Known for his documentaries, Civil War historian Ken Burns agrees that Confederate statues should come down, saying they are ‘attempts to rewrite history’.
On CNN, Burns told Chris Cuomo that many statues of Confederate generals had been put up decades after the Civil War as symbols of white supremacy – and that Robert E. Lee himself had opposed putting them up in the first place.
Burns went on to say that the US is “in the middle of an enormous reckoning” and that:
‘We see that these are not monuments to history and heritage but they’re an attempt to rewrite history and to essentially celebrate a false narrative about what happened during the Civil War.
‘They’re not about heritage. This is a specious argument. This is about the re-imposition of white supremacy in the South at various periods. ‘