tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/confederate-statues-41923/articlesConfederate statues – The Conversation2023-03-24T12:37:05Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1985812023-03-24T12:37:05Z2023-03-24T12:37:05ZReaction to bronze sculpture of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston hasn’t been good – and that’s not bad for art that shatters conventions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517025/original/file-20230322-1452-42ggzh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=231%2C21%2C1797%2C1329&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. memorial sculpture at Boston Common is called 'The Embrace.' </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/embrace-the-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-memorial-sculpture-at-news-photo/1246205559?adppopup=true">Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As an acclaimed photographer and conceptual artist, <a href="https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2023/02/28/mlk-statue-embrace-backstory/">Hank Willis Thomas</a> has grown accustomed to criticisms of his unconventional art and concepts of identity.</p>
<p>But even Thomas <a href="https://time.com/6249068/martin-luther-king-sculpture-hank-willis-thomas-interview/">had never experienced anything like</a> the reaction to his latest sculpture, designed to commemorate the lives of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr., two of the most revered civil rights leaders in modern American history.</p>
<p>Unveiled in January 2023, the two sets of 20-foot-tall bronze arms appear floating in air and are embracing. Those who visit the statue in Boston can also walk underneath it into the space between the Kings’ arms.</p>
<p>It was in Boston after all, that the two met and fell in love.</p>
<p>Despite the intended show of mutual affection between the Kings, many of the tweets shared on national news feeds after the unveiling were crude and misinterpreted arms for other body parts. </p>
<p>Tweeters decried: “Disrespectful,” “Obscene,” “Phallic,” “Gross” and “Insulting.”</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://compactmag.com/article/a-masturbatory-homage-to-my-family">online magazine Compact</a>, Seneca Scott, a labor union activist and cousin of Coretta Scott King, depicted the sculpture, titled “The Embrace,” as a “masturbatory metal homage to my legendary family members” and an insult to Black people everywhere.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/kah.html">a scholar</a> of visual culture, public memorials and race, I know these reactions to a new monument are not uncommon.</p>
<p>In fact, outrage is the common response. </p>
<h2>Shattering the idea of a conventional memorial</h2>
<p>“The Embrace” is unusual and was unveiled at a time of intense national debate about the public memorials of white men and the dismal histories of representing Black people and women. </p>
<p>Across the U.S., Confederate monuments and statues of Christopher Columbus and Teddy Roosevelt have been passionately defended – and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/970610428/nearly-100-confederate-monuments-removed-in-2020-report-says-more-than-700-remai">have come tumbling down</a> over the past 10 years.</p>
<p>This sculpture is both abstract and carefully detailed – the buttons on his coat and her jewelry are clearly articulated in bronze. </p>
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<img alt="A Black man is embracing a Black woman as both of them are smiling." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517048/original/file-20230322-2304-nf6b9f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Martin Luther King Jr. hugs his wife, Coretta, after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-hugs-his-wife-coretta-during-a-news-photo/517330412?adppopup=true">Bettmann/GettyImages</a></span>
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<p>Many of the critics complained that enormous floating arms of beloved civil rights leaders did a terrible disservice to the Kings.</p>
<p>One tweeter asked Thomas: “Why did you make it so complicated and confusing?”</p>
<p>Most memorials do their work with a few very familiar conventions – soldiers on horses, scantily clad buxom figures of liberty, and dignified men caught midstride, forever frozen in time. </p>
<p>“The Embrace” shattered those conventions – which partly explains the outrage. </p>
<p>In the past, the most respectful, most dignified way to represent a revered person was as fully dressed and standing tall.</p>
<p>“The Embrace” steps outside of memorial conventions, which is a particularly complicated thing to do when representing Black people and women. </p>
<p>Depicting Coretta Scott King without a whole body and without a face runs the risk of seeming to be part of a long practice of denying women the power and dignity of their male counterparts.</p>
