The Week In Monuments – IOTW Report

The Week In Monuments

Pittsburgh removed a statue of 19th century songwriter Stephen Foster in Schenley Park this week. Created by Giuseppe Moretti in 1900 and set in the park in 1940, the statue of the man who penned “Oh, Susannah” and “Camptown Races” was deemed offensive because it depicted an elderly black man with a banjo sitting to the left of the song writer. City officials plan on replacing the monument with a yet unnamed important black woman from Pittsburgh’s history. -read more  Here

A memorial to the victims of lynching was unveiled this week in Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is an open air rectangular structure filled with man-sized brown slabs suspended from the ceiling and inscribed with the names and information on roughly 4,000 victims of racial mob violence.  Accompanying the monument is the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. It focuses on the treatment of blacks since the civil war and is meant as a truth commission approach to our past . Both memorial and museum are projects of the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit founded in 1994 . More

17 Comments on The Week In Monuments

  1. I posted on Diogenes’ site this week about this:

    This was shameful. Absolutely shameful. That statue was iconic to the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and Stephen Foster deserved the notoriety from his home town. Adding Uncle Ned to the statue was certainly not meant to demean him…quite the opposite. It’s showing where Foster’s inspiration came from. All this viewing the past through today’s lens is flat out bullshit, and INSANE.

    One of the complaints was that Uncle Ned was sitting lower than Foster, implying servitude. It’s a statue of STEPHEN FOSTER! Why would he not be displayed prominently? And another bitch was Uncle Ned being shoeless. Would he have looked better in wing tips? Bare feet were common back in the day, and not just slaves. But now that beautiful sculpture will be warehoused, because the world has gone mad, and be replaced by some bullshit modern “rendering” of who knows what. And why does it have to be a black woman? I thought it was Uncle Ned that got the shitty end of the stick in the Foster statue? Why’s he gettin’ thrown under the bus?

    This just breaks my heart. Pittsburgh used to be a bad ass, bare knuckle town. I was always proud to call it home. But that was before it became Pussyhat Pittsburgh. Makes me wanna puke…

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  2. This really makes me sick! Stephen Foster was one of our great musicians and he composed many Civil War ballads, sung by both the Union and Confederate soldiery. He was one of our early super-star musicians, selling many thousands of copies of his sheet music (before recordings were invented). In fact, Foster’s music on CDs can now be purchased at many of our Civil War National Battlefields. Will that also be eliminated ?

    Keep erasing our honorable history and then erecting ‘mass incarcerations monuments’… So it is the white man’s fault that blacks commit the majority of crimes ? Sick and tired of the guilt trip that is foisted upon us by the race hustlers.

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  3. Blues Junky is right!

    Plus we lose our history at our peril. Kids are graduating high schools with twelve years of leftist bullshit being bullied into them every single day. The only hope is that they’re getting the truth at home.

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  4. Since we they are putting a statue up to commemorate the crime of lynching, can we put statues commemorating the tens of thousands of black on white crimes, murder, black on black crimes and murders? Of course not. I am tired of this nation apologizing for not growing as a society fast enough to satisfy the perpetually aggrieved.

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  5. The lynching memorial is pretty power. Removing Stephen Foster seems extreme, but he’s fallen out of style now and I imagine few people under 30 would think him important.

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  6. No matter what state city or town in this country you live in there will always be someone crying about somethinh. I look for a heavenly city built withlut hands where there is no race crying or hate…

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  7. Down the “memory hole.”

    Didn’t Winston Smith have a job helping to re-write the past?
    Didn’t do him a helluva lot of good, did it?

    See, we got rid of Obola and blocked the totalitarian Harridan/Harpy, but we haven’t solved the problem.

    izlamo delenda est …

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  8. Been down on the Swanee River many times, assholes abound in Pittsburg, no wonder Mr. Foster came on down.
    Oh, wait, he never actually came to Dixie, the intellectual carpetbagger just wrote about it, he didn’t personally go there.
    The funniest thing about this, Foster was an abolitionist, in the vein of Beecher Stowe.

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