Thread: Black Pastor wants George Washington name & statue removed from public park

Pastor Wants Presidents’ Names Removed From Washington, Jackson Parks Over Ties To Slavery

August 16, 2017 10:13 AM
Filed Under: George Washington, Jackson Park, Susanna Song, Washington Park






CHICAGO (CBS) — A Chicago pastor has asked the Emanuel administration to remove the names of two presidents who owned slaves from parks on the South Side, saying the city should not honor slave owners in black communities.
A bronze statue of George Washington on horseback stands at the corner of 51st and King Drive, at the northwest entrance to Washington Park

Bishop James Dukes, pastor of Liberation Christian Center, said he wants the statue gone, and he wants George Washington’s name removed from the park.
“When I see that, I see a person who fought for the liberties, and I see people that fought for the justice and freedom of white America, because at that moment, we were still chattel slavery, and was three-fifths of humans,” he said. “Some people out here ask me, say ‘Well, you know, he taught his slaves to read.’ That’s almost sad; the equivalent of someone who kidnaps you, that you gave them something to eat.”
Dukes said, even though Washington was the nation’s first president and led the American army in the Revolutionary War, he’s no hero to the black community.
“There’s no way plausible that we would even think that they would erect a Malcolm X statue in Mount Greenwood, Lincoln Park, or any of that. Not that say Malcolm X was a bad guy; they just would not go for it,” he said. “Native Americans would not even think about putting up a Custer statue, because of the atrocities that he plagued upon Native Americans. And for them to say to us ‘just accept it’ is actually insulting.”
The pastor also said President Andrew Jackson’s name should be removed from nearby Jackson Park, because he also was a slave owner. He said he’s not necessarily asking the city rename the parks altogether. He suggested Washington Park could be named after former Mayor Harold Washington, and Jackson Park could be named after civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson or singer Michael Jackson.
Dukes said he’s not trying to erase history. He said black people should be able to decide who is and is not honored in their communities.
“I think we should be able to identify and decide who we declare heroes in or communities, because we have to tell the stories to our children of who these persons are,” he said.
He said parks, statues, or other monuments honoring Presidents Washington and Jackson might be appropriate elsewhere, but not in black neighborhoods.
“In an African-American community, it’s a slap in the face and it’s a disgrace for them to honor someone who was a slave owner.
Dukes said he has sent letters to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Park District asking them to change the names of Washington and Jackson parks. He shared the letter on Facebook.
“I am feeling ambivalent that I would have to walk my child, attend a parade or enjoy a game of softball in a park that commemorates the memory of a slave owner,” he wrote. “Therefore, I call on the immediate removal of President George Washington and President Andrew Jackson names from the parks located on the southeast side of Chicago. They should not have the distinct honor of being held as heroes when they actively participated in the slave trade.”
Representatives for the mayor did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A Chicago Park District spokeswoman pointed to the city’s formal process for renaming parks, which allows anyone to submit a request to the superintendent. The Park District board may vote on any such request after a 45-day public comment period.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/08/...-slave-owners/

Not surprised. We knew this was coming.

Originally Posted by MW

Not surprised. We knew this was coming.

What's so ironic about this is that they're all Democrats saying this stuff when it's the Democratic Party that refused to end slavery. Jefferson, Washington, all of them wanted to end it but they wanted the states to do it. Some states did, others didn't, therein lies the conflict that eventually led to the Republican Party and the Civil War.

Erasing history.

I'd like to erase the pastor's 501 C 3 tax status.

Breathtaking Confederate Monument Hypocrisy at Duke University


BY D. C. MCALLISTER
AUGUST 19, 2017

Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Bluedog423 Sculpture: Edward Virginius Valentine (1838-1930)

Duke University has cowered to political pressure and is removing the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from its chapel. The snowflake students don’t want it, so this paragon of higher learning is bowing to the will of the propagandized.

Here’s the thing. If Duke is going to be consistent (and I’m conceding leftists rarely are), they need to scurry on over to East Campus and tear down the statue of George Washington Duke because he was a Confederate soldier and, according to Robert Durden, author of The Dukes of Durham, owned a slave named Caroline whom he bought for $601. He also hired a slave from a neighbor to work on his tobacco farm.

In the 1920s, Duke’s son, Buck, gave a hefty endowment to Trinity College, and in appreciation, the school changed its name to Duke University in honor of Washington—a slave owner who fought to keep black people working in the tobacco fields under the strap of the white man’s whip.

Given this horrific history, the university must tear down all images of and all references to the Duke family, including changing the name of the university itself. If they refuse to go that far, they at least need to change their mascot to the White Devils.

