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The NYT article on the monuments to the Confederacy by Gary Shapiro tries to be thoughtful, but it struggles with a larger thoughtlessness. While Shapiro is right that confederate monuments have a historical value, he seems oddly oblivious to that history. These monuments were raised by the same people who either participated in or condoned lynching and terror. Slavery does not exhaust our inventory of American evils. To say that Jim Crow was "nasty" shows at the least an inadequate conception of how Jim Crow came about. To quote Bob Marley, a better authority here, 'half that story has never been told." These monuments were part of a process, and that process existed not in ante-bellum times - which seems to be Shapiro's main concern - but in the bloody post-bellum times that allowed the white establishment to, in essence, reverse the verdict of the Civil War. In other words, these are not just monuments to the Civil War past, they are emblems of the Jim Cr