Remove a Confederate Statue? A Tennessee City Did This Instead.
The New York Times
Some residents want the monument removed. In the meantime, Franklin, Tenn., erected a statue of a U.S. Colored Troops soldier, broadening the way the community memorializes the Civil War.
FRANKLIN, Tenn. — For decades, when Hewitt Sawyers drove past the monument of the Confederate soldier standing tall in his city’s public square, he felt the weight of slavery’s long shadow.
Mr. Sawyers, 73, had attended a segregated school in Franklin, about 20 miles south of Nashville. He read from torn books passed down from the local white high school. The courthouse offered a “colored” water fountain, and the movie theater did not welcome him on the lower floor. As Confederate monuments across the South began to come down after a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., he wanted the 37-foot local statue, known as “Chip,” gone, too.
“Chip represented a large part of the reason I was not part of the downtown arena,” Mr. Sawyers, a Baptist minister, said. “Every time I went around that square, it was a reminder of what had gone on.”