Nothing else will be acceptable. How can they keep the statue and name of a slave owner who freely enlisted to serve in the Confederate army when they can’t tolerate the man who led that same army? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/08...ke-university/

6 Historical Figures Whose Statues SJWs Should Also Remove


BY TYLER O'NEIL
AUGUST 17, 2017



After the clashes in Charlottesville, a mania against Confederate monuments has swept the country. Local leaders in various states have decided to remove statues and monuments, while at least one black pastor in Chicago has called for excising even George Washington's name from public parks, and Anonymous has planned to remove 11 statues on Friday.

One plausible response is to defend the statues. Another would be to encourage the movement to go further.

Activists who cry for the removal of Confederate statues do so on the grounds that these leaders were racist, that they hurt people based on the color of their skin or their national origin. If those are the criteria, however, why stop with the Confederacy?

Racism has a long and varied history, and certainly these social justice warriors wouldn't want to defend racists, even if they were important inventors, politicians, or scientists, right?

Here are six people whose statues should be removed, if the Left insists on that sort of thing.

1. Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).

Woodrow Wilson, America's 28th president, wasn't just a racist. As president of Princeton University, he discouraged blacks from applying for admission. His book series History of the American People defended Ku Klux Klan lynchings in the late 1860s.

When Wilson was president, his War Department drafted black soldiers, and while it paid them the same as whites, it kept them in all-black units with white officers. When black soldiers protested, Wilson told them "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen."

The pro-KKK film The Birth of a Nation became the first film screened in the White House under Wilson's presidency. Under Wilson, racial segregation was implemented in the federal government, at the Post Office, and in the military.

In 2015, the University of Texas removed a statue of Wilson, along with one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, from campus. Statues of Wilson remain, however. Many stand across Europe, a prominent one stands in Rapid City, S.D., (pictured at left in photo atop article), and his presidential library and museum gives prominence to his birthplace in Staunton, Va.

2. Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922).

Bell Statue in front of the Brantford Bell Telephone Building. Photo credit: the city of Brantford, Ontario.

Alexander Graham Bell deserves recognition for inventing the telephone, but he was also a horrible racist. Bell served as honorary president of the Second International Eugenics Conference in New York in 1921, and led the eugenics movement during that period.

Based on the naturalistic worldview of Charles Darwin, many scientists in the early 20th century adopted the idea that human beings needed to continue to evolve — that natural selection involved choosing the strong over the weak, and that therefore human society should promote the existence of strong people at the expense of the "less fit."
Eugenics leaders saw evolutionary fitness in explicitly racial terms.

Bell made a hobby out of breeding livestock, and this gained him an appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan's Committee on Eugenics, which extended the principles of breeding to humans. From 1912 to 1918, Bell was the chairman of the board of scientific advisers to the Eugenics Record Office. Such organizations advocated for laws to establish compulsory sterilization for people who, in Bell's words, were a "defective variety of the human race."

To make matters worse, California's compulsory sterilization law (one of the results of Bell's advocacy) was used as a model for that of Nazi Germany.

The most famous and impressive monuments to Bell are in Canada. A statue depicting Bell in the style of the Lincoln Memorial stands by the Bell Telephone Building in Brantford, Ontario. The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site rests in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Alexander Graham Bell Memorial Park has a monument to telecommunications.

In the U.S., the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory stands in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Georgetown. The laboratory was created by Bell himself for the research and development of telecommunications technology.

3. Margaret Sanger (1879-1966).

The founder of Planned Parenthood herself, Margaret Sanger, may not have been a racist exactly, but she was a classist and fellow traveler in the eugenics movement.

After World War I, she lamented that the affluent and educated limit their child-bearing, while the poor and ignorant had more children. She sought to "assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit." While she rejected race as a determining factor, she still sought to control who should and should not have children.

In a 1939 letter to black pastors, she infamously wrote, "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

Sanger advocated sterilization for the unfit, and she lived in a time when racism was considered scientifically credible. She opposed the Nazis and donated to the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda, and she believed the responsibility for birth control should fall on able-minded parents rather than the state.

Even so, Sanger's calls for preventing the "unfit" from having children should legitimately shock Americans, and abortion has disproportionately hit the black population.

Sanger may not have been a racist per se, but if statues are being removed, hers should be on the list. Not only was she a fellow traveler for eugenics, but she founded America's largest abortion provider, undermining the right to life for generations.

