Concern 12

Why Are They Destroying Our History? Monuments, Statues, and Symbols

This section addresses the calls for public symbols of slave owners and the Confederacy, such as the Confederate flag and monuments to confederate figures, to be removed.  Arguments for their removal state that these relics glorify and memorialize slavery, while perpetuating America’s revisionist history. In this section we examine the origins of these monuments, and the applied values and psychological attachment ascribed to their existence, while offering alternatives to recording history.

01

This article provides the basic ABC’s on the debate about Confederate monuments and their removal: what was the Confederacy? When were these statues erected? How many are there? If you know little about the subject, start here. Some key takeaways:

  • The Confederacy was a group of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and fought the Civil War beginning in 1860 in order to preserve the institution of slavery. 

  • They were defeated in 1865 and slavery was abolished.

  • Most Confederate monuments were built long after the Civil War ended, between the 1890s and 1950s.

  • The two periods that saw a spike in the construction of Confederate monuments coincided with the rise of Jim Crow segregation laws in the 1900s and again in the 1950s as a backlash against the Civil Rights movement.

  • The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,503 Confederate place names and symbols across the country.

  • Civil rights activists see these statues as honoring figures who supported slavery, racism, segregation, and treason. Opponents argue that removal would erase history, while others support the statues as symbols of “southern pride.”

02

Interview with Gettysburg College Prof. Scott Hancock

CNN (June 27, 2020)

This video clip features an interview with Gettysburg College Associate Professor of History & Africana Studies, Scott Hancock at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania (which has about 40 Confederate monuments, some built in the '60s and '70s) discussing the nuances in this national conversation about statues and monuments.  Scott argues that a real historical dialogue can be had surrounding these statues, but only within an appropriate historical context. Statues can have an educational value, but they should not have merely "a one-way message” that erases the history of the Civil War and slavery’s centrality to the Confederate cause.

“I think the context matters tremendously.  Statues in town squares, that aren’t situated on the battlefields and aren’t situated because of the consensus of people in those towns.  It’s not like they're talking to the Black folk in those towns.  For me personally, I’m all in favor of those coming down.  [However] these because they have an educational value, I think are a bit different, significantly different because it is about pointing to the battle.”

“It’s important to not let that statue communicate a one way message, cause that one way message is that they had a righteous cause.  I would say their cause was to maintain the institution of slavery there’s nothing righteous about it.  So for me, it's not so much about taking the statute down, as educating visitors about why that statue went up.  That it went up to maintain white supremacy.”

03

This map identifies the growing number of Confederate symbols that have been removed since the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting in 2015 — and the almost 2,000 that still stand. Full report found here.

04

As Monuments Fall, How Does the World Reckon with a Racist Past?

By Philip Simmons, National Geographic, (June 29, 2020)

In this article, Simmons examines controversial statues and monuments that are considered dishonorable today and asks, should these relics be removed or preserved as mementos of history?  As a “major reconsideration of how the history of colonialization, slavery, and white supremacy is taught and viewed, especially through public art and memorials, is furiously underway,” the author examines the pros and cons of removing these aspects of our history.

“Using contemporary values to judge the moral failings and atrocities of ancestors and to reevaluate the lives and legacies of canonized leaders is an explosive calculus. Nonetheless, a growing number of nations seem ready to embrace the moral deconstruction of the past to understand and improve the present. The removal of monuments and symbols to a racist past is an important step to a more just future. Some scholars see the current waves of activism that sprouted primarily from the Black Lives Matter movement as a precursor to overdue structural reform. ”

““The racial justice movement currently underway is unprecedented and can be considered a game changer. The way many people look at the world has literally changed in weeks,” said Kevin K. Gaines, Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia…  This is a transformational moment not only in the United States but around the globe. In the United States this is a multi-racial movement under the banner of Black Lives Matter. That’s what’s novel and unprecedented about this effort,” said Gaines.”

“How history will judge us a century from now is anyone’s guess. It seems likely the emerging generation of young scholars and social activists will be remembered for challenging systems of oppression and racial hierarchy.”

“Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we choose them carefully. Once I learned the real history of these statues, I knew there was only one path forward, and that meant making straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong. It starts with telling the truth about the past,” wrote former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

05

‘The Worshipping of Whiteness’: Why Racist Symbols Persist in America

By Alexandra Villareal, The Guardian, (June 30, 2020)

This article investigates the pervasive way in which our checkered past exists symbolically in every aspect of American life; not only in Confederate statues but in everyday items like pancake syrup bottles. 

“‘Racism isn’t always abrupt. It isn’t always in your face. Sometimes, it’s very insidious,’ said Franklin Eugene Forbes II, an architect and urban planner. ‘Why am I, a Black person, using a bill where a man who believed I was inferior to somebody else as a way to buy things, the same way people that look like me were bought by him?’”

“‘I hope at least that the questioning that has started with monuments, because they’re visible, because they’re large, and because they’re easy to remove, will continue to happen as we start to re-evaluate the symbols on money, on our stamps,’ Akiboh [Alvita Akiboh, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan] said. ‘The flags and other symbols that we use. The songs that we sing for our patriotic anthems. And that definitely, we will get to re-evaluate our K-12 curriculum.’”

