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Argumentative Essay On Confederate Monuments

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The battle about what to do with the Confederate monuments is not new. Unless we figure out how to honor infamous events in way that does not glorify them, we as a country will continue the long and complicated debate. There are many perspectives, but the four biggest are to leave them up, take them down, put them in museums, and learn more about them before making a permanent decision. Right now, the United States seems to be taking the side of forming a more educated decision, although some cities, like Charlottesville, have been making the decision of taking them down. The United States is a very undivided nation, which makes it difficult to come up with a solution, especially because it is impossible to make everyone happy. That is why, …show more content…

The people who are on the side “leave them up”, believe that the monuments represent only love and heritage, not hate. Sara Lane, an author for the Bowling Green Daily News believes that, “these are not monuments of hate. These are not monuments to slavery. Not one of the monuments suggest slavery was a good thing.” Although it may be true that there were some memorials built to remember those who fought with the Confederacy because they were forced to, most of them were not, and it is evident because they were built a long time after the Civil War ended. Many well known memorials, such as the Vietnam Memorial, were put up right after the event, and they were made to honor those who fought, and to help start the healing process. However, according to the article “How The U.S. Got So Many Confederate Monuments” by Becky Little, she writes that in the US, “most of these (700 some Confederate) monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865,” and that ‘“The vast majority of (Confederate monuments) were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s.’ If most of the monuments were put up over 30 years after the Civil War, were they really put up for the right

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