Great argument. You mean to tell me people should be judged by the norms of the time and place which they lived? You do realize you just completely destroyed your argument for tearing down statues. Tony Stark liked it too, BTW, you insulted me and then I challenged you to put up some of your posts where you went against conventional wisdom and turned out to be correct. I put up a bunch of examples of mine. I am still waiting for yours.
People should be judged by the times however it was known at the time slavery was immoral. The statues at issue at the moment were mostly put up as part of a concerted revisionist campaign by an organisation of socialites. Removing them (with some dumb ass exceptions) is destroying a conspiracy to make false history, not history. A hundred years before that in the early 1800s the same kinds of people engineered the departure from slavery as a necessary evil to it being an act of kindness. Hitler was just trying to help some Jews get warm in winter and there were some accidents. That won't fly but if you said it enough and made statues, it would convince oh about a third of the population. The racists in their most extreme form were the Southern generals and their backers. They had a theory of inherent racial superiority, isms require some belief system. Eugenics took a while for it to be understood as a comfortable platform for the bad guys.