Robert E Lee Research Paper

Faced by recent protests and controversial events, memorials and monuments remembering Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy should be removed from public areas because they were not originally built to honor their roles in the army but rather to convey the message of white supremacy and continuing slavery, and into museums or archives, as well as because of the person Robert E. Lee was. Most of the statues were built in the early 1900’s, during a time of racial segregation and the implementation of the Jim Crow laws. It is no coincidence that most of these statues were built during this time, when whites felt and were indeed superior to blacks. The message was clear that they wanted to maintain white supremacy and subjugate blacks. Eric Zorn writes

This, in fact, would be the most proper and effective way to handle the situation. It is the better alternative to removing these statues forever and essentially trashing them out. Museums are meant for people to learn about history, and having these statues will allow people to become more educated about the significance of them and the reasoning for them. People who oppose removing the statues concern about how it will “whitewash” and erase history; however, moving them to museums also resolves this issue. It is important to preserve history and putting the statues into museums will surely do that because of the role of museums: to educate people about history. In addition, statues of Robert E. Lee should be removed because of who he was. Lee, like many other people at the time, were slave owners. Not only was he a slave owner, but he was furthermore a cruel and harsh owner, as he often severely beat his slaves. One slave said that Lee was “one of the meanest men she had ever met” (Contreras). A popular counter argument to that is George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were also slave owners, so we should remove their memorials