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<img alt="A Black man dressed in a dark suit is sitting on stairs made of stone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517040/original/file-20230322-14-9dq21n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hank Willis Thomas, the artist who created ‘The Embrace,’ in Boston on June 14, 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/hank-willis-thomas-the-artist-who-created-the-embrace-the-news-photo/1241421458?adppopup=true">Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Most women found in public memorials are symbols of liberty, peace, justice – and at least partially naked. </p>
<p>They are beautiful and aspirational, and, most notably, not powerful actual people in the world. </p>
<p>According to <a href="https://monumentlab.com/">Monument Lab</a>, a public art and history nonprofit group, there are 11 times more monuments to mermaids than congresswomen in the United States.</p>
<p>The history of representing Black men in the United States is equally disturbing.</p>
<p>Figures of them are all too rare, and when they do appear, they are generic soldiers or, more often, barechested and kneeling, nameless or enslaved. </p>
<p>The artistic choice to depict Martin Luther King Jr. without a face, without an intact body, without the dignity of a straight back, runs the risk of robbing him of the power he risked to carve out nonviolent protests in a racially hostile country.</p>
<p>An artist of Thomas’ caliber and experience knows he is taking those risks, and does so intentionally.</p>
<h2>Initial reactions change over time</h2>
<p>Some of the most beloved public art has been met with calls for a wrecking ball. </p>
<p>Lots of folks, for example, were very upset when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in 1982. One critic called the monument a “<a href="https://magazine.art21.org/2017/03/15/the-black-gash-of-shame-revisiting-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial-controversy/#foot-04">black gash of shame</a>.”</p>
<p>“It is an unfortunate choice of memorial,” the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3108969">New Republic wrote</a> at the time. “Memorials are built to give context and, possibly, meaning to suffering that is otherwise incomprehensible. … To treat the Vietnam dead like the victims of some monstrous traffic accident is more than a disservice to history; it is a disservice to the memory of the 57,000.”</p>
<p>Designed by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maya-Lin">Maya Lin</a>, the memorial <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/11/08/vietnam-veterans-memorial-40-years/">has now become</a> one of the most cherished pieces of public art in the U.S.</p>
<p>Even the Eiffel Tower <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/1120/How-the-Eiffel-Tower-outlasted-its-critics">was considered an eyesore</a> by high-minded Paris art critics, some of whom described it as no more than a railroad bridge turned on its side when it was finished in 1889.</p>
<p>Willis is no stranger to criticisms. In fact, he embraces it.</p>
<p>“My belief,” he told Time magazine in a <a href="https://time.com/6249068/martin-luther-king-sculpture-hank-willis-thomas-interview/">January 2023 interview</a> “is artists learn through critique. There’s things that we love that over time we get tired of, and there’s things that we’re not quite sure about at the beginning, but over time, we love.”</p>
<p>Such was the case in Philadelphia in 2017, when he unveiled his 8-foot-tall, 800-pound sculpture of an Afro pick topped with a clenched-fist, Black Power salute. </p>
<p>Officially called “<a href="https://monumentlab.com/projects/hank-willis-thomas-all-power-to-all-people">All Power to All People</a>,” the statue rests near Philadelphia City Hall on Thomas Paine Plaza and received initial rebukes but eventual praise.</p>
<h2>Public art that has something to say</h2>
<p>But one crucial idea is missing from most of the criticisms of “The Embrace.”</p>
<p>In my view, memorials and monuments are not actually made to mark a shared history or to maintain the status quo, as some have argued. It’s my belief that the people who build and design them have a point they want to make in the world.</p>
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<img alt="A statue of arms and hands has a space underneath where visitors can walk." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514297/original/file-20230308-28-ewpuxm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Another view of ‘The Embrace’ shows the space underneath the statue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/embrace-the-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-memorial-sculpture-at-news-photo/1246205254?adppopup=true">Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/united-daughters-of-the-confederacy/">United Daughters of the Confederacy</a> had a vision in 1890 when it unveiled the sculpture of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee riding atop his horse Traveller in Richmond, Virginia. </p>
<p>And Thomas had his vision for “The Embrace.” </p>
<p>The magic of memorials and monuments is that they seem natural and eternal in our landscape but they are neither.</p>
