A new poll shows that most people in the United States oppose removing statues of Confederate generals, siding with President Trump on an issue over which he has been repeatedly slapped down.
In a survey of 1,006 adults by the Washington Post and ABC News, conducted July 12-15, 52% of respondents said statues that honor Confederate generals should not be removed from public spaces. More than two-thirds, 68%, said the same of statues of slave-owning U.S. presidents.
The poll found that 50% oppose renaming military bases that bear the names of Confederate generals, such as Fort Lee, Virginia, named for Gen. Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army, while 42% said they favored such a move.
Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy said last month that he would be open to renaming bases such as Fort Lee, or Fort Gordon, which honors Lt. Gen. John Brown Gordon, believed to have been head of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.
Trump has said he may veto the defense spending bill because it includes a provision changing the base names.
Trump has decried the push to remove such statues as an effort by those on the Left to eliminate U.S. history. During his remarks at Mount Rushmore on July 4, he said the push to remove Confederate statues was an effort by those on the Left to “wipe out” history and “defame our heroes.”
George Floyd’s death and the racial disparities of the coronavirus have placed historic inequalities for black Americans to the forefront of the national discussion, but most people oppose paying reparations to black people whose ancestors were slaves.
Less than one-third of people surveyed said they favored reparations, while 63% opposed it. In a comparable June 1997 poll, 19% of people favored paying reparations, while 77% opposed it.
There is a strong divide between black and white Americans on the issue, a divide that has grown over time. Where 82% of black Americans support reparations today, a 17-point increase since 1997, among white Americans that number is only 18%, up 8 points from 1997.
However, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they support the Black Lives Matter movement, with 46% expressing strong support. Thirty-two percent said they opposed it.
Fifty-five percent of people surveyed do not support reducing funding for police departments and redirecting the money to social services and 43% oppose it strongly, while 40% say they would favor it.
The White House is set to resume briefings on the coronavirus with Trump, but the poll shows that 64% percent of respondents. do not trust what he says about the virus and are concerned by its spread.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said that trying to control the spread of the coronavirus was more important to them than trying to restart the economy, and 66% said they were concerned about themselves or a family member catching the virus. Just 15% of people said they rarely or never wore a mask.
