True Left

What began Saturday as a three-day “occupation” of the Santa Fe Plaza by Native activists and their supporters culminated on Indigenous Peoples Day with protesters toppling a controversial war monument.

About 50 people used a rope and chains to bring the obelisk down.
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Erected in 1866, the Plaza centerpiece, sometimes called the Soldiers Monument and constructed to honor to Civil War Union soldiers, has spurred several demonstrations in Santa Fe this year amid a nationwide call for racial justice.

Native activists and other protesters have long objected to a plaque on one side that said the obelisk was dedicated, in part, to “heroes” who died in battle with “savage Indians.”

The plaque has sustained damage. Decades ago, a man chiseled away the word “savage,” and in late June, part of the plaque was broken off during an act of vandalism.

Webber said just before a planned protest earlier in June that the monument’s removal from the public park was “long overdue.” Following a failed attempt by a state-contracted crew to take down the structure overnight on the eve of the protest, however, Webber had not moved forward to remove it.

Four months later, just before the holiday known as Indigenous Peoples Day in Santa Fe, across New Mexico and in a growing number of U.S. cities and states, Webber released a statement continuing to call for a community conversation about the obelisk’s future.

He said he did not believe he had the unilateral authority to remove it.

After two days of peaceful protests, activists took the matter into their own hands.
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“It was a really emotional moment for me. For all that it represents, this type of monument shouldn’t exist,” Cipriana Jurado, 53, an Indigenous woman from Chihuahua, Mexico, said in Spanish.

“There is so much to celebrate here and in Latin America that existed before European culture,” she added.

As we approach Monday’s national observance honoring Christopher Columbus, I am joined by many fellow Native and non-Native Americans and Washington-area residents in reconsidering Columbus’s actions against Indigenous populations and indeed the justification for honoring and memorializing this complicated and divisive historical figure.

We know the history of Christopher Columbus. He embarked on a very consequential journey in 1492. He was not the first European to visit present-day North America. In fact, he discovered nothing. For Native peoples, his legacy is clear. He murdered, tortured and enslaved the indigenous Taíno, Lucayan, Arawak and Cigüayos. He introduced death and human suffering on a scale unknown to these peoples. In a letter to his benefactor King Ferdinand II of Spain, Columbus described his conquest: “I found many islands inhabited by men without number, of all which I took possession . . . no one objecting.” They did object, and they did fight. Indigenous peoples continue to fight, reclaim, resist, protest, create and, in many cases, thrive.

Columbus’s early incursions across these lands began a 500-plus-year ascendancy of European Christians and their descendants. It is a history of loss and trauma for many that includes the attempted extermination of Native peoples, the abduction and enslavement of African peoples, the continued devaluing of Black life and the institutionalized racism and bigotry that confront those who are Black, Indigenous or people of color. Columbus should be considered the progenitor of white supremacy. Let us remember him for that.

To be clear: Columbus is famous because he was a thief. He took resources, lands, personal belongings and many lives. He abducted human beings. He stole the futures of countless people. That was his impact.

On the side of his fountain, not far from the depiction of Columbus perched above a forlorn Native man, the memorial inscription proclaims that he “gave mankind a new world.” Here, mankind is exclusively White, Christian and European — it is explicit on whose behalf his quest was made. The world he discovered was not new. It was old and home to many families and distinct cultural communities.

(CNN)A collection of Confederate monuments, markers and weaponry that has long stood outside the courthouse in Fairfax County, Virginia, is no longer on display.

Fairfax County Commissioner Jeff McKay confirmed the county has removed and will relocate the items in a tweet earlier this month.

In a follow-up tweet, McKay revealed their immediate fate: A Virginia Department of Historic Resources marker will be returned to the state, a John Quincy Marr monument will be given to the Stuart Mosby Historical Society, and the Dahlgren howitzers -- a type of gun used for firing shells -- will be given to Manassas National Battlefield Park.