“‘That is the story of America, to have Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama simultaneously. To have Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and 4 million people enslaved simultaneously. That paradox is the American narrative,’ said Rhae Lynn Barnes, an Assistant Professor in Princeton University’s History department.”

“Aspirational depictions of a city upon a hill and liberty and justice for all lose their luster when they’re juxtaposed against the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples, or an intricate slave-based economy rubber-stamped by revolutionaries fighting for their own freedom.”

“It’s this inconsistent retelling that has allowed for the veneration of deeply flawed characters, whose biographies are often cherry-picked for effect. Many of the founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders, despite waxing poetic about how the institution was a “moral depravity”. Even Benjamin Franklin, revered as an early abolitionist, owned enslaved people for much of his life and ran ads selling others in his newspaper. Champions of these men often attribute their moral failings to the sociopolitical environment in which they lived. But “just because slavery was accepted among white elites or even the broader white population at the time does not mean it was accepted by everybody, because everybody includes Black people who were enslaved, indigenous people who were pushed off their lands in order to expand plantation slavery,” said Akiboh.”

06

More Than A Statute: Rethinking J. Marion Sims’ Legacy

By Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens (August 24, 2017)

Written by one of the foremost scholars of medicine and slavery, this article explores the violent racist origins of the field of gynecology and its forefather, J. Marion Sims. His early research, and subsequent fame, was based on a series of experiments done on enslaved women without anesthesia. While statues honoring him stand in New York, South Carolina, and Dublin, the enslaved women on which he experimented have been largely forgotten. Cooper Owens reminds us that Sims’ experimentation, as appalling as it sounds, was not an outlier but rather the norm—physicians in the South practiced on enslaved black people for the purpose of maintaining their economic value as property and in disregard for their humanity.

She suggests that the commemorative statues and awards that bear his name and give him uncritical praise must be recontextualized to link him to the Black women on whom his work depended. More importantly, she argues, we must advocate for the end of modern medical policies that provide unequal and unethical care for Black women.

“I have argued and continued to insist that James Marion Sims was a product of his time, but this fact does not detract from his role as a man who participated in a system that reduced human beings to moveable property, one that was built on violence, terror, and white supremacy. Yet, our assessments of him as a purveyor of racialized terror must include how historic figures were regarded by their peers. Sims noted in his memoir that the local white community and his two white medical apprentices abandoned him after two years of failed surgeries on his leased slave patients.”

“What are we to make of commemorative statues and honorific medical awards that provide uncritical praise of James Marion Sims as an uncomplicated hero? I support efforts to recontextualize the historical text on monuments to Sims. The names, statuses, and labor of his enslaved patients must always be linked to Sims because he would not have achieved success as the country’s foremost gynecological surgeon without the institution of slavery and the forced availability of Black women’s bodies. His stature as a medical hero was built on the broken bodies of enslaved women.”

“Systemic racism requires that the fight for equality in medicine be rooted in the continued inclusion of medical humanities, a field that applies the humanities, social sciences, and the arts to medical education; in reforms in how biomedical ethics classes are taught in medical schools; and in legislation that does not harm women of color physically and legally.”

“My hope is that, while acknowledging how damaging racist symbols are for people of color who are reminded of the way “American heroes” achieved their status, we simultaneously work to eliminate racism within our educational and health-care systems at all levels. No medical doctor trained to heal women and their children should graduate with the same concepts about biological differences that Sims did in 1835.”

07

Myths and Misunderstandings I The Confederate Flag

By John Coski, The American Civil War Museum (January 9 2018)

This article from historian John Coski, provides an overview of the history of the Confederate flag’s use as a symbol of heritage, as a civil war battle flag used to defend southern state’s rights to maintain slavery, to its use as as a symbol of hate.

“Even before World War II, cracks were evident in the foundation of the flag’s status as a symbol of heritage. Occasional northern and African-American voices questioned the wisdom of displaying a flag they associated with disunity or treason. And young white southerners began using the flag in distinctly non-memorial ways as a symbol of regional identity.”

“The growing battle over the post-Reconstruction South’s established racial order of Jim Crow segregation resurrected the Confederate flag’s use as a political symbol.

Supporters of the States Right Party (aka the Dixiecrats) in 1948 embraced the flag as a symbol of support for segregation. Although the Dixiecrats emphasized Constitutional principal, “states rights” in the 1940s and 1950s translated, as it had in the 1860s, into the purposeful denial of fundamental human and civil rights for African Americans.”

Extended Readings

  1. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2008).

  2. Ana Lucia Araujo, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury, 2020).

  3. John M Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard University Press, 2005).

  4. Monnica T. Williams, “The Confederate Flag: Heritage or Hate?,” Psychology Today (July 6, 2015).

  5. "America Inside Out: Historians on the Confederate Monument Debate,” The American Historical Association.

  6. Aaron Black, “How Americans Still Resist Removing Confederate Symbols,” The Washington Post (June 11, 2020).

  7. Kelly Grovier, “Why Are Statues So Powerful,” BBC UK (June 12, 2020).