'Don’t take down statues – take down racism’

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Back in the 1600s when there was no USA, the Brits set up 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard. Then there was a territorial dispute between William Penn, and Lord Baltimore over the boundary between their respective colonies. So they hired a mr. Mason, and Mr. Dixon, to survey it. And that two man team figured out that straight line that is still the boundry between the two colonies that became two states of Pennsylvania and Maryland.

In Maryland the economy became based upon tobacco, and therefore upon slave plantations. Pennsylvania had family farms that grew wheat and potatoes. So it became apparent that Maryland was the top of the south, and Penn was the bottom state of the north. So the Mason-Dixon line double as the boundary between two big regions of the country. Actually the Mason-Dixon line plus the Ohio River. Between the north and the south, and between slave states and free states, and later between states that had segregation laws and those that did not.

However the Mason Dixon line probably has nothing to do with the term "Dixie" for the south.

Ah, so the original division prior to independence, later extrapolated westwards.

Exactly.

All of the ...racial, regional, political, sociological, etc, baggage attached to the Mason-Dixon line came long later.

I don't think that every single statue should be taken down. This would had a lot of great leaders. Take down the statues of racists, sure. Why don't the protesters put their heads together and come up with constructive ways to make racism a thing of the past?

Because they are putting their heads together to make racism a thing of the past. In general the system already failed in the past.

I am not sure if it what you meant to write, that taking down statues would hurt a lot of leaders, because it wouldn't. Taking down a statue from someone hundreds of years ago does not hurt them in the least, they are already gone. And the worshiping we do of people who are made of statue are themselves kind of silly, generally if you went back to that time to talk to that person you would find that they were a lot different than what their mythos would say and would be applicable to today. Monuments to ideas are much more of a positive element than to a specific person, and for that reason, it would probably be fair that there be more even holding up of ideas of people who may not have been able to organise a statue for their ideals than some random statue of a slave owner.