Won’t be long until the Lewis and Clark expedition monuments are on the hit list.
Via Helena IR:
Helena’s memorial to Confederate soldiers, a granite fountain in Hill Park, will soon be accompanied by a plaque explaining it was part of a campaign “to assert justice for the ‘Lost Cause.’”
Though New Orleans and other cities around the country are taking down their memorials to Confederate soldiers, Helena’s city commission has instead opted to install a sign explaining the fountain’s history.
Proposed language for the sign seeks to give the fountain historical context and in part explains that the United Daughters of the Confederacy “openly supported the early Ku Klux Klan in its mission of white supremacy and worked to rewrite school textbooks to distort history by romanticizing the Old South.”
City Manager Ron Alles said the city had previously approved the wording for the sign, but the language didn’t fit and had to be condensed. Alles said he needs to compare the revision to the original to be sure it meets the intent of that initial language.
“We’ll get a sign up that’s separate from the fountain. The fountain stays, it’s not coming down,” he said.