<p>What Thomas does in “The Embrace” is ask us to see the Kings, simply yet powerfully, in a new light.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198581/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristin Ann Hass does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A memorial to Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr. has received stinging criticisms, but time will tell whether ‘The Embrace’ will endure as a cherished work of public art.Kristin Ann Hass, Professor of American Culture, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1736252022-02-15T13:49:16Z2022-02-15T13:49:16ZOld statues of Confederate generals are slowly disappearing – will monuments honoring people of color replace them?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445505/original/file-20220209-13-1pvibsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=751%2C60%2C3722%2C4412&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The monument 'Rumors of War' depicts a young African American in urban streetwear sitting atop a horse.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-monument-rumors-of-war-is-unveiled-in-times-square-on-news-photo/1177509058">Spencer Platt/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With most of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/23/charlottesville-verdict-live-updates/">legal challenges resolved</a> after the violent <a href="https://time.com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/">Unite the Right rally</a>, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/charlottesville-confederate-monuments-lee.html">statue of Robert E. Lee removed</a> from its lofty pedestal in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, local lawmakers in December 2021 voted to do the unimaginable – donate the statue to the local <a href="https://jeffschoolheritagecenter.org/">Jefferson School African American Heritage Center</a>. </p>
<p>In turn, the nonprofit cultural group quickly announced its plan to <a href="https://www.cbs19news.com/story/45391966/jefferson-school-will-melt-lee-statue-by-february-2022">melt down the bronze statue</a> and use it as raw material for a new public artwork. What the group plans to build is still an open question, but it clearly will not be another statue honoring the <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/#start_entry">Lost Cause</a> of the Confederacy, the idea that slavery was a benevolent institution and the Confederate cause was just.</p>
<p>As part of America’s reckoning with its oppressive past, Charlottesville and the rest of the nation face the question of not just which statues and other images should be taken down, but what else – if anything – should be put up in their place.</p>
<p>Statues of Black Americans – and, more importantly, their absence – are an often overlooked barometer of racial progress, hidden in plain sight. Despite their silence, statues are active portraits that can reinforce the value and visibility of Black Americans. The <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/global-race-usa-statues-idINKBN2601O5">lack of Black statues</a> sends a clear message of exclusion.</p>
<p>For its part, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center wants to be not only more inclusive in the decision-making involved in determining the future of the Lee statue, but also transformative. </p>
<p>“Our aim is not to destroy an object, it’s to transform it,” <a href="https://www.wvtf.org/2021-12-09/black-heritage-museum-reenvisions-charlottesvilles-statue-of-confederate-gen-robert-e-lee">Andrea Douglas</a>, the center’s executive director, explained. “It’s to use the very raw material of its original making and create something that is more representative of the alleged democratic values of this community, more inclusive of those voices that in 1920 had no ability to engage in the artistic process at all.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Construction workers use heavy-duty chains to remove a statue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445492/original/file-20220209-15-6ngyxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee is lifted off its pedestal in Charlottesville, Va.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/statue-of-confederate-general-robert-e-lee-located-in-news-photo/1233936650?adppopup=true">John McDFor their partonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Most important, she said, the group wants to “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/08/us/charlottesville-lee-statue-melted-trnd/index.html">turn it into something that can cause our community to heal</a>.”</p>
<h2>History of exclusion</h2>
<p>As a <a href="https://honors.tcu.edu/faculty/dr-frederick-w-gooding/">professor of pop culture history</a> who studies Black statues within mainstream society, I believe Charlottesville is not the only city in need of healing. With more questions being asked about today’s relevance of Confederate statues, Americans must also ask critical questions about the role of statues in reflecting present morals and future ideals. </p>
