Time to remember Robert E Lee but not with statues or pub names
A statue of the Confederate General Robert E Lee has been officially taken down in Richmond Virginia. Numerous attempts to get it taken down had been resisted until the pressure of the Black Lives Matter movement finally saw it done.
The statue was one of many put up not immediately after the US Civil War but decades later to remind people who was in charge in the Southern US- slavers. Donald Trump called the removal of the statue ‘desecration’ and later claimed that if Lee had been in charge in Afghanistan the US would have won. The kind of view of history that makes even Boris Johnson’s efforts look tolerable
Statue defender in-chief Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden does not appear to have opined and neither does the hard right sect Save Our Statues.
It wasn’t just in the US that racists venerated Robert E Lee though. A few minutes from where I’m writing this at Tottenham High Cross there was for some years a pub named after him. The attached nightclub Charlie Browns was better known. The late Dale Winton DJ’d there and mentions the pub in passing without comment on Lee. Then again Winton who died in 2018 backed Trump in 2016.
Robert E Lee does however still deserve to be remembered as the Civil War General who led the military fight against the abolition of slavery. Remembering and cheering on are not the same things
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