A bust of Sanger (pictured at right in photo atop this article) was sculpted in the early 1970s by artist Joy Buba, and is on display in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Two years ago, a group of pro-life protesters, most of whom were black, urged the Smithsonian to remove it.


. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945).

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the FDR memorial in the Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C. Photo Credit: Tyler O'Neil.

America's 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, may have led America through World War II against the Nazis, but he also seized and relocated hundreds of thousands of first-generation Japanese immigrants in "internment" camps.

FDR's government seized these people's assets and carted them off to camps in harsh locations. In December 1941, when Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S., many Germans and Italians were also arrested and placed in camps.

While this was a war tactic, intended to prevent espionage and sabotage, many consider it a long-lasting racist crime of discrimination against Japanese people.

Although polls often rank FDR as the second or third greatest president (partially due to the misconception that the New Deal or World War II ended the Great Depression), Japanese internment will always be a part of his legacy.

Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park is now a national historic site and home to his presidential library. His retreat in Georgia is a museum. The president has a huge memorial (7.5 acres) in the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., along with a marble block in front of the National Archives. Social justice warriors should protest both locations.

5. J. William Fulbright (1905-1995).

J. William Fulbright statue on the University of Arkansas campus. Credit: Clinton Steeds.

Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) supported segregation and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While he later repented of his racist positions, that makes him little better than Robert E. Lee (who emphatically supported the Union after the Civil War) or George Washington (who freed his slaves after his death).

Fulbright signed the Southern Manifesto in opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling against segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1964, Fulbright joined with other southern Democrats in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also voted against the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with 61 percent of House Democrats and 80 percent of House Republicans. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats supported it, compared with 82 percent of Republicans.

Despite his earlier support for segregation and opposition to civil rights, Fulbright later changed sides. President Bill Clinton acknowledged his switch and presented him the Presidential Medial of Freedom in 1993. Clinton called him "my mentor and friend."

The University of Arkansas has a statue of Fulbright. In 1996, The George Washington University renamed a residence hall in his honor. The Fulbright Program for international student exchange, established in 1964, awards approximately 6,000 new grants annually. Approximately 294,000 people (111,000 from the U.S. and 183,000 from abroad) have participated in the program.

Even so, Fulbright opposed civil rights. Social justice warriors should protest the program, demand the removal of the statue, and rename the George Washington University residence hall after someone who didn't oppose civil rights.

6. Robert Byrd (1917-2010).

A members of the West Virginia National Guard takes a photo of a memorial at the statue of the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, at the Capitol in Charleston, WV., Thursday, July 1, 2010. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

In the early 1940s, Robert Byrd recruited 150 friends and associates to create a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Sophia, West Virginia. He became a recruiter and the leader of his chapter, and when it came time to elect the top officer (the "Exalted Cyclops") in the Klan unit, Byrd won unanimously.

"I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side. ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen form the wilds," Byrd wrote to segregationist Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (D-Miss.).

In 1952, when Byrd ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, he said he lost interest in the Klan "after about a year," but he wrote a 1946 letter to a Grand Wizard praising the Klan.

Byrd went on to become a member of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. He later called joining the KKK "the greatest mistake I ever made." In 2005, he said, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

Byrd endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008, and Hillary Clinton later called him the "heart and soul" of the United States Senate. The West Virginia State Capitol has a statue of Byrd, and various laboratories, community centers, and government buildings bear his name.

If the social justice warriors want a KKK member to protest, they have many Robert Byrd memorials to choose from. Yes, Byrd relented and swore off the KKK, but Lee also swore off the Confederacy, Washington freed his slaves, and Thomas Jefferson's own Declaration of Independence inspired abolitionism.

If the Left insists on removing the monuments of repentant historical figures, why not include Fulbright and Byrd?

This is far from an exhaustive list. President Donald Trump asked "where does it stop?" Rationally, there is little reason for it to ever stop.

Has there ever been a perfectly good historical figure, by the SJWs standards? Even Jesus Christ, for all his preaching about helping the poor and needy, his raising people from the dead and healing their diseases, insisted that God was male, condemned sex outside of marriage, and led a movement whose disciples were anti-abortion and homophobic.

Will the Left demand statues of Jesus also be removed? Just wait until they hear the traditions about Mohammed.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/08...-forget-these/

Originally Posted by MW

Not surprised. We knew this was coming.

it is a longtime ago afro American want the statues taken off

Id say this story has really made rounds after Trump brought it up during his nationally televised speech in Phoenix AZ last night.

W

This is getting ridiculous. And oh yeah, Henry Ford was extremely anti-semitic. Does that mean that we should stop driving Fords and burn them all?