Vicksburg trip shows why we shouldn’t rush to tear down statues, even of Confederates

As a follow up to my earlier commentary on the desecration of the nation’s tributes to historic leaders who shaped our country, I traveled to see about 1,400 statues, monuments and memorials from the Civil War.

Then, a few days ago, news reports came of prominent African American leaders and others who were rallying around the statue in Washington depicting President Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave.

Star Parker, president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education described why they were protecting this informative bronze image.

“We do not believe that America is so systematically racist that we should divide ourselves now and start having discussion with domestic terrorists about which statues stand and which statues fall,” she said.

She went on to defend their actions by citing the efforts of Charlotte Scott, a freed person from Virginia, to raise the money needed to build the statue. She said the image of the slave that Lincoln had set free as “getting up to embrace his freedom.”

Parker added that the memorial “is too important in American history to be hidden away in a museum just to appease a mob or the insecure that thinks they need safe space.”

That report confirmed my purpose of making the trip to the National Military Park in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to see all those memorials, accompanied by my wife, son, daughter-in-law and our teenaged granddaughter.

The National Park Service describes the more than 1,400 monuments in the commemorative landscape as a fundamental part of the park’s purpose, which reflects the efforts of veterans groups and states from both sides to write their legacy on the landscape while healing and reuniting the nation.

Most people seem to be satisfied that the statues and monuments from our nation’s most devastating war are appropriately on display in such a place as the battlefields of that war. But many will never make a trip to one of those venues.

The journey from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to Vicksburg, for example, is a 760-mile round trip that probably can’t be accomplished in a day’s time. The battlefield tour itself, if done right, is at least a four-hour experience.

Being there provides an important opportunity to illustrate our nation’s long transformation from slavery through the near dissolution of our country, to what is now seen the world over as the land of opportunity and promise for all people.

We talked with our granddaughter about how the Union victory there, led by Gen. Ulysses. S. Grant, helped turn the tide of the war to ultimate victory. We described how it supported Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, forever freeing all the slaves, and secured his second term as president.

Yes, the U.S. was founded by imperfect men who would not agree on its very creation unless the awful practice of slavery was protected in both the Declaration of Independence and, 11 years later, our Constitution.

It would require the bloodshed of more than 600,000 to achieve the dual outcomes of preserving the nation and total abolition of slavery.

The opportunity to understand all of that should not be confined to museums and battlefields. It can more readily occur locally by standing at a statue such as the one Star Parker’s efforts are protecting,

Yes, the Confederate ones are of traitors, as are the ones of our Founders. So we explain that to our youth as we look upon the images of our history and prepare the next generation to learn from the past and ensure that our country’s best days for all people are the ones that lay ahead.