I enthusiastically and proudly support Black Lives Matter. I attended a protest just last weekend. But I’m saddened at protesters’ destruction of a Ulysses S. Grant statue.
As a Union general he advocated for black soldiers and crushed the slaveholders’ rebellion. Between Lincoln and LBJ, no president fought harder for racial justice than Grant. He secured passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, signed Civil Rights Acts that wouldn’t be seen again until the 1960s, and wiped out the KKK for a generation.
Grant wasn’t perfect. No one is.
His effort to do right by Native Americans was was genuine, but he bears much of the responsibility for the Peace Policy’s collapse. Nonetheless, the world is a better place because he existed. Frederick Douglass had good reason to say that Grant was “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point.”
– P. Sicher
The Lincoln Liberal 
Well said
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