Ken Burns, the famed documentarian behind “The Civil War” miniseries, spoke in support Tuesday of taking down Confederate statues amid rekindled calls for their removal.
Mr. Burns, whose PBS series about the Civil War earned two Emmy awards in 1991, also said he supports rebranding military installations named for leaders of the former Confederacy.
The acclaimed filmmaker made the remarks as controversial monuments across the country continue to come down following the racially charged killing of George Floyd last month.
“I think we’re in the middle of an enormous reckoning right now in which the anxieties and the pains and the torments of centuries of injustice are bubbling up to the surface,” Mr. Burns said on CNN. “It’s very important for people like me, of my complexion, to it be as quiet as possible and to listen. What I know from my reading of history is that the Confederate monuments have to go.”
Mr. Burns, 66, subsequently proceeded to explain the racist history associated with most of the Confederate monuments that remain standing.
“They were put up in the 1880s and ’90s when White supremacy was being brutally reimposed over the old Confederacy,” he said. “Again in the late teens and 20s when the Ku Klux Klan was ascendant. Again after the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954. And so we see that these are not monuments to history and heritage, but they’re an attempt to rewrite history and to essentially celebrate a false narrative about what happened during the Civil War, and to send the wink-winks, the dog whistles, as we are fond of saying today, across the generations of what the Civil War was about.
“It’s so interesting that we’re even having this having this argument, because the people that we memorialize, the nation’s forts that are named after Civil War generals, these are all people who fought to perpetuate slavery, which must be anathema to every American,” Mr. Burns added. “These are people responsible for the deaths of loyal American citizens.”
Confederate monuments have been topped or threatened in several cities following the killing last month of Floyd, a Black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.
Monuments to Americans on the other side of the war have come under fire as well, CNN host Chris Cuomo noted during the interview, such as a statue of former President Ulysses Grant recently knocked down in San Francisco and controversial statues of former President Abraham Lincoln standing over a newly freed Black man on display in Boston and D.C.
“Of course there’s a danger in going too far. It’s the passions of the moment,” Mr. Burns responded. “More than a quarter of the United States presidents owned other human beings. This is a huge thing that we cannot just dismiss. But I would say the Confederate monument for me is an easy decision. We have to get rid of them. They’re not about heritage.
“This is a specious argument,” he said. “This is about the reimposition of White supremacy in the South at various periods. The names of the bases and the forts should be changed. We’ve taken down the statues. It’s a good thing to do. And we now need to continue this reckoning by looking as carefully as we can.”
Mr. Burns won two Emmys for informational programming in 1991 for “The Civil War.” He created several other acclaimed docu-series aired by PBS, including “Baseball” and “Jazz.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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