"We started today with a Fairfax County that better reflects our values," McKay said.

More than 200 statues, streets and buildings in Wales named after historic Britons have been identified as having connections to the slave trade, according to a Welsh government-ordered audit.
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    13 monuments, buildings, or street names commemorating people who took part in the African slave trade.
    56 monuments, buildings, or street names commemorating people who owned or directly benefited from plantations or mines worked by the enslaved.
    120 monuments, buildings, or street names commemorating people who opposed abolition of the slave trade or slavery.
    20 monuments, buildings, or street names commemorating people accused of crimes against black people, notably in colonial Africa.
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Francis Drake: Three streets named after him.

Thomas Picton: Four monuments, five buildings and 30 streets.

Lord Nelson: Seven monuments, six buildings and 18 streets.

King William IV: Five buildings and seven streets.

Winston Churchill: Two buildings and 13 streets.

Duke of Wellington: Two monuments, 14 buildings and 32 streets.

William Gladstone: Three monuments, five places, 26 streets.

Robert Peel: One street.

George Canning: One street.

Cecil Rhodes: One street.

RICHMOND — A statue of a Black teenage girl who dared challenge segregation in Virginia schools could soon stand beside George Washington in the U.S. Capitol.

Barbara Rose Johns, who as a 16-year-old in 1951 led a protest of poor learning conditions for Black students in Farmville and helped dismantle school segregation nationwide, has been chosen by an advisory commission to replace Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as one of two figures representing Virginia in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

The bronze statue of Edward Douglass White Jr., until recently the only Louisianan ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court but one who fought for the Confederacy and upheld racial segregation laws, disappeared Wednesday from its pedestal on the steps of the state Supreme Court building in New Orleans.
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White, a Louisiana native who died in 1921, fought as a teenager for the South in the Civil War and afterward took part in the Battle of Liberty Place, an armed White supremacist uprising that in 1874 briefly wrested control of New Orleans from the Reconstruction-era government. His tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, from 1894 until his death, saw him vote in the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson and several other infamous decisions upholding Jim Crow racial segregation and stripping Black Americans of civil rights.
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White grew up in a prominent Thibodaux family of slaveholding sugar planters. His father and namesake, Edward Douglass White Sr., was governor of Louisiana from 1835 to 1839 and served nine years in Congress.
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"We’re happy to see that it's no longer in public view but also disappointed they would have the temerity to put it inside to try to satisfy those who want to celebrate its White supremacist history," said Malcolm Suber, one of the leaders of the activist group Take 'Em Down NOLA. "We don’t think he should be honored in any kind of way, so we will continue our fight."
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A separate statue of White in the U.S. Capitol in Washington also has also been slated for possible removal. In July, the House of Representatives voted by a wide margin to boot statues and busts of numerous prominent Confederates and other proponents of slavery — a list that included White, although the details of his military service are hazy — from the building.

The North Carolina Supreme Court has announced plans to remove the portrait of Thomas Ruffin, a former chief justice who was a slave owner, from one of its walls.
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Ruffin, who owned slaves in the 1800s and served on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1829 to 1852, firmly believed owners held absolute power over those whom they enslaved. He once wrote slave owners should not be convicted of assault or battery against their human property.
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Earlier this year, a smaller portrait of Ruffin was removed from another courthouse, as was his statue from the entrance of the state’s Court of Appeals building, which was once named after him.

Ruffin has been described as “particularly brutal in his ownership of slaves.” During his time serving on the North Carolina high court, he overturned the conviction of a slave owner named John Mann, who shot a female slave after she refused his orders.

According to the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts, “In that case, in which an enslaved woman had been shot in the back after fleeing a brutal whipping, Ruffin rejected the notion that a slave owner could be guilty of assault or battery of an enslaved person, writing, ‘The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect … This discipline belongs to the state of slavery.’”

Black troops defending the US Capitol from pro-Trump rioters took a moment to snap a photo with Rosa Parks' statue