White supremacists and counter protesters clash in Charlottesville

[Brian37]

I think that it should be left up to a town vote, the residents who make up the town should get to decide how they are represented.

Everyone here knows I am hardly PC, but no, sorry, this isn't about free speech, this is about clinging to institutionalized racism. Leaving those statues up in the context that they were put up, to glorify what they defended to keep, is not what our nation should seek to keep.

I can see them as part of a museum of what not to do, but to leave them up knowing why they were put up in the first place to paint them as heros is vile. Leaving them up in that context is no different to me than glorifying Andrew Jackson and what he did to Native Americans. 

Slavery was a horrible part of our history. Lynchings were a horrible part of our history. Segregation was a horrible part of our history. Nobody back then who supported that should be represented in such a way as those who made the statues back then supported or the actual men who supported it.

Nobody should erase that past nor pretend it never happened. But I am not talking about erasing history but putting those figures in the context of what humans should not do to other humans.