We're pleased Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has called for the Communities Foundation of Texas to tackle the long-thorny issue of the Confederate memorials in this city.

What to do about these divisive and painful reminders of this country's racist past seems exactly what the W.W. Kellogg Foundation had in mind when it awarded the foundation a $1.75 million grant in its campaign to provide more racial equity and healing.

This city needs that today more than ever.

Rawlings isn't dictating an outcome, he wants citizens to decide. But he knows too well that Dallas and this country are still living in the shadows of slavery and the enduring legacy of Jim Crow segregation. It's this dark and brutal past that these statues have come to symbolize.

Dallas has four major monuments to the confederacy. We believe it's time for two of the towering tributes in our public spaces to be removed: The massive statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E.Lee in an Oak Lawn park that bears his name and the Confederate War Memorial in front of Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.

They are stand-alone symbols that pay specific tribute to the side of the Civil War that fought to keep human beings in bondage. Continuing to pay homage to that cause is unnecessarily divisive and out of touch.

Jefferson Davis is part of the Confederate Memorial at Pioneer Park in downtown Dallas. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

We felt the same when we pushed in recent years for the renaming of Dallas schools named for Confederate leaders and the end of the flying the Confederate flag.

We're not advocating the erasure of history. It's important for all Americans to understand the history of the Old South. That's why we favored adding plaques to a group of sculptures in Austin a couple of years ago, rather than calling for their removal altogether. We felt adding explanatory text would put the four statues honoring the Confederacy among seven historical leaders on the University of Texas' south plaza in proper context.

Dallas' other two big confederate monuments are at Fair Park. One is a statue on the promenade and the other is a Confederate Medallion in the Great Hall devoted to Texas history. We feel differently about them — and believe they should stay — because they're part of a larger historical presentation that places Texas and its role in the confederacy in a broader context.

One of sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens statues along Dallas Fair Park's Esplanade represents the Confederacy. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

History should capture a sense of time and place. We in Dallas are still shaping this city's history. What does it say about the legacy we're leaving our children if we, in 2017, are still honoring those who helped lead a cause that brought this country such shame?

This discussion won't be easy. It's opened old wounds in dozens of southern cities since white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine people two years ago during a prayer service at a South Carolina church. That horrific act led to New Orleans removing four Confederate statues that had been landmarks in that city for a century.

Dallas should follow the Crescent City's lead. The time has come for Dallas to stop showing reverence to symbols of a hateful past.

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