Artists, historic preservationists and museum curators are watching the nation’s Confederate soldier statues coming down and are torn about what should happen to them when they’re no longer atop their pedestals.
“I am loath to erase history,” Lonnie Burch III, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, told The New York Times. “For me it’s less about whether they come down or not, and more about what the debate is stimulating.”
And where Burch would like the statues to be grouped together and put on display, so people will understand what they stood for, others aren’t so sure.
Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford, for example, told the Times that he does not believe the statutes should be removed unless educational plaques are put in their place, to explain why the statues are gone.
Robin Kirk, the co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center, meanwhile, called for