<p>While not uncommon to spot statues of accomplished Black athletes, such as <a href="https://www.baltimoreravens.com/video/ray-lewis-statue-unveiled-at-m-t-bank-stadium">Ray Lewis</a> in Baltimore, <a href="https://www.unitedcenter.com/venue/statues/">Michael Jordan</a> in Chicago or <a href="https://www.espn.com/boston/nba/story/_/id/9914066/statue-boston-celtics-great-bill-russell-unveiled-boston">Bill Russell</a> in Boston, it’s much more rare to find Black Americans memorialized outside of the sports and entertainment industries. </p>
<p>With few new exceptions, public and prominent statues of Blacks people are nonexistent. </p>
<p>The public art and history nonprofit group <a href="https://monumentlab.com/">Monument Lab</a> conducted a survey in 2021 of 48,178 statues, plaques, parks and obelisks across the United States. In its report, the group found that less than 1% were of people of color. </p>
<p>Of the top 50 most-represented individuals, the survey revealed that only five are Black or Indigenous people: civil rights leader <a href="https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm">Martin Luther King Jr.</a> in fourth place; abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/harriet-tubman-statue-philadelphia-black-history-month-exhibit-20220111.html">Harriet Tubman</a> in 24th; Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who led Native American resistance to colonialism, in 25th; Lemhi Shoshone explorer <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/sacagawea-statue-in-portland-or.htm">Sacagawea</a> in 28th; and abolitionist and writer <a href="https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/central-park/monuments/2098">Frederick Douglass</a> in 29th. </p>
<p>More than likely, that percentage will remain the same for the foreseeable future – even with the recent wave of removing controversial statues in 2020 and 2021.</p>
<p>Since May 2020, the <a href="https://www.toppledmonumentsarchive.org/">Toppled Monuments Archive</a> has detailed <a href="https://www.toppledmonumentsarchive.org/the-collective">84 such removals</a> of “colonialist, imperialist, racist and sexist monuments” <a href="https://www.artpapers.org/monumental-collapse/">in North America</a>. In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">Whose Heritage? Project</a> says that if other Confederate symbols are included, such as institution names and publicly displayed plaques, a more accurate number is that <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/02/04/cost-remove-confederate-monument-south">168 were taken down in 2020</a>.</p>
<h2>A changing landscape</h2>
<p>Not a single statue was built to honor the legacy of a Black person until 1974, when the likeness of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/11/archives/20000-at-unveiling-of-statue-to-mary-bethune-in-capital-a-fine.html">famed educator Mary McCleod Bethune</a> became the first Black statue ever <a href="https://washington.org/find-dc-listings/emancipation-memorial-freedmans-memorial">erected on federal lands</a>. The <a href="https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm">Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial</a> on the National Mall was not installed until in 2011. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of a Black woman giving a loaf of bread to two children." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445496/original/file-20220209-27-1eohu7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A view of the Mary McLeod Bethune statue in Lincoln Park in Washington.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-the-mary-mcleod-bethune-statue-in-lincoln-park-in-news-photo/474111719?adppopup=true">Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Bethune’s statue stands in stark contrast to a nearby statue in Washington’s Lincoln Park. The <a href="https://washington.org/find-dc-listings/emancipation-memorial-freedmans-memorial">Freedman’s Memorial</a>, erected in 1922, immortalizes Abraham Lincoln standing clothed and erect, while a bare-chested Black man with broken chains around his wrists kneels at Lincoln’s feet. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/protesters-demand-removal-of-statues-depicting-freed-black-american-kneeling-before-lincoln">Tensions over this controversial symbol</a> led to the removal of a similar statue in Boston <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/us/boston-abraham-lincoln-statue.html">on Dec. 29, 2020</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of a man standing near another man on his knees." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/445499/original/file-20220209-13-ma85n7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Freedmen’s Memorial depicts President Abraham Lincoln freeing an enslaved man.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/conservative-african-american-leaders-rally-and-call-on-news-photo/1227127010?adppopup=true">Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Public statues represent significant expenditures of time, money and political capital, especially with more than US$2 million and four years of legal battles spent on the Robert E. Lee statue’s removal in Charlottesville.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand key political developments, each week.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=politics&source=inline-politics-understand">Subscribe to The Conversation’s politics newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Public art is widely viewed as a tool to tell a more complete and honest narrative. As noted in the key findings of the Monuments Lab Audit: <a href="https://monumentlab.com/audit?section=key-finding-4">Monuments should be held accountable to history</a>. “Monuments that perpetuate harmful myths and that portray conquest and oppression as acts of valor require honest reckoning, conceptual dismantling, and active repair,” the audit concluded. </p>
