Category Archives: American civil war

Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names to two public schools

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Schools changed their names after 2020 George Floyd protests, but will now revert to old names celebrating slave-state leaders

An all-white school board in Virginia has voted to restore the names of Robert E Lee and other Confederate military leaders to two public schools in a backlash to the racial reckoning that followed the police murder of George Floyd.

The decision to restore the names of Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby was taken on Friday morning by the six-member school board in Shenandoah county. Only one of the members voted against the resolution.

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Sarah Palin says US civil war ‘is going to happen’ over Trump prosecutions

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Former vice-presidential nominee condemns prosecutors over ‘travesty’ and says ‘we’re not going to keep putting up with this’

A second US civil war is “going to happen” if state and federal authorities continue to prosecute Donald Trump, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin said.

“Those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice, I want to ask them what the heck, do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen,” Palin told Newsmax on Thursday night.

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US military academy begins removal of Confederate memorials from campus

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The elite military school is taking down monuments from its Hudson Valley, New York, site in accordance with Pentagon orders

The elite US military academy at West Point is removing Confederate monuments from its Hudson Valley campus in New York state, in accordance with a congressional review and orders set in motion by the Pentagon.

The removal, which includes a portrait of Gen Robert E Lee in Confederate uniform, began on 18 December. The academy, America’s oldest, said the operation to either take down or modify displays memorializing the Confederacy would be a “multi-phased process”.

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Richmond removes last city-owned Confederate statue after two-year purge

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The effort to remove Gen AP Hill’s monument was complicated as his remains were interred beneath it

The city of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy for most of the civil war, removed its last city-owned Confederate statue on Monday, more than two years after it began to purge itself of what many saw as painful symbols of racial oppression.

It took just minutes to free the statue of Confederate Gen AP Hill from its base, before a crane using yellow straps looped under the statue’s arms lifted it onto a bed of tires on a flatbed truck. After the statue was removed, the crew got to work removing the base.

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Is the US really heading for a second civil war?

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With the country polarised and Republicans embracing authoritarianism, some experts fear a Northern Ireland-style insurgency but others say armed conflict remains improbable

Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognised the full scale of the current threat to American democracy.

“At this moment, we must decide,” Biden said in Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. “What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?”

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It’s shameful that it took so long to bring down the statute of Robert E Lee

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Let’s hope Richmond makes its removal more than an empty gesture

When they lifted the enormous statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee from his pedestal and set him on the ground in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday, it was symbolically huge to me. On high, he was undeservedly venerated.

And for years of walking under him on Monument Avenue, going about my day, I always felt the city was in an embarrassing time warp, unable to completely shake its status as the former capital of the Confederacy.

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‘It’s a beautiful day for democracy’: Virginia removes Robert E Lee statue from capital

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Elated crowd cheered the removal of the bronze monument to Confederate general, erected more than 130 years ago in Richmond

For 131 years it loomed over Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of America’s slave-owning south, sending a chilling message about the resilience of white supremacy to generations that passed beneath.

But at 8.55am on Wednesday, daylight reappeared between a giant statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee and its granite pedestal, now covered with Black Lives Matter graffiti. In warm sunshine the towering sculpture was hoisted by work crews and lowered to the ground amid cheers, songs and whoops from a watching crowd.

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Removal of Confederate statue greeted with cheering in Virginia – video

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A bronze statue of General Robert E Lee was removed from its pedestal in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy.

In summer 2020, after Black Lives Matter protests connected to the death of George Floyd, it was ordered that the statue, one of the largest Confederate statues in the US, should be taken down. It was removed after a year of litigation.

Crews took down the statue in front of a crowd of about 200 chanting people

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Charlottesville removes Confederate statues at center of deadly 2017 protest – video

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Statues of Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson were taken down in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, nearly four years after white supremacist protests over plans to remove them led to clashes in which a woman was run down by a car and killed. A small crowd of onlookers cheered as the statue of Lee was hoisted away first, lifted by crane from its stone pedestal and taken away on a flat-bed truck.

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Three Alabama professors on leave over racially insensitive Halloween pictures

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  • Students demand terminations over photos from 2014
  • USA president announces independent investigation

Three professors at the University of South Alabama have been placed on leave over racially insensitive Halloween photos, the university said.

Related: Rochester police officer off streets after pepper-spraying woman with toddler

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‘Black resistance endured’: paying tribute to civil war soldiers of color

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In a new book, the often under-appreciated contribution that black soldiers made during the civil war is brought to light with a trove of unseen photos

A classic tintype photo from the 19th century showing a civil war soldier, whose garments are hand-colored in gold paint. The soldier, crowned by a gold frame, looks forward, holding a gun over his chest.

But rather than just any war portrait, it’s part of the overlooked history of African American soldiers who fought during the period. This one and more are featured in a new book called The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

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Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote

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How Republicans applied old school racism to new demographics, and lost

In March 1965, ABC interrupted a showing of its Sunday-night movie – Judgment at Nuremberg, a courtroom drama about Nazi war crimes – to show shocking footage from Selma, Alabama, where mostly Black protesters were being beaten bloody by mounted police with billy clubs as they tried to cross Edmund Pettus bridge into the city, demanding the right to vote.

John Lewis, then just 25 years old, led the way. “I can’t count the number of marches I have participated in in my lifetime, but there was something peculiar about this one,” he wrote in his memoir, Walking With the Wind. “It was more than disciplined. It was somber and subdued, almost like a funeral procession.”

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Tom Cotton calls slavery ‘necessary evil’ in attack on New York Times’ 1619 Project

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  • Republican gives interview to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
  • Senator wants to ‘save’ US history from New York Times

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Related: Trump aims barb at Reagan Foundation in fundraising coin kerfuffle

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Trump equates support for Confederate flag with Black Lives Matter

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Donald Trump has equated the Black Lives Matter movement with displays of the Confederate flag, saying: “I’m not offended either by Black Lives Matter, that’s freedom of speech. You know the whole thing with cancel culture – we can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the north and the south fought.”

Related: Trump's 2020 strategy: paint Joe Biden as a puppet for the 'radical left'

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Why Trump loves the US military – but it doesn’t love him back

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The president’s West Point speech went smoothly but protests have focused a harsh light on his use of the military

Donald Trump attempted to solidify his bond with the US army on Saturday, delivering the graduation speech to cadets at the United States Military Academy and boasting of a “colossal” $2tn rebuilding of American martial might.

Related: Top US military general Mark Milley apologizes for Trump church photo-op

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Every Drop of Blood review: how Lincoln’s Second Inaugural bound America’s wounds

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Edward Achorn delivers a fascinating account of an address which entered the national consciousness

As Abraham Lincoln prepared to take the oath of office for a second time, on 4 March 1865, the nation waited to hear what he would say about its future. Triumphalism at military success? A call to further sacrifice? Vengeance on the rebel South or an outline for reconstruction?

Related: 'What it means to be an American': Abraham Lincoln and a nation divided

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Beto O’Rourke’s ancestors were slaveholders, records reveal

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Exclusive: O’Rourke addresses family history for the first time and admits that he and his children are ‘beneficiaries’ of slaveholding

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke recently delivered an impassioned speech while meeting with the Gullah-Geechee Nation, an organization of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved on plantations from Florida to South Carolina.

The speech in Beaufort followed one attendee’s question about whether O’Rourke supports reparations, the idea of compensation for the descendants of slaves.

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