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Sometimes you have to have museums that focus on specific things. Like, you can have a museum of 20th century pop culture, a president's museum, Ellis Island museum. So that you can take a more indepth look at a particular subject.
I recall studying Emmett Till and similar in my 3rd grade class. That was 1973.
There is a plethora of materials and sources available to study this subject.
I was responding to this part of Ralph_Kirk's post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk
... His death was not a terribly unusual thing of the times. What made it unusual is that his mother refused to let it be another of the nation's dirty secrets. ...
Quote:
By June of 1963, at the age of thirty-seven, Medgar Evers was a hardened veteran in the fight for Civil Rights. Growing up in Decatur, Mississippi, he couldn’t help but be aware of race and how blacks and whites were treated differently. He had a close childhood friend who was white, and watched as they grew distant as they grew up. iii At about 14, Evers witnessed Willie Tingle, a black man accused of insulting a white woman, being dragged behind a wagon through the streets of Decatur. Tingle was eventually shot and hanged. As Evers walked to school every day, he would pass Tingle’s bloody clothes where they were left near the tree where he was hanged. ii Evers left high school early to enlist in the army during World War II. He served in the European Theatre and received an honorable discharge. When he returned at age twenty-one, Medgar Evers and his brother Charles successfully registered to vote, but on Election Day, when they actually tried to vote, they were turned away by angry whites. ii ...
To be honest, from what I've read, Emmett Till really didn't do anything that was particularly worthy of honor. In fact, he came across to me as rather crass: a 14-year-old boy supposedly bragging about his sexual conquests. Did he deserve to die? No, absolutely not. But did he deserve statues in his honor? No, not really. But the reason that he is worthy of memorializing is not because of the person himself, but rather what his death represented: the very worst of a racist, oppressive system.
Yes, this.
He was a teenager who was murdered. This is horrible, yes.
But he did nothing worthy of being "honored".
Save honor for those who are heroes, who sacrifice themselves for others, who save lives, who benefit society via their efforts.
He was a teenager who was murdered. This is horrible, yes.
But he did nothing worthy of being "honored".
Save honor for those who are heroes, who sacrifice themselves for others, who save lives, who benefit society via their efforts.
Like the victims of 9/11? Why do we build monuments and commemorate them every year? They were also just normal people trying to live their lives who were murdered by the forces of evil. How do we decide which victims deserves recognition? It couldn't have anything to do with the race/nationality of the perpetrators vs. the victims, could it?
I say we build a statue of Emmett Till's mother. What she did took some guts.
Like the victims of 9/11? Why do we build monuments and commemorate them every year? They were also just normal people trying to live their lives who were murdered by the forces of evil. How do we decide which victims deserves recognition? It couldn't have anything to do with the race/nationality of the perpetrators vs. the victims, could it?
I say we build a statue of Emmett Till's mother. What she did took some guts.
I think no victim deserves honor unless their victimhood was related somehow to a heroic deed. Ex:someone murdered while trying to defend someone else who is being attacked.
Absolutely not about race, how ridiculous.
I don't agree the 9/11 victims deserve a monument any more than Emmett Till. They did nothing heroic.
A monument to the first responders is more fitting.
Honoring victims is insulting to true heroes who voluntarily incur risk to benefit/save/aid others.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kthnry
Like the victims of 9/11? Why do we build monuments and commemorate them every year? They were also just normal people trying to live their lives who were murdered by the forces of evil. How do we decide which victims deserves recognition? It couldn't have anything to do with the race/nationality of the perpetrators vs. the victims, could it?
I say we build a statue of Emmett Till's mother. What she did took some guts.
Yes. Absolutely. I can't imagine being brave enough to insist on an open casket if my beloved son looked like Emmett did when he was buried.
Monuments to people are about honoring them. Victims of systemic racial violence merit the honoring of their memory. Perpetrators of enslavement, and those who defended such, do not merit said honor. Declining to honor them is not whitewashing. No one was white-washing Iraqi history when statues of Saddam Hussein were torn down in 2003. No one white-washed history in the Eastern bloc when statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Dzerzhinsky were torn down in 1991. Where are all the statues of Benedict Arnold? There aren't any, because as a traitor he is deemed unworthy of being so honored. Yet the story of Benedict Arnold is widely known, which demonstrates how baseless is the assertion that to not honor people with statues is akin to writing them out of history. And no one is white-washing history when it is decided that those traitors whose treachery was rooted in the pursuit of perpetuating enslavement - and the historical record leaves no doubt that the Confederacy existed solely to do precisely that - should not be honored.
A few statues of Lenin and Stalin were torn down. Thousands more remain, and thousands of streets are still named after them.
Like the victims of 9/11? Why do we build monuments and commemorate them every year? They were also just normal people trying to live their lives who were murdered by the forces of evil. How do we decide which victims deserves recognition? It couldn't have anything to do with the race/nationality of the perpetrators vs. the victims, could it?
I say we build a statue of Emmett Till's mother. What she did took some guts.
Or memorials of the Oklahoma City bombing, of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
There are monuments that serve as memorials to the victims of the sinking of the Titanic, to communist repression, to the victims of the Mountain Meadows massacre, to the Boston Massacre. And countless other victims of violence throughout history.
Yet no one ever seems to complain about those. Yet society dares to reconsider whether treason in the name of enslavement merits honoring said traitors, and suddenly memorials to victims of the systemic violence perpetrated against the same ethnic group those traitors fought to enslave have to go?
That.
Makes.
Zero.
Sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by james777
A few statues of Lenin and Stalin were torn down. Thousands more remain, and thousands of streets are still named after them.
A great many statues were torn down, not 'a few'. But I'm wondering as to your point.
No one - except for maybe communists - protested that it amounted to 'erasing history'. But even they probably didn't bother with such a silly argument, and instead merely claimed that Lenin and Stalin deserved to be honored. Certainly, the crowd who thinks that Confederate history is taught by statue (history is never taught by statue) didn't decry the pulling down in 1991 of those statues of oppressors. Why? Because no one really think that it's wrong not to honor people with statues.
The people who admire and respect those who made their mark in history solely for being pro-enslavement know "But you're erasing history!" simply sounds a lot better than "We must continue to honor those who fought to perpetuate slavery!".
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