<p>Part of the repair is occurring in Charlottesville and in Richmond, Virginia, where most notably <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/878822835/rumors-of-war-in-richmond-marks-a-monumentally-unequal-america">“Rumors of War”</a>, featuring a Black man in dreds and urban streetwear atop a powerful horse, stands near the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.</p>
<p>As with Charlottesville, Americans can reject the notion that our future, as now represented in public statues, is permanently fixed in stone. Perhaps when it comes to our existing statues, it is time to consider what we can melt down in other places and forge anew.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/173625/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frederick Gooding Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With a few notable exceptions, public monuments across the United States are overwhelmingly white and male. A movement is slowly growing to tell a more inclusive history of the American experience.Frederick Gooding Jr., Dr. Ronald E. Moore Professor of Humanities and African American Studies, Texas Christian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1433182020-09-04T12:24:19Z2020-09-04T12:24:19ZMonuments ‘expire’ – but offensive monuments can become powerful history lessons<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356156/original/file-20200902-20-14ywezs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4082%2C2780&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Charlottesville city workers drape a tarp over the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in 2018. Debate over removing the statue continues today.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Confederate-Monuments-Virginia/d95f1d175d4f4e1f94cdaec565c90845/3/0">AP Photo/Steve Helber, File</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Historical monuments are intended to be timeless, but almost all have an expiration date. As society’s values shift, the legitimacy of monuments can and often does erode. </p>
<p>This is because monuments – whether statues, memorials or obelisks – reveal the values of the time in which they were created and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=A_xmDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA7&dq=lies+across+america+loewen&ots=dvIDkQmqi5&sig=a8Jo_vADxErbjPGB0cdM8mqqbWg#v=onepage&q=lies%20across%20america%20loewen&f=false">advance the agendas of their creators</a>. </p>
<p>Many 9/11 monuments in the U.S., for example, <a href="https://www.911memorial.org/">serve both to remember and honor victims of the attacks</a> while promoting national vigilance. These views garnered nearly universal support immediately after the attacks. Over time, however, as the costs and consequences of “homeland security” became clearer, unqualified support for this agenda has waned. </p>
<p>Current debates around racism confirm that Confederate statues and Christopher Columbus statues, both of which effectively commemorate white superiority, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876293231/confederate-monuments-the-history-of-controversial-symbols">have expired</a>, too. </p>
<p>The question then becomes: What’s a nation to do with expired monuments?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two young blond boys jump and crawl on a fallen bronze statue in a park" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C3824%2C2570&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356154/original/file-20200902-20-1vsxaqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russian children play atop a toppled statue of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/after-the-coup-children-play-on-a-toppled-statue-of-stalin-news-photo/635966617?adppopup=true">Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Purpose of monuments</h2>
<p>Over the past century, American public officials, citizens and historians have taken one of two paths. They either ignored expired monuments – the 20th-century approach – or, more recently, rejected them. </p>
<p>Ignoring problem monuments left the impression among many that officials endorsed the views they embodied. Today, people who see a host of monuments as illegitimate symbols of racism, authoritarianism and oppression have rejected this official indifference. Through protest or policy change, they have forced more open and productive discussions about race in America. Ultimately, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53005243">many offensive monuments have been removed</a>. </p>
