Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said Confederate monuments should be removed and military bases named after Confederate generals should be renamed.
During a Tuesday appearance on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time," Burns told host Chris Cuomo that the Confederate statutes are “not monuments to history and heritage.”
“I think we’re in the middle of an enormous reckoning right now in which the anxieties and the pains and the torments of injustice are bubbling up to the surface,” Burns said. “It’s very important for people like me, of my complexion, to be as quiet as possible and to listen. What I know from my reading of history is that the confederate monuments have to go.”
He said Confederate statutes were erected during periods of history where there was opposition to civil rights and equality.
“They’re an attempt to rewrite history and to essentially celebrate a false narrative about what happened during the Civil War and to send the wink-winks, the dog whistles, as we’re fond of saying today, across the generations of what the Civil War was about,” Burns said of the Confederate monuments.
Cuomo asked Burns if some protesters calling for the statues of the country’s Founding Fathers to be removed are going too far.
“Of course, there’s a danger in going too far,” Burns said. “It’s the passions of the moment.”
He added that more than a quarter of U.S. presidents had slaves.
“This is a huge thing that we cannot just dismiss,” he said. “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.”
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