Leaders of a New York Episcopal diocese say they’ll remove two plaques honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a church property in Brooklyn.
Bishop Lawrence Provenzano, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, told Newsday the plaques outside St. John’s Episcopal Church are being removed Wednesday.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy markers commemorate the spot where Lee is said to have planted a tree while serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Hamilton in New York in the 1840s. Two decades later, he became commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
The removal comes in the wake of last weekend’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists protested plans to remove a Lee statue from a public park.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
2 Responses
We’re beginning down a slippery slope of rewriting history. I am beginning to feel a lot more uncomfortable over the past few weeks. This has nothing to do with Trump. This has to do with the hysterical and utterly insane reaction to him becoming president.
Sanctuary cities in the U.S. go way back before Trump. Removing the Confederate symbols also goes back before Trump. In 2015 the media reported
> President Obama on Friday praised the lowering of the Confederate flag in South Carolina as “a meaningful step towards a better future.”
In 2015 such as Amazon and Walmart announced they would no longer sell the flag, and semi-classic “The Dukes of Hazzard” (the main characters were southerners with confederate flag on their car) was pulled from some cable channel from its lineup. Warner Brothers no longer permitted manufacture of “The Dukes of Hazzard” merchandise that had the flag.
And in 2016 then-President Obama announce: “In particular, we will amend our policy to make clear that Confederal flags will not be displayed from any permanently fixed flagpole in a national cemetery at any time”.
And in January 2016 New Orleans commissioned the removed of four civil war monuments (inlcuding Jefferson Davis, the “president of the Confederate States of America”).
And Baltimore commissioned the removal of monuments to Roger B Taney, Robert E Lee and Thomas J “Stonewall” Jackson.
And all of it before Trump.