Trump Should Distance Himself from Confederate Racism

It is reprehensible that President Trump is reinstalling a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike, a traitor who fought in the Civil War to preserve slavery, in Washington, D.C.

Pike led a regiment of Native Americans in Arkansas who sided with the Confederacy and were accused of scalping Union troops in an 1862 battle.

The Confederacy, as stated by its Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in his "Cornerstone Speech" on March 21, 1861, believed "The negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

Debate about having statues in honor of Confederate generals should be moot. After all, the Confederacy was defeated when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.

Yet in defiance, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forest -- a slave trader who butchered nearly 300 Black Union troops after they surrendered in the Fort Pillow massacre -- soonafter became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and led a reign of terror, which included lynchings, against newly-freed slaves in the southern states.
Confederates today are in their graves where they and their racist ideologies belong. They are not deserving of being honored with statues.