Ulysses S Grant is canceled.

[Koharu]

Grant at least tried to be decent. He apologized for his antisemitism during the war and worked hard to make up for it. My understanding is that the Jewish community at the time accepted his apology and appreciated his willingness to work with them.

His comments about Mexicans during the Mexican war were... Very imperialistic. However, he had just gotten out of West Point and his sentiments basically echoed those of the people he was around. Still, during his administration, he also had imperialistic designs on a Caribbean nation (whose name is escaping me at the moment), somewhat tied into white saviorism combined with it being a possibility as a place for freed slaves to go and build their own community. That said, he seemed to be less into the "send blacks somewhere else to be their own nation" than Lincoln was.

He also was really awful at dealing with Indigenous Americans. The Black Hills were supposed to be left to the Native Americans, but Americans went in anyway and found gold, so settlers shoved their way in and Grant could have done a lot more about it. And then, of course, the Sioux Wars. I don't know how Native folks feel about Grant, honestly, but I grew up in an area steeped in the history of those fights. I do know many absolutely hate Lincoln, as he sentenced 38 Dakota men to death.

Anyway, Grant is actually one of my favorite presidents, but I still understand people toppling statues of him. Statues aren't useful for telling or sharing history. Their destruction or removal is irrelevant to whether or not people learn about these figures. This isn't erasing history. It's removing an image that causes some people pain/frustration/anger when seeing it, and I'm okay with that. That means they know about the reality of history. Grant did good things and bad things. Lincoln did, too. He's a hero to African Americans but a villian to Native Americans. We need to learn about all these aspects, and statues don't encourage any in-depth education.

The only type of monument I would be upset about being destroyed is one still used by living people to mourn lost family members, such as WWI-current memorials. I was and am a bit uncomfortable with removing Confederate memorials that were lists of names with no other stuff to be propaganda. Obviously if it's glorifying "the lost cause," that's different. But something for people to look back on lost ancestors, that doesn't need to go anywhere as long as there's not anything else.