 Hello, welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you very much for joining us. And us, of course, is my friend, Cal Potter, who not only is former state senator and representative on all kinds of state library boards at one time. And history major, teacher. Old friend. Old friend. Very old. Well, as I just mentioned to you, I just went to my 60th anniversary of my class reunion. And that makes it... Sobering. But one of the things that it does still do is require that I and you, because of our backgrounds especially, but also because we're citizens of Wisconsin, a progressive state once upon a time, and the United States of America. And when we have issues like the Klan and other things, and Virginia lost a life, it pays to occasionally stop and talk about where we've come, how we've come, and how it's taken place so that people have an understanding. And then they can remember what the historical facts are rather than the emotional things. And one of the things that we talked about, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis in our first program, the Civil War, and the good deal the Celts got out of the war by Grant and how they turned and didn't share the power that they should have shared with everybody in the South. And today I'd like to talk about statues, believe it or not, statues are controversial. You would think that a statue of Robert E. Leasing on a stone horse, winter, summer, spring and fall wouldn't be controversial, but it can be. What I found very interesting is, I don't know if it was NBC, one of the networks did a poll of Americans should these Confederate statues be removed? And it was like 60-some percent of Americans said no. And I was at a meeting last week, a fellow with a big mouth, a conservative, started just lambasting people who would want to remove these, and he was just, he said their works of art, their part of their culture, let them, they can have their statues, they should remain up in the city square and so on. And this guy was, I didn't say anything because it was sort of a social engagement. And in the right circumstances, I probably should have bopped them on the head or something that you idiot. But he was expressing the opinion that a lot of Americans have, and surprising number of Americans have. They don't know why and how they got there. Well, most of these statues, and I think statues and monuments were like 1500 of them, I think, have been put up, and they've been put up, I think people of the stereotype, well, they're put up right after the war because everybody just loved Robert E. Lee and then they put the statue. Most of these statues and monuments were put up after the 1890s and many into the early 1900s. And they were put up by people who were feeling their oats about white supremacy. They put in place white power again after the Civil War. The North let this out, do what the hell they wanted to do. And they took over all the government. Blacks were excluded, blacks were excluded from bathrooms and from laundromats and bubblers and everywhere else they could do in schools and so on. And these were put up as a symbol of the old south. Of where the whites ruled and blacks should know that they're in their place. And a lot of those communities down there, 30, 40% of a lot of these towns were black people but they lived in hobbles, they didn't have jobs, they were treated like dirt and these center of the town statues were nothing more than an expression of white supremacy, power, right. And so when we step back and say, well, who put them in there? Why were they put in there? When were they put in there? We can't come up with a hell of a lot of reasons why those things ought to be maintained in the place they are. I don't go along with the idea that they ought to take a rope and destroy all these bronze statues. But what they ought to do is do what they did in European countries. When I was in Budapest and we were in Prague, they used to have all these Lenin statues and Marx statues. Well, they took them and they've got a park someplace. They've trucked them off to the side. This is what we used to have all over our town. If you want to go see them, find and remember what it was like years ago. If they're going to be used as a symbol of anti-racism of what the past was, you know, let's put them in a museum or someplace and that's fine. But to keep them in the central part of a city that's probably 40, 50% black where the power is still run by whites, there's something wrong with that community that they're going to defend having that symbol and not being sensitive to people. It's the same way with the naming rights for schools or mascots. You know, you get these people who want red skins or want, and I've had people, I used to chair the education committee. We'd have that bill all the time to do away with these racist mascots and we'd have people come and say, it's our right to do that. I says, you got a community with a large Indian presence in your community and in your school. They don't like it. Why don't you be sympathetic? You know, do what South High School did. They went from the red men to the red wings. You can do this very easily, solve the problem and not go around ticking people off and sticking a stick in their eye. What do you want to do that for? You know, only people with a peanut for a brain go around doing that type of stuff and I'll tell them that. And so when we used to have hearing, I advanced the bill. Well, of course it didn't go very far in the legislature in most cases because people represented schools that had the red skins, you know? And so what I'm saying is that these statues were reminiscent of a power play by whites to defend themselves, to bring back a culture of white supremacy. They weren't, couldn't bring back slavery but they could defend and want to preserve the separation of the races and white supremacists. And so as a