Violence in Charlottesville last week over the removal of a Confederate monument has cities across the country considering what to do about their own tributes to the Confederacy. That debate is not limited to the south.
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin is calling for the city to grapple with its own Confederate monument located in the Forest Hill Cemetery. Soglin calls the 1931 monument, “a neo-confederate monument to racism and white superiority.” An organization called the Daughters of the Confederacy, whose aim was to paint a more flattering picture of rebel forces built the monument. Soglin says that the monument supports the ongoing hundred years of Jim Crow laws and supports lies about the treason of the Confederacy. It has nothing to do with prisoners of war held at Camp Randall or the burial of those Confederate soldiers.
His suggestion is to build a more “honest” monument with a goal of educating the public about what these organizations actually stood for. WORT’s Nina Kravinsky reports.