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Should Boston Remove Its Confederate Monument?
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Today, President Trump sent out a series of tweets saying, "Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"
The president's tweets come in the wake of his many controversial statements since the violence in Charlottesville. And they also come amid the removal this week of Confederate monuments by the mayor of Baltimore, and the removal, by activists, of a statue of a Confederate soldier in North Carolina.
But it's not only our southern neighbors who have to deal with Confederate monuments.
Here in Boston, the state's only Confederate monument has been boarded up since June, when the governor said he wanted it taken down. The state is trying to figure out how to remove it, given it's part of a national historic landmark.
The granite block, which sits outside Fort Warren on Georges Island in Boston Harbor, lists 13 Confederate soldiers who died there as prisoners.
Guests
Barbara Berenson, author of "Boston In The Civil War: Hub Of The Second Revolution" and "Walking Tours Of Civil War Boston: Hub Of Abolitionism."
Michael Jeffries, associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley and author of "Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America." He tweets @m_p_jeffries.
Al Brophy, professor of law at the University of Alabama and author of "University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War."
This segment aired on August 17, 2017.