[PghBaldy]

I am mad about this removal in particular.

[Pravious]

Wow! How utterly offensive! A friendly black man playing a banjo and a (gasp!) white guy listening to him! How terrible! How racist! This statue might bring out everyone’s inner Nazi (or something)!

/s

[CIB-173RDABN]

American Taliban - destroying our culture in the name of PC

[piasa]

(snip)...Rather than writing nostalgically for an old South (it was, after all, the present day for him), or trivializing the hardships of slavery, Foster sought to humanize the characters in his songs, to have them care for one another, and to convey a sense that all people--regardless of their ethnic identities or social and economic class--share the same longings and needs for family and home. He instructed white performers of his songs not to mock slaves but to get their audiences to feel compassion for them. In his own words, he sought to "build up taste...among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order." Stephen Foster is understood by some scholars as having reformed sentimental songs in black-face minstrelsy, then the most pervasive and powerful force in American popular culture.

     It is possible that the sense of compassion reflected in some of his songs was aided and encouraged by his boyhood friend and artistic collaborator [ardent abolitionist] Charles Shiras.”Pittsburgh was a center for abolitionist activities in Pennsylvania, and Shiras was a leader of the movement. Inspired by local appearances by William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, Shiras launched a crusading abolitionist newspaper, and subsequently published a volume of anti-slavery and anti-capitalist verse. He and Stephen wrote at least one song together, and a stage work that was performed but never published and is now lost.

LINK

[piasa]

I’m tempted to sculpt large piles of crap to place on all these empty pedestals... and engraved on each hardened turd the words “This POS was made possible by the race baiters of the Democratic Party.”