This I so wrong on so many levels.  Who gets to sanitize history?  The answer is apparently a mob of politically correct vandals who can't view history in context.  These people are a bubble off of the same collective mindset displayed by ISIS in tearing down ancient temples and statues.  They assign meaning and claim injury to objects that have long ago lost any aura.  These people can't separate the past from the present.  They lack an ability to get past their self-absorption and see how this could apply, in the future, to statues erected today.    These memorials are a part of our collective past.  The reasons for their erection are as much a part of the past as the actions or people they depict and none of these reasons or actions happened in a vacuum.  They took place as a time where norms were entirely different.  These changes in our society are memorialized, in part, by how these events and people are viewed now, not by trying to erase them as if they never existed.