I have a Civil War hypothesis to explain the statues: We never officially ended the part of the Civil War due to slavery. The original goal of the war was maintaining the Union of the country. And while Republicans were abolitionists, and Lincoln after the Emancipation Proclamation made the war also about ending slavery, we really ended it on preserving the union. We didn’t go through and systematically destroy all of the things that supported slavery. Reconstruction tried, but, like going to the moon, people got bored with it and moved on. And that allowed a system to be restored that was slavery in everything but name. Jim Crow and the statues were consequences of that. If we had truly ended slavery, we would have completely redone the economy of the south, redivided the land so that it didn’t match the plantations, and introduced more manufacturing.

Shorter: We still have to have the final battle over slavery.