<p>Removal eliminates the symbols of now-rejected values. But as <a href="https://cthistory.org/">historians</a> and <a href="https://education.uconn.edu/person/alan-marcus/">educators</a> who have <a href="https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/articles/se_7403131.pdf">explored the instructive value of monuments</a>, we believe statue removal can also limit the important conversations underway about their expired agendas. </p>
<p>Monuments provide an especially useful educational service because they serve double duty. They mark historical events or figures – the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/bost/learn/historyculture/bhm.htm">Battle of Bunker Hill</a>, say, or <a href="https://www.ajc.com/news/local/photos-martin-luther-king-statues-around-the-country-and-beyond/oMpTNGO3Bkq2CEqfpvVLEN/">Martin Luther King Jr.</a> – and reflect the prevailing values of the time in which they were created. Monuments are also unique compared with other forms of cultural expression like art or literature in that they almost always reside in public spaces and are found in practically every town and city in America. </p>
<p>These attributes make monuments ideal launching points for helping society assess its current values and compare them with what mattered in the past. </p>
<p>Expired monuments are a lesson: They teach that people can be tragically wrong about something even when that belief once had widespread public support and official approval. Simultaneously, they show that radical, marginalized or contrary voices can turn out to be right. Or they may be, like their opponents, creatures of a particular moment in time. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Workers in hardhats use a small orange crane to hoist a plastic-wrapped and padded bronze statue" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/356155/original/file-20200902-18-10up4y1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1933 statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis is removed from the University of Texas campus to be placed in a university museum, 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/statue-of-confederate-leader-jefferson-davis-is-removed-news-photo/539558538?adppopup=true">Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Reinventing monuments</h2>
<p>We’ve been studying <a href="https://www.wnpr.org/post/seeing-cracks-controversial-statues">how the function of expired monuments might be entirely reinvented</a> so that their outdated agendas provide a cautionary tale. </p>
<p>Many thinkers, artists and public officials <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/confederate-monuments-fall-question-how-rewrite-history/">have put forward suggestions</a>. </p>
<p>A common idea is to move expired monuments to museums, where they would be recast as art or as historic artifacts. The most creative proposals include making a <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-confederate-statue-graveyard-could-help-bury-the-old-south-118034">Confederate statues “graveyard”</a> or moving expired monuments to a <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/what-to-do-with-all-those-toppled-monuments-artist-suggests-turning-chicago-dump-site-into-sculpture-park">sculpture park</a>. </p>
<p>In all these settings, expired monuments would be stripped of the seal of official endorsement and clearly explained as once-venerated symbols of views now understood to be morally unacceptable. That raises larger questions about how societies can be blind to their own moral failures. </p>
<p>European countries offer some examples of how statues from painful chapters of history can be, as artist Jonathan Keats put it, “<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2019/02/15/getty-monument/#1723d49852c5">forcefully repositioned in a radically new context</a>.” </p>
<p>Gorky Park in Moscow <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/21/892914684/what-to-do-with-toppled-statues-russia-has-a-fallen-monument-par">contains an area displaying old Soviet-era monuments</a> that deprives them of their symbolic power. Statues of dictators Stalin and Lenin are no longer in a prominent public location and are clumped together in an apolitical manner. </p>
<p>In Estonia, old Soviet-era monuments <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/noukogude-aegsete-monumentide-valinaitu">are part of a history-rich museum exhibition</a> that uses these relics of authoritarianism as a warning to future generations. </p>
<p>In post-World War II Germany, virtually all monuments to Hitler and the Third Reich were destroyed; perhaps some crimes are simply too abhorrent to be remembered so soon. But in 1986 <a href="https://www.shalev-gerz.net/portfolio/monument-against-fascism/">an unusual monument against fascism was erected</a> in Hamburg. Each year a portion of this vertical gray column was lowered underground until by 1993 it was completely gone. The 39-foot monument “disappeared” before it could expire. </p>
