Public monuments that appear to be a tip of the hat to slavery might be better off in museums, veteran political journalist Edward Klein told Newsmax TV.
But choosing which statues to remove is not as easy as it looks because some of the nation's most beloved political figures owned slaves, Klein, author of "Guilty as Sin," said Tuesday to Miranda Khan on Newsmax TV's "America Talks Live."
"[Museums] may be a fine idea. Then . . . I think the next step would be in fact putting the statues of some of our founders who were also slave owners in museums rather than in public places," Klein said.
"What would we do with the Jefferson Memorial for instance? Would we allow it to continue knowing that [Thomas] Jefferson not only owned slaves but actually had a relationship with one of his slaves Sally Hemings?"
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Demonstrators pulled down a bronze monument of a Confederate soldier outside a courthouse Monday in Durham, N.C., as fallout from last weekend's deadly white supremacy rally in Charlottesville continues.
But Klein said the destruction of such controversial monuments the best way to deal with them.
"There's always a danger in trying to demolish the past, demolish history," Klein told Khan. "That's what happened in the Soviet Union when people were made nonpersons. They were literally deleted from photographs so that they didn't ever exist.
"I was thinking about [Confederate Army Gen.] Robert E. Lee and his statues. I think this is important for us to remember that after he surrendered, he went on a tour of the south urging his fellow southerners to reconcile themselves to the Union, to put the past in the past and to become good citizens.
"In fact he even suggested at one point that . . . some of these monuments perhaps should be removed. He was a great patriot. Yes, he was on the wrong side. Yes, he was a slave owner, [but] so were Washington and Jefferson."
Klein said throwing offending statutes away "as though they were garbage is a very serious offense to our history."