yet laws that explicitly treated African-Americans differently were in force 100 years after that.

[chrisco255]

Yes and yet Americans helped save the Jews from extinction and yet they defeated Nazism and imperialism and held off communism and prevented South Korea from being dominated and won two world wars that could have ended in all of the Western hemisphere being conquered.

Of course, there's nothing black and white about history, it's all shades of grey. That goes without saying.

[danbolt]

If it's "all shades of grey", I feel like that leaves a lot of room for the feelings and discussion for how and what light they want to view their historical figures. I think "Never meet your heroes" is a popular saying for reasons like that.

I'm not American, albeit, so I might be missing something on a deeper level though. My opinion here probably deserves some grain of salt.

[rfrey]

There is only one nation in the world where a large number of people believe America defeated the nazis.

[chrisco255]

Yeah I know Stalin and the Russians had a lot to do with it too. But the U.S. fought on two fronts. As if the imperial Japanese and their slaughter of Chinese people was any better than the Nazis.

And suppose the U.S. stayed out of that war, what would have Stalin done with Europe, supposing they won outright?

[tomohawk]

Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades. Republicans enacted the anti-slavery and equality amendments. Republicans integrated the federal civil service and military. Democrats created the KKK, Jim Crow, and resegregated the federal government first chance they got (Woodrow Wilson).

There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that, and one of the reasons is the aspirational words in the Declaration, which has inspired generation after generation to live up to what it says, and make a more perfect union.

[dragonwriter]

> Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades

Large parts of the Democratic Party did so for about a full century, until the parties flipped positions on race with Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the subsequent Republican Southern Strategy to exploit the disaffection of (mostly Southern, hence the name) racists that resulted from Johnson's move. The same group still resists the results of the Civil War, but now they are key part of the Republican base rather than the Democratic base, which is why the South is now a Republican stronghold rather than a Democratic one, why the Democrats that continued in Congress from that time over the next several decades were often either repudiating past positions or switching to the Republican Party, why the KKK has voiced it's support for Trump, etc.

> There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that

No, they realigned and switched sides (or the factions active in the fight switched parties, to look at it a different way.) They didn't move past it at all: the same fight is still happening.

[tomohawk]

The KKK is a footnote in history at this time. The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat. Obama said the eulogy at his funeral, and Hilary Clinton said he was "a friend and mentor".

The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats. In fact, the modern Senate is based on cloture, which was finally used to break the decades long delay.

Only six Senate Republicans voted against the bill in 1964, while 21 Senate Democrats opposed it. It passed by an overall vote of 73-27. In the House, 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act, passing with an overall 290-130 vote

[dragonwriter]

> The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats

Yes, and it was support by the Democratic President, the resulting alienation of Southern racists from the Democratic Party, and the exploitation of that alienation by the Republican Party that were key factors in the political realignment that moved the US from the post-New Deal Fifth Party System to the modern Sixth Party System.

[undersuit]

This comment is "historically accurate" but misleading. Even though the comment they are replying to tried to clarify the situation this commenter continues to push for their agenda without heeding the facts stated.

Political Parties are not set in stone, their goals and morals can change just as easily as your own personal affiliation can change.

[dragonwriter]

> The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat.

The person who was most recently a KKK member who served in Congress during or after the time of their KKK membership was a Republican at the time he served in Congress. The same is true of the most recent member of the American Nazi Party to serve in Congress. And these are the same individual, David Duke.

The most recent person to serve on Congress who had ever been a KKK member was a Democrat (Robert Byrd), but he left the Klan about 3 years before Duke was born, 5 years before Byrd first ran for Congress, 20 years before Duke joined the Klan, and 30 years before Duke was elected to Congress as a Republican.

[0815test]

> ...the parties flipped positions on race...

A convenient myth. The reality is that once the Southern vote became contestable as the result of Democrat party dominance breaking down, the Republican party managed to mostly grab it without appealing to racism. It's of course fair to criticize Richard "I'm not a crook!" Nixon for his Southern Strategy, but it's not something that describes the Republican party as a whole.

Of course the post-Trump Republican party is indeed very different, so perhaps the parties will have ended up switching after all; and on their overall, broad attitude to 'modernity' in a social sense, encompassing far more than just "race"! Who knows, it all depends on how much sticking power these things have.

[vkou]

> Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past.

And in many of these countries, the role of prominent figures in that history is, for that reason, controversial.

That's why even in the USSR (Which nobody could ever honestly consider to have been blessed with an overabundance of introspection), there's been both a parade with a tank column rolling down the Red Square every 9th of May and official defacement of monuments commemorating one of the 'chief' architects of that victory.

[dragonwriter]

> But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won.

No, it's not.

It's not like slavery isn't viewed as a horrific phase of history in the parts of world that were ruled by Britain and are still under either the British monarchy or a now-separate monarchy that happens to share both the same monarch and the same rules of succession, having never revolted against the Crown and either still being British or having peacefully separated while retaining ties to the monarch.

[wahern]

Nothing says thoughtful engagement like burying controversial subject matter.

It won't be long before right-wingers succeed in building a sustained narrative around MLK's infidelity and communist flirtations that permits them to taint public sentiment. That's par for the course for the vast majority of American Black activists. All the accusations of wrongful equivocation, etc, won't matter, because it's always more convenient to vilify and bury.

I guess it's technically some kind of social progress that traditional American icons are now being vilified and buried. There's the argument that white guilt is black empowerment. But it seems more like a lateral move and definitely not substantive empowerment of the disenfranchised. What the evolution of victim mentality over the past 20+ years has shown us is that whites and even the rich are able to play the role of victim at least as well as minorities. I suspect there were many more Americans reciting "blue lives matter or "all lives matter" than "black lives matter".

[nerdponx]

Infidelity and maybe being a communist is a lot better than literally owning other people as property.