The mayor of Charlottesville, Va., was on the mark when he compared the people who marched with torches on Saturday to protest the planned removal of a Confederate monument to Ku Klux Klansmen, who terrorized Southern nights with cross-burnings and violence. By embracing the symbols and rhetoric of racial terror, the demonstrators made clear that they valued the Confederate memorial not for civic or aesthetic reasons but as a testament to white supremacy.
Communities across the South have been removing Confederate flags from public spaces and removing or reappraising Confederate monuments since the white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. The Charlottesville City Council voted last month to sell a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was donated to the city by a wealthy segregationist almost a century ago. A court has barred the city from removing the statue while it weighs a lawsuit opposing the action.
