Robert E. Lee and Me

Changing names honoring Confederate generals and removing memorials, apart from a few practical challenges, is relatively easy. Monuments can be moved into museums, and names on street signs can be changed. (At W&L, the four-ton statue of Lee napping in battle dress with sword at hand is too much to move, but Lee Chapel was renamed University Chapel.)

But to get rid of the world’s largest Confederate monument at Stone Mountain? That’s hard to imagine. How much dynamite would it take, and what about the optics? “Erasing history” would come to mind unbidden. . .

For full story, go to Salvation South.

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About Doug Cumming

Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, Providence and Atlanta; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
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