Beat the Press host Emily Rooney joined Boston Public Radio on Friday, where she read her weekly list of fixations and fulminations. This week, Emily pointed her critical eye at the thousands of statues and monuments across the country, political and otherwise.
"I don’t really like a lot of monuments and memorials,” she said. "A lot of them are junk, they just look terrible.”
Public monuments have returned to the national media spotlight in recent weeks, with the removal and defacement of several statues commemorating Confederate leaders and Christopher Columbus .
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Rooney noted that, despite these cases, a vast majority of U.S. Confederate monuments remain standing.
"More than 70 confederate monuments have come down since the Charleston South Carolina church shooting in 2015,” she said. "A third of them since George Floyd was murdered. But there’s still over 700 remaining -- 10 percent. And if you look at, there’s a map with the little dots on it . Hundreds of them, all over the South.”
"I have no problem with that stuff being removed,” she said.
Rooney added that she wasn’t content to focus on just the Confederate monuments, however. Speaking of a statue in downtown Boston of Edward Everett Hale, Rooney asked hosts Margery Eagan and Brian O’Donovan, “Do you guys know who Edward Everett Hale is?”
(For what it's worth, Everett Hale was a 19th century historian and minister who lived in Roxbury.)
“What are we doing with that thing there?" she asked. "And now people have defaced that, they’ve put a mask on it.”
