Those statues are not historic

The President said "They are trying to take away our history" and
"These thing have been there for 150 years."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/08/23/as-trump-ranted-and-rambled-in-phoenix-his-crowd-slowly-thinned/?utm_term=.bf57c9f73af3

But that is almost universally untrue.  The confederate flag was
hoisted in South Carolina in 1961.  The Robert E. Lee statue recently
removed at The University of Texas (my alma mater) was erected in 1933
and the recently renamed Robert E. Lee Elementary in Austin opened in
1939.

The statues are not genuine relics of the Civil War and the names were
affixed to places opened long after the war.  These actions are not
historic, they are specifically political.  They are a message to the
North about the extent of the South's resistance to black progress and
a specific reminder to black to "stay in the place."  Therefore their
actual historic "value" is the history of invoking the Civil War as a
proxy racist statement.  They are literally monuments to racism.  That
is why there was a surge in Civil War naming and monument building
during the civil rights struggles in the 50s and 60s.

Civil War sites should be respected.  Relics from the war do belong in
museums.  The graves of boys for fought to defend their homes should
be respected.  But the majority of these monuments and place names
happened due to callous political machinations and lack genuine
history.