Confederate War Memorial in Downtown Dallas Must Come Down

Dallas made a powerful statement about the kind of city we want to be when it removed the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee last September.The City Council vote signaled that the time had come for the painful reminders of this country's racist past to go. Now the council faces decisions about how to move forward with other proposals offered by Mayor Rawlings' Confederate monuments task force.Last May, this newspaper first detailed our point of view on the statues controversy, calling for the removal of two tributes to the Confederacy: the Lee statue in the green space that has since been renamed Oak Lawn Park and the Confederate War Memorial in front of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.As we've argued in previous editorials, these stand-alone symbols serve as tributes to the side of the Civil War that fought to keep human beings in bondage. Continuing to pay homage to that cause is unnecessarily divisive and out of touch.  Continue reading...