Confederate memorials are being taken down in many states, after it became a recent hot button issue with white supremacy protests in Charlottesville. VA recently.
Some towns are suggesting pop artists as replacement statues. Portsmouth, VA has a current petition with 25,000 signatures to replace a Robert E. Lee statue with Missy Elliot (since it's her hometown). Nathan Coflin, the petition's author, said, "Together we can put white supremacy down, flip it and reverse it,", with the new Missy statue.
Another petition was just started in Louisiana on Change.org, is asking to replace confederate memorials with a statue of "an actual Louisiana hero", Britney Spears. Spears is from Kentwood, LA and is the biggest pop star to hail from Louisiana.
The petition site her philanthropy for the state as good reason. "The Britney Spears Foundation raised $585,000 for charity, and donated a large portion of it to Hurricane Katrina relief programmes, and [she is] currently donating some of her Vegas ticket show sales to Louisiana schools for flood recovery."
I'm not sure either of these will ever really happen and though they both deserve recognition for their accomplishments, I don't think this is the right spot.
However, if we can get a statue of this, I might be more convinced:
For real though, this confederate statue thing is getting so out of hand. I'm a little confused on how a statue of historical figures all of a sudden become offensive. An even so, if we took them all down to appease people, does that really change anything?! It seems like we could focus efforts on things much more beneficial to race relations that could really make a change.
P.S. I'm having trouble picturing Outkast and Luke Bryan on Stone Mountain