Our great nation’s history is replete with what can be viewed as “hurtful and hateful” history. Slavery was implicitly permitted in the original Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist. In an 1858 debate Lincoln made the following statements: “…I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Should men like Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, Pike, Lee and Parker be viewed in the context of their time or in the prism of modern values? I believe the former.
There is danger and a slippery slope when removing, revising, sanitizing and erasing history. It is my belief that we should keep all of our history before us. As our first Black Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated, “When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better it’s a bad thing.”
If the logic of the iconoclasts were to be applied universally, every monument or structure built before our time must be targeted for destruction. Every temple and shrine of ancient or classic antiquity must be destroyed throughout the world so that no one is reminded of the simple fact that the ancestors of everyone alive on planet Earth once believed and practiced things which we today find wrong.