Trinity College Resurrects Debate About Removing Confederate Memorial Plaque From Campus
“The U.S. does not have a habit of honoring or memorializing those who attempted to destroy our country. Why should we make an exception for Confederates?”
Why can’t people just leave history alone and focus on their own lives?
The College Fix reports:
Debate about removing Confederate memorial resurfaces at Trinity College
A Trinity College student recently resurrected the debate about whether a Confederate memorial plaque should remain on campus, amid a broader push to reevaluate historical symbols.
The plaque is attached to a Civil War era cannon on Trinity’s Hartford, Connecticut campus and honors alumni who fought on both sides of the Civil War.
Installed in 1950, it commemorates “Trinity men who fought for the principles in which they believed with the Union and Confederate forces.” While the memorial has stood for more than 70 years, some students argue that it no longer belongs in a prominent campus space.
A recent student op-ed in the Trinity Tripod called for the removal of the memorial. The op-ed was written by Savannah Brooks, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper and a history major.
“The plaque still serves as a Confederate memorial on a Union cannon,” Brooks told The College Fix in a recent email.
Brooks said the timing of the plaque’s installation is crucial to her argument. While reunification efforts following the Civil War were real, she believes they were most relevant in the late 19th century.
“By the mid twentieth century, when the plaque was affixed to the cannon, the number of living Civil War participants was extremely small, and the last veteran would die within the decade,” she said. “The U.S. does not have a habit of honoring or memorializing those who attempted to destroy our country. Why should we make an exception for Confederates?”
She also emphasized that Trinity today is a different institution than it was when the plaque was installed. Brooks pointed to the presence of black students, faculty, staff, and trustees whose families were directly impacted by slavery.
“We live in a different era of Trinity,” she said. “Black Americans who have been directly impacted by slavery in their ancestral line are classmates, professors, friends, staff, parents, trustees.”
She added that emotional responses to campus symbols should be part of the decision making process. “If I feel discomfort walking past the cannons, how would a prospective student feel? A prospective donor?”
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Comments
It was just a few weeks prior to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and less than 200 miles distant that Abraham Lincoln delivered his memorable 2nd inaugural address. Clearly Lincoln was pivoting, and wanted the nation to do so as well, from the emotional intensity of the war towards engineering a lasting reunification when he spoke the following words which I think inspired the Trinity college plaque, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Savannah Brooks, as well as all of us, would benefit from a reflection on Lincoln’s words.
“If I feel discomfort walking past the cannons, how would a prospective student feel? A prospective donor?”
I’m Jewish. How does she suppose I feel walking past someone wearing a keffiyah? This self-absorbed muffin will do just fine in the workspace. Maybe by her third or fourth job in her first year out.
Once students are fully indoctrinated they waste their time on things like this having nothing else going on in their heads.
And what of the students who are descendants of the victims of the “Northern War of Aggression” who must endure “discomfort walking past” symbols of that part of history?
If I look hard enough, I can ALWAYS find something to be “triggered” by … but instead, many of us have moved on.
How many ways is this BS?
The most obvious one is she called for the removal of the entire monument, not only the part about those who ‘destroy the country.’
Another is speculative. She would love a monument to a left-looking insurgent like black separatists or or like Indian tribes.
“If I feel discomfort walking past the cannons, how would a prospective student feel? A prospective donor?”
I see a leftist civil rights book being published, “Snowflake, Like Me.”
“The U.S. does not have a habit of honoring or memorializing those who attempted to destroy our country. ”
Of course we do. There’s George Floyd statues. A ship named after Jack Murtha. There was one named after Harvey Milk. And look at who gets elected in Democrat districts and states.