A group made up of predominantly African-Americans has called for Confederate statues in Dallas to remain standing – despite a nationwide push to remove similar markers after the deadly rally in Charlottesville.

“I’m not intimidated by Robert E. Lee’s statue. I’m not intimidated by it. It doesn’t scare me,” Sandra Crenshaw, a former city council member, told a local CBS affiliate. “We don’t want America to think that all African-Americans are supportive of this.”

Crenshaw was joined by several Buffalo Soldier historians and Sons of Confederate Veterans in a bid to protect the Confederate statues in Dallas.

“Some people think that by taking a statue down, that’s going to erase racism,” Crenshaw said. “Misguided.”

City council member Philip Kingston disagreed.

“What we don’t do is leave up a monument that celebrates the very idea that some of us are not equal to the others,” said Kingston, who has proposed a resolution that seeks to keep the monuments off public property.

Mayor Mike Rawlings agreed with Kingston, saying he doesn’t like the Confederate monuments in the city’s public spaces – calling them a “symbol of injustice” and “dangerous totems,” The Dallas Morning News reported.

But the mayor said he wasn’t ready to say the city should tear down its Confederate monuments near City Hall or in Lee Park.

“It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and say ‘tear it down’ because it’s frankly politically correct and in many ways it makes us all feel good. I feel that way,” Rawlings said.

“But I hesitate because I realize the city of Dallas is better, is stronger when we are united and not divided. My goal as mayor, my job as mayor, is to continue to unite our city.”

Rawlings called for a task force to consider what to do about the city’s public Confederate monuments.

Dallas was once a Ku Klux Klan hotbed and was dubbed “The City of Hate” after the John F. Kennedy assassination.