At this point all I’m willing to say is, at least it’s not Alabama 
I hear ya. I work in Albany, but i live in Troy.
Lived in update New York as a kid, not far from Albany. As the story goes, as we crossed a bridge into New York on our great Northern migration, my sister, around 5 at the time, pointed to the oncoming cars and said, " Mom, are they Yankees?"
If they admitted history they would have confront quotes like these from party leaders:
Kevin Phillips - Nixon’s political strategist and Lee Atwater former aide Reagan and later the RNC chair.
Kevin Phillips (1970):
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Atwater (1981): Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”. So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the backbone.
Party of Lincoln my ass.
Why are we keeping up statues of traitors and losers?
EUGENE ROBINSON COLUMN
Advance for release Tuesday, June 23, 2020, and thereafter
(For Robinson clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)
By EUGENE ROBINSON
(c) 2020, The Washington Post
WASHINGTON – The solution to the problem of Confederate memorials is simple: Tear them down, all of them. If a few must be left standing for practical reasons – the gigantic carvings on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta come to mind – authorities should allow them to be appropriately defaced, like the graffiti-scrawled remnants of the Berlin Wall.
The question of monuments to other white supremacists is more complicated, but it’s still not rocket science. As a society, we’re perfectly capable of deciding together which must go and which can stay. This supposed “slippery slope” isn’t really slippery at all.
There is no earthly reason any of this nation’s public spaces should be defiled by statuary honoring generals, soldiers and politicians who were traitors, who took up arms against their country, who did so to perpetuate slavery, and who – this is an important point – were losers.
This was clear even to Robert E. Lee, who opposed such monuments. “I think it wiser,” he wrote in 1869, declining an invitation to help decide where to erect memorials at Gettysburg, “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Lee understood that the South had lost and slavery was gone. Most Confederate memorials were erected decades later, when white Southerners were reestablishing their repressive dominion over African Americans through the imposition of Jim Crow laws and a state-sponsored campaign of terrorism led by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Confederate monument in my hometown, Orangeburg, South Carolina, was dedicated in 1893. It is a statue of a rebel soldier atop a tall column, and the inscription, attributed to “the women of Orangeburg County” – though presumably only the white ones – calls it “a grateful tribute to the brave defenders of our rights, our honor and our homes.” The “rights” in question were to own human beings, including my ancestors, and compel their uncompensated labor. The point of erecting the monument was to reassert those “rights.” If the statue is a homage to anything, it’s hate. Take it down.
“Oh, but you’re erasing history,” defenders of such memorials always say. Nonsense. The monuments themselves are an attempt to rewrite history and assert white supremacy. Put them in some sort of Museum of Shame, if you must, but get them out of the public square.
“Oh, but if you start toppling statues, where does it all end?” defenders wail, rending their garments. This is not a hard problem to solve: It ends where we, as a nation, decide to draw the line between those historical figures who deserve to be so honored and those who do not.
There is an obvious difference between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who founded our union, and, say, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, who tried to destroy it. The fact that Washington, Jefferson and other early presidents owned slaves should temper our admiration for them but not erase it entirely. They gave us a nation grotesquely disfigured by slavery, but they also gave us the constitutional tools, and the high-minded ideals, with which to heal that original, near-fatal flaw.
Davis, Jackson and the rest of the Confederates gave us war, destruction and suffering, all in the service of white supremacy and African American subjugation. They deserve nothing but our eternal scorn.
White Southerners who consider the memorials a matter of “heritage” should realize that many Americans have ancestors who made poor choices. Like the Germans of the Third Reich, they merit familial respect but not public honor.
What about non-Confederate historical figures who were white supremacists? If every statue of a racist were taken down, we’d mostly have empty pediments and plinths. It should depend on the person, the context and the memorial itself.
A good example is the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which Mayor Bill de Blasio announced will soon be taken down. The problem is not Roosevelt himself. He was relatively enlightened for his times: He invited civil rights leader Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, for which he was pilloried. And he did much to preserve wildlife (when he wasn’t shooting it) and our natural wonders.
The problem is the statuary itself. Roosevelt is astride a horse, and flanking him - on foot, thus beneath the great man - are a Native American man on one side and an African man on the other. The tableau amounts to a visual parable of white supremacy.