<p>The sunken monument can still be viewed underground. This tactic communicates that society needs to remember the dangers of fascism, but that a monument is not enough. Ultimately, only engaged citizens can attack injustice.</p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/217650363" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Artists Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz’s disappearing anti-fascism monument went up in 1986 and was fully sunk into the ground by 1993. Video from www.shalev-gerz.net.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From valorizing to analyzing</h2>
<p>Reinventing expired monuments uses outdated objects to teach about a society’s past values while assessing – and perhaps challenging – its contemporary beliefs. In other words, it moves from valorizing monuments to analyzing them. </p>
<p>That’s rich terrain for educators. Teachers can use reinvented monuments to ask students to consider the validity of what American society believes, says and does. </p>
<p>Monuments expire because views change. But because present-day cultural values are themselves often difficult for people to see from another perspective, analyzing monuments also has the educational value of prompting deliberations about how future generations will reflect upon today’s United States. How did this generation of Americans grapple with issues like racial injustice, climate change and economic inequality? </p>
<p>Future generations will hold current society to account, just as Americans today are scrutinizing the views and actions of past generations. </p>
<p>Reinventing rather than simply removing monuments requires confronting the past, recognizing current conditions and planning for the future – all while embracing the reality that historical change is a complex, messy and malleable process.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143318/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Once stripped of their symbolic power, problem monuments offer what educators call ‘teachable moments,’ helping people assess society’s current values and compare them with what mattered in the past.Alan Marcus, Professor, University of ConnecticutWalter Woodward, Associate Professor of History, University of ConnecticutLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1420292020-08-19T12:19:56Z2020-08-19T12:19:56ZAncient cancel cultures: The defacement of statues in America replicates a tradition going back millennia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350013/original/file-20200728-15-1gm20iq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=33%2C108%2C956%2C619&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Intentionally mutilated head of Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/8a9b0fee-058c-4bc5-a656-0c7db5c47383">Elizabeth Ellis</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Amid pleas for racial justice, protesters across the United States have mutilated hundreds of monuments. They have <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/christopher-columbus-statues-beheaded-torn-down-180975079/">decapitated statues of Christopher Columbus</a>, <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/06/16/confederate-statues-are-being-torn-down-across-america">spray-painted graffiti on memorials to Robert E. Lee</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/us/richmond-jefferson-davis-statue-pulled-down-trnd/index.html">mutilated tributes to Jefferson Davis</a>.</p>
<p>As statues tumble, a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/confederate-statues-monuments/">national conversation has emerged about American monuments</a>. For some, the defacement of monuments, particularly those <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/07/toppling-statues-is-first-step-toward-ending-confederate-myths/#close">dedicated to Confederate leaders</a>, helps debunk myths of white supremacy. For others, their destruction equals vigilantism and lawlessness.</p>
<p>The result of months of protests over racial injustice and monument destruction may seem like a modern form of American political speech. It’s not. </p>
<p>As an <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/anthropology/sarah-kurnick">anthropology professor</a> and archaeologist who has written about how <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416518301302">ancient peoples navigate their pasts</a>, I believe it mirrors an age-old practice long used to discredit once revered people and repudiate once venerated ideas. </p>
<h2><strong>Power in the present</strong></h2>
