Civil War Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns Calls for Confederate Statues to Be Removed: ‘They’re an Attempt to Rewrite History’ by White Supremacists

Legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said the country is “in the middle of an enormous reckoning” and endorsed the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and the renaming of military bases.

During a discussion with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the director of numerous historical documentaries, including the seminal, nine-part movie Civil War, strongly came out in favor of sweeping prestigious symbols of the Confederacy from the public landscape.

“I think we’re in the middle of an enormous reckoning right now in which the anxieties and the pains and the torments of injustice are bubbling up to the surface,” Burns said. “It’s very important for people like me, of my complexion, to it be as quiet as possible and to listen. What I know from my reading of history is that the confederate monuments have to go.”

Burns then noted that much of the Confederate iconography was installed during waves of backlash to the freeing of the slaves and enfranchising of African-Americans that occurred decades after the Civil War.