We put statues in places of honor to depict our heroes and our values. Overt racism is not an idea we honor – not in relationships and not in bronze and marble. Not anymore.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Ken Burns chimes in (Ken is our mostest famous historical documentarian, everything from baseball to MLK. And his rug is legend.)
asked if some of the protestors are going to far by attacking statues of former Presidents Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Ulysses Grant, Burns acknowledged that, but pleaded for patience.
“Of course there’s a danger in going too far. It’s the passions of the moment. And let’s think about it,” Burns added. “Let’s hold off and reserve judgment for one second and consider that more than quarter of the Presidents of the United States of America, founded on the idea that all men are created equal, the guy who wrote that [Jefferson] owned 300 human beings in his lifetime, by the way. More than a quarter of the United States presidents owned other human beings. This is a huge thing that we cannot just dismiss. But I would say that the Confederate monument for me is an easy decision. We have to get rid of them. They’re not about heritage. This is a specious argument. This is about the reimposition of white supremacy in the South at various periods. The names of the bases and forts should be changed. We’ve taken down the statues. It’s a good thing to do. And we now need to continue this reckoning by looking as carefully as we can, monuments are hugely important. They’re acts of fact but also acts of mythology. They are acts of symbols.”
Time for the old Southern military mystique to fade away. You lost the war. You lost Reconstruction. You lost Jim Crow. Time to move on. Seriously. 
BRANSON, Mo. (AP) — Branson, Missouri, may be known for its country music shows and wholesome entertainment, but the tourist hot spot now finds itself at the center of a standoff over Confederate symbolism.
Protesters have been gathering outside a strip mall store Dixie Outfitters, which specializes in Confederate flags, clothing and other merchandise. The protests have drawn people from opposing sides of the debate — Black Lives Matter demonstrators, as well as those who support the store and the Confederate flag.
I’m not sure how one supports the Confederate flag.
The Kansas City Star reported that the Dixie Outfitters store is owned by Anna and Nathan Robb. Nathan Robb is the son of Thomas Robb, an Arkansas-based pastor who was once the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2015, Anna Robb said she and her husband were estranged from Thomas Robb, but acknowledged attending KKK events in the past.
Reminds me of that jackass I knew in the Marines. “My Daddy ain’t like that no more.”
You don’t suddenly become not a bigot because someone sticks a mic in your face. I wonder if road trip mobs will become a thing.
Was he wrong? Did it not actually happen that way?
No, he was absolutely right.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, he is said to have told an aide, “We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.”
Johnson underestimated.
https://www.c-span.org/event/?473532/washington-journal-07052020
Discussion on Confederate named military bases and statues.
I just thought this was a good read and fits here; as I’ve said before I know many Christians have also been at the forefront of abolitionist and civil rights efforts.
And I can never understand how blacks can embrace a religion which condones owning people as property.
Christianity does that? 
You might be thinking Old Testament, bruh. That ain’t Christians. Or are you talking Islam?
Oh, are Christians tossing the whole Hebrew scriptures now? There’s some problems in the NT as well, not surprisingly given when they were written and that they reference the OT extensively. This from the article:
Among the New Testament verses Thornwell could cite was the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians where he writes, “Slaves, obey your human masters, with fear and trembling and sincerity of heart.” (Biblical scholars now discount the relevance of the passage to a consideration of chattel slavery.)
I bet they do 
C’mon, recognize that the language says what it says and is a problem.
I don’t even have a dog in this hunt. I am unaware of any slave talk in the NT.
Really ? Where do Christians get their creation, 10 commandments and all that etc etc from? Pick and choose conveniently?
Dude, don’t take my questioning you as some indication of my Christian bias. I have no need for religious superheros of yore in my life. As I told TG, I have no dog in this hunt. Just curious as to what you were basing your opinion on.
On the dogma of the Christians who refuse to admit what is in their own religion 
and pick and choose what they like.
I would respect any religious person way more that others, if he or she said - look ya we have crazy stuff in our religion and we are all hypocrites. We pick and choose what suits us. Atleast it’s total honesty.
So, not on actually reading and studying the Bible and OT? Your opinion is based on what you perceive as others’ hypocrisy?
That is an interesting row to hoe. Good luck.
Well I don’t waste time reading and studying fantasy books. I let others do that and then they contradict themselves.