Yeah, we’re just gonna forget about the civil war if we don’t have a bunch of tacky trash put up by people angry about the civil rights movement strewn about.
Better idea: replace every confederate monument with a statue of a slave made of the melted down material of the bigot in question, with a plaque explicitly stating it is a replacement of a memorial to people who perpetuated it.
I think it’s basically just a donation/endowment-supported theme church that a lot of politicians and the like book for funerals and such because, hey, patriotic theme church in downtown DC.
Oh, I agree. My dad was stationed at the Pentagon before he retired and when we lived in Arlington I would take every opportunity to visit the historic Washington buildings, museums, unis, monuments, ect…including several trips to the National Cathedral. Atheist though I am, I appreciate it immensely.
Well, I for one think it is fine to honor our vanquished enemies, and object to taking down these windows as long as they are leaving the windows dedicated to Rommel, Göring, Himmler, and Tojo in place.
OK, how about we start with all the art and history that you appreciate, that I think ought to be melted down? I will await your list. 
Personally I feel sorry for Laura Garden Fraser’s legacy. Her design for the Washington Quarter was rejected because it wasn’t fascist enough (and, arguably, because she was a woman) and then her beautiful double statue of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in Baltimore was torn down, leaving only the extremely objectionable pro-confederate plinth intact.
Love. This.
Is there a panel depicting the Underground Railroad?
Perhaps just leave one, with a plaque “this is the kind of racist shit we used to do”. Tear the others down. Replace them with statues of actual heroes, like MLK, Ada Lovelace, or Jane Addams.
Both sound fine to me as they are.
There is one minor quibble – actually, a pretty big one – about you talking about destroying monuments, in that there has been no real effort to do that. In fact, in almost every case they are being moved into either “retirement” parks or museums, or simply put into storage until a proper venue can be found. Which makes it also worth mentioning that several of these monuments were mass-produced, so there is the issue of how many copies we need to preserve.
Also, nearly all of them were put up in the 1950s and 1960s as a direct and unsubtle “fuck you” to the civil rights movement and anti-jim crow efforts.
Why should we keep around monuments that only exist because white people wanted public space dedicated to the idea that black people are second-class citizens?
Imagine if it were the other way around. What if there were numerous black panther monuments all over the south celebrating someone like Malcolm X? I’m pretty sure the white hicks would want to get rid of those, even though Malcom X wasn’t a traitor to his own country.
Point taken, but I was pointing out that our dear friend was over-dramatizing what is actually going on. That’s all.
I get it. I’m just piling on with the info that, this isn’t really high art, so much as a crass expression of racial hatred, and we ought to get rid of it anyway 
I’m responding directly to comments here literally calling for their destruction.
I would love to see such monuments used as publicly available educational material, and I don’t think destroying them is the best way to achieve that; others disagree.
We can stay with the Civil War theme if necessary:
Well, none of the art and history I appreciate is supportive of bigotry, so I’m not too concerned about you being upset with any of it unless you’re supportive of bigotry. Then again, you are defending statues put up by neocofederates in the mid 50’s that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with supporting mid-century Jim Crow laws.
And I’m more upset over people continuing to propagate that than an artist for hire’s work.
Why do you want to retain objects of bigotry and hatred that serve no purpose except to congratulate and condone such ideology? WWII history isn’t lessened because we don’t have statues of Hitler at our memorials.
how assiduously, and how often do you vet the artists you profess to enjoy?
Pretty regularly, in fact, almost constantly, it’s the only thing I do all day. It’s a much more fulfilling past time than defending dead racists and nazis on the internet.
Neat, I also learned what the Grotesques are for!
The grotesques deflect rainwater by bouncing it off the tops of their heads and away from the stone walls.
The Cathedral held a contest through one of the “National Geographic” kids magazines to design grotesques. My brother entered (and won a honorable mention). We were a little surprised that the Darth Vader design placed in the contest. It wasn’t original.