result, I think we ought to examine why they're there, who to put there, when they were there and say, I think we could probably take some of these statues and move them into another part of town or into a museum and we'll talk about why all this background on these things without making them a symbol of white supremacy in a town in many of these cases, like Birmingham and so on, very large black population. What do you want to do that to these people for? I mean, they got enough problems in life brought on by white people and their discrimination. We don't need the statues up there. You know, and I'll tell people that but 60 some percent of Americans still feel these statues ought to remain the way they are. Well, I'll argue the other side and hope for the best, I guess. Yeah. When I was serving my country in the armed forces and I was drafted, so I was one of those willing but did not volunteer to go in and one of the things we did, we went on maneuvers. I went to Yakima, Washington and I went to the Carolinas and never went overseas at the beginning of the Vietnam War but was available. Matter of fact, we were packed to go to Cuba during the Cuban missile or issue. In the little town that we did some maneuvers for in for a couple of days, I was sitting out in a field with my guards post, you know, in my empty M1 rifle and my ad in the hot Carolina sun and the wonderful Southern people would bring lemonade out to us with their kids and it was wonderful but you go to the little town next door. They had one laundromat in town and what did it say about there? Whites only. They were being discriminated against. The power plays were there and you go through some of the southern areas where they have some of these statues. Don't even belong, you know, the soldier or the person didn't even come from that state and the whatever that was, the Klu Klux Klan or others wanted to push the statue because they liked Jefferson Davis or someone. That's power and that power intimidates people just as the lynchings in the south. Those blacks were very friendly when I was down there but they were very careful. They were not free as we would think of freedom and so when I see those statues, we need freedom of expression and you know, statutes have their place but they don't necessarily have to be on a place that belong to all the public. That's right. Especially when half of that public or maybe even more than half of that public have been discriminated with over the years. They should be at a place where it can be educational as you mentioned earlier and helpful and so those people that think, oh, these are nice statues. Well, some of them are put in there intentionally to intimidate people because they wanted their special, they wanted to glorify the violation of our constitution and go against the union and they lost and they should, and they were given some pretty good deals by Grant to let all the soldiers go or almost all of them take their horses and the rifles if they needed for protection and some food and they were left to go home. Another nation would have put them in prison camps and then gone through them one at a time. We didn't do that but the solace did not treat others as friendly and as well as the union side did. And then as you mentioned, there were leaders in our country that had their own problems, that were racist and issues that they grew up with and that was in their background. We see this oftentimes even in Christianity, people want to put up the Ten Commandments Monument in the city park. And I says, well, I'm a Christian but I stopped to sit back and say, well, there are people out there who are Buddhist, there are people out there who are Islamic, there are people who are Jewish, there are people who are agnostic, there are people who are atheists out there. Maybe it ought not to be in the city park. That's how I look at it because I'm sensitive to the fact that they have a right to their own religion and they have a right to believe the way they want to believe and they should not feel intimidated that they can't believe the way they want to. That's the same thing with the Indian mascot type thing, be sensitive to the Indian community. And in the case of these monuments, it's being sensitive to people of color who have had a history going back not too far who were slaves, literally slaves and bought and sold as human beings. We're gonna sit back and use our heads, not be such an idiot. Man, this whole argument and defending a lot of this is just ludicrous, it's foolish, it's stupid. Or we just sit back and say, how can we heal these wounds? If they don't like this statue there, maybe we ought to take that statue and put it in the museum. Let's put it on the side of town and we'll put up a plaque saying, where did it come from? Why is it here? And we'll educate people. Why we can't do that? I don't know. I guess there's a certain level of people out there that are dumber than a box of rocks and I don't know how he could change it. And they want to dominate people by their own selfishness and their own precision. We had a town of Ryan has, if you've never been there, you should go out there because they have a monument for those silver war soldiers that went off and died. They just have a big monument there and they list them all, doesn't glorify them, just mentioned what units they were in and that they served. And I think those things are very appropriate but having something beyond that tends to intimidate people or glorify a different aspect of what should be intended. And we've run out of time, Cal Potter, we've run out of time. But we are doing our job because we wanted to do four programs, four weeks in a row that deal with the issue that confronted Virginia and we should talk about things based on history and philosophy and a variety of other things. So thank you for coming. Until next week, this has been Legislative Update.