Streeter: I know exactly what to do with Baltimore’s Confederate monuments. Burn them.

After a trip across the country to take part in a California exhibit, four controversial monuments will soon be making their way back to Baltimore. The problem is the city hasn’t yet said what it’s going to do with the Confederate sculptures.

In the spirit of civic responsibility and general helpfulness, I have a modest suggestion: Anybody got a wood chipper?

I jest, of course. These behemoths of hate, created long after the Civil War ended to memorialize racists and slaveholders, are made of metal, not wood. So maybe it’s more appropriate to just let them burn? If we can’t do that, I’d like them locked in a storage unit where they get lost in a box, anonymously, like the Ark of the Covenant in that Indiana Jones movie.

Because in life, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Roger B. Taney, all at one time the owners of human beings who looked like me, were committed to the destruction and degradation of my people. They don’t deserve the honor of artistic immortality outside the context of their horrors.

Lee and Jackson, as Confederate generals, were literal traitors to this country, so monuments to them were always hypocritical. The truth is that these beasts, made so long after their deaths, were meant to terrorize Black citizens so they wouldn’t get too comfy in their newfound freedoms, which are currently being chipped away like I wish those statues would be.

Maybe we just melt them down and shape them into statues of Harriet Tubman, Lucille Clifton and Tupac? That’s similar to what Mayor Brandon Scott told NPR in 2017 when he was on City Council, though his current stance of remaining “informed” on next steps for the sculptures is surprisingly vague.

But my feelings are unchanging and not vague. Shall I remind you of the wood chipper?

I wanted to hear what a cooler, more knowledgeable head had to say, so I spoke with Annapolis native and Black historian Janice Hayes-Williams of Our Legacy Tours, which cover local history. She’s no stranger to the discussion of what to do with these monuments, having been vocal about the 2017 removal of a statue of Taney, the fifth chief justice of the United States, from the Maryland State House.

The difference between the two of us is that Hayes-Williams thought it should stay put. “I thought it was a bad idea to take him away,” she told me. But not because she thinks Taney — who provided the opinion in the diabolical Dred Scott case that Black people, enslaved or free, could not be considered U.S. citizens — was a swell guy. To her, it’s more about context.

“It was his presence that created the Thurgood Marshall statue, juxtaposed on the other side of the State House,” she explained. “There are two Maryland justices. I used them to teach. You don’t take away. You add to.”

I admit that it would be a quietly powerful lesson of change, justice and progress to walk from the image of Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, to that of Taney, who would have been horrified that Marshall had the same job. The thought of Taney, wherever he is in the afterlife, discovering that sends me into bitter, spiteful cackling.

The thing is that Taney’s significance is more than Dred Scott. Hayes-Williams has used Taney’s statue to talk about the justice’s brother-in-law, Francis Scott Key, leading tour participants in a “Star-Spangled Banner” sing-along.

She even schooled them on how Taney’s nephew, Philip Barton Key II, was murdered by Sen. Daniel Sickles in a Washington, D.C., private club because Key had been having a torrid affair with Sickles’ wife. The senator became the first defendant to claim temporary insanity — and it worked.

Taney’s statue acted as a visual historical aid, but also as a testament to the ugly period during which he was chief of the Supreme Court. Without these markers, it’s easier to distort the truth, she said.

“When we look around and we ask ‘Who is responsible for slavery?,’ all these white men and their statues are gone,” Hayes-Williams said. “You can’t teach from them. This is not education. This is behavior dictated by trauma.”

That makes sense to me. The public removal of these monuments was spurred by the 2017 fatal interaction between protesters and white supremacists upset with the removal of such structures in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Honestly, the sinister embers of the Confederacy should have been snuffed out right after Lee and Grant met at the Appomattox Court House to end the fight. If they’d put all the rebels in jail as an example, we wouldn’t be where we are. I take this personally as the descendant of slaves. I was also an American History minor with a Civil War concentration at the University of Maryland, and a Black reporter who early in my career covered Battle of Gettysburg reenactments surrounded by gray-suited men voluntarily playing the people who wanted to keep me enslaved. Good times.

Hayes-Williams understands why all this is disturbing, and why after the death of protester Heather Heyer at Charlottesville the monuments came down in the middle of the night and “we didn’t think about it.” But she thinks we need to, and that it would be more powerful to have Taney, Lee and others not in a place where they are honored, but where they are studied.

“What we should do is to teach the whole thing,” she said. “We have warehouses we could put them all in, and tell the context of what they meant to America. It’s been nine years, and now they’re all coming home.”

I think that could be a good compromise. But if that doesn’t happen, the first strike of the chisel is on me.