ADL Takes Soft Line On Removing Confederate Statues
Lee monument in Charlottesville. Image by Getty Images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis August 23, 2017
Donations poured into the Anti-Defamation League last week after neo-Nazis and white supremacists rioted against an effort to remove a monument of a Confederate general in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Yet the ADL has broken from other civil rights groups in refusing to call for the removal of Confederate monuments nationwide — the very issue that sparked the Charlottesville clashes.
The ADL said in a statement only that it “support[s] the efforts communities are taking to reconsider their monuments and statues.”
That falls far short of demands from leading civil rights groups, including The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center, for the removal of Confederate symbols nationwide.
The Leadership Conference, a coalition of leading civil rights organizations that includes the ADL, is supporting a call to “take ‘em all down.”
The NAACP has also called for the removal of all Confederate symbols from public sites and buildings.
The ADL is taking a much softer line.
“We also support decisions by cities and other jurisdictions to consider these changes, and to remove monuments when the decision is made through appropriate government process,” the ADL said in a statement to the Forward
The acknowledged that “symbols of [the history of the Confederacy] bring tremendous pain to many, particularly in the African-American community.”
Update, August 28: This story was updated to include additional text from the ADL’s statement.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
