This afternoon I took a bone-chilling walk through the Hopkins campus up to University Parkway and down Charles Street Avenue Boulevard. Baltimore is fortunate to have reasonably good air quality anyway, but the frigid temperatures of late make everything seem crisp and clean, almost as though the air has been through a bleach and rinse cycle.

I took notice of three monuments along my route. They’ve both been there for years, but given the political climate of late, I have a nasty feeling that they won’t be around much longer.

At Charles and University is a red-granite monument to the Women of the Confederacy. A block south is a beautiful, bas-relief Hans Schueler bronze honoring Sidney Lanier, the poet of the Confederacy. Along Wyman Park is a pair of equestrian statues, honoring Lee and Jackson.

It is common belief in the rest of the world that Baltimore is a northern city. It is not. Washington, its neighbor to the south, was in fact a rather Southern city in temperament until the ballooning post-WW2 government turned it into polyglot sprawl. Baltimore lies below the Mason-Dixon line, and its merchant class and aristocracy had distinctly Confederate sympathies. Thus, for these four Confederate monuments — and one other on Mount Royal Avenue — Yankee monuments weigh in at exactly one (annoyingly enough, right on my way to work every day).

Even though the city was never able to secede — the Union government wisely did not want to lose a major industrial port, nor did it want its capital surrounded — the sentiment of the people in that day was Confederate, and so after the War ended, the monuments that went up were mostly Confederate.

When a monument is erected, it is generally reflective of the spirit and history of the people who erect it. It commemorates the people of its locale. Cities build monuments to local heroes or national figures who play prominently in their own history and interests.

Hence, the current flap over the erection of a statue to Lincoln in the city of Richmond. Why on earth does Richmond, the Confederate capital, need a statue of Lincoln? The argument from the politically correct side is that, given the supposed monstrosity of the Confederate memorials that fill the city, a statue of Lincoln would “even sides.” How ridiculous! The “sides” were decided, for better or worse, in 1865. Why should Richmond erect a statue to someone who not only had no personal connection to Richmond, but in fact was instrumental in the city’s defeat? If sides need to be called back into play and must be made even, then I will expect to see a monument to Jefferson Davis located somewhere in the city of Washington.

The true problem is that monuments are now being used as granite markers of one-upsmanship, rather than actual memorials of people and events. Richmond’s struggle with monumental tongue-sticking started with the erection of the Arthur Ashe memorial. The issue was not that he was a native son (who, incidentally, hated Richmond and couldn’t wait to leave) or that he had been a tennis star, but that the statue must be placed on Monument Avenue. Erecting a statue to a tennis star (which seems a bit ostentatious, anyway) was not the goal; the goal was to put a statue of a black man alongside the Confederate heroes. And now, the Great Emancipator must live on symbolically in the Confederate capital. This is no longer a question of civil rights or equality; it’s become an expensive and bitter war of point-making.

Why not, instead, build a monument to Maggie Walker? She was the driving force behind Richmond’s black community in the late 19th century, establishing schools and a free bank for black citizens. Or, preserve the Woolworth’s on Broad Street — about to be razed — where Richmond had a lunch-counter sit-in, never as publicized as a similar event in Greensboro.

Richmond would stand well to commemorate the struggle for civil rights. However, the gesture should be one of honesty and historical accuracy rather than childish saber-rattling.