Tearing down Thomas Jefferson: Black leaders of past wouldn't agree with removing statue

 I hate to admit it, but it’s true: Donald Trump was right about the monuments.

 Not about monuments to Confederate traitors like Robert E. Lee, whom Trump labeled “a great general.” Nor was he correct in claiming that military bases named after Confederates were “part of a Great American heritage.”

But Trump was right that these attacks would morph into a broader campaign to pull down memorials to the Founders of America, not just to the Southerners who took up arms against it.

“So this week it’s Robert E. Lee,” Trump mused in 2017, after white nationalists marched to defend a statue of him in Charlottesville, Virginia. “I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?”