<p>In response to the recent defacement of monuments in the U.S., President Donald Trump issued an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/">executive order</a> in June stating that his administration “will not allow violent mobs…to become the arbiters of the aspects of history that can be celebrated in public spaces.” He added that the protesters’ “selection of targets reveals a deep ignorance of history.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=69%2C65%2C2568%2C1716&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=69%2C65%2C2568%2C1716&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349010/original/file-20200722-22-kranun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protesters against police violence and racism continue to rally at the Richmond, Virginia monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/protesters-against-police-violence-and-racism-continue-to-news-photo/1221109105?adppopup=true">Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>President Trump is partly correct. The recent destruction of monuments is about power in the present. Protesters today, like their ancient counterparts, have challenged the social order by questioning who should and should not be publicly venerated, who should be remembered or forgotten.</p>
<p>But Trump is also mistaken. Those defacing monuments are not oblivious to history.</p>
<h2><strong>Power in the past</strong></h2>
<p>Since at least the third millennium B.C., economically, socially and politically marginalized people have questioned authority by mutilating public images of rulers. And those in power have destroyed monuments to reinforce their authority and erase the names and accomplishments of their predecessors. </p>
<p>As art historian <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/style/confederate-statue-columbus-analysis.html">Erin L. Thompson recently explained</a>, “destruction is the norm and preservation is the rare exception.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ancient.eu/akkad/#:%7E:text=According%20to%20the%20Sumerian%20King,142%20years%20before%20it%20collapsed.">Akkadians</a>, who lived in Mesopotamia between about 2300 and 2150 B.C., created a bronze likeness of one of their living rulers. This portrait probably represents King Sargon of Akkad, known for conquering nearby Sumerian city-states. Although the likeness initially glorified the king, it was later purposefully mutilated. Akkadians cut off its ears, broke its nose and gouged out one of its eyes.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/347989/original/file-20200716-15-4qfom3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sargon of Akkad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/0268a6fc-ff1c-4c45-b51d-6bb4c8994acc">By Hans Ollermann</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Importantly, Akkadians chose to mar rather than obliterate this monument to Sargon. Their goal was not to erase history but to show in dramatic fashion the downfall and ultimate humiliation of a once powerful leader. </p>
<p>Thousands of years later, Mesoamericans engaged in a similar practice. <a href="https://www.archaeology.org/issues/249-1703/features/5300-olmec-tres-zapotes-government">The Olmec</a>, who lived in the lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico between approximately 1400 B.C. and A.D. 400, purposefully disfigured colossal heads. </p>
<p>These portraits of rulers’ faces were carved from basalt boulders. The largest weighs about 40 tons and measures over 10 feet high. Many have had pieces of their noses or lips broken off. Others have gouges carved into their surfaces or pox marks ground into their faces. Many were also buried. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350014/original/file-20200728-31-b5kdvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Olmec colossal head from San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, Veracruz, Mexico.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/5a24e6e9-8299-4c9b-916a-1e58748dca55">Maribel Ponce Ixba</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Scholars have proposed several <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/article/672/olmec-colossal-stone-heads/">theories to explain the defacement of Olmec colossal heads</a>. It may be that these monuments were ritually killed to neutralize the powers of rulers after their deaths. Or it may be that incoming rulers defaced the heads of their predecessors to help justify their newfound authority.</p>
<p>Many details about the Olmec colossal heads remain unknown. Elsewhere in Mesoamerica, however, the circumstances are more clear. In some instances, commoners purposefully destroyed and reused portraits of rulers. </p>
<p><a href="https://indigenousmexico.org/oaxaca/the-mixtecs-and-zapotecs-two-enduring-cultures-of-oaxaca/">Ancestral Chatinos occupied coastal Oaxaca</a> prior to the arrival of the Mixtecs around A.D. 1100. At Río Viejo in Oaxaca, archaeologist <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Mixtecs_Zapotecs_and_Chatinos.html?id=gQHy8ln34aIC">Arthur Joyce</a> and colleagues excavated the ruins of an ancestral Chatino residence dating to approximately A.D. 800-1100.</p>
<p>At that residence, Joyce found a piece of a carved stone monument depicting the face of a ruler. In a politically motivated move, the peasants chose to reuse the monument fragment, a powerful symbol of authority, as a metate – a stone for grinding grain and seeds.</p>
<p>In other cases, we know that incoming rulers intentionally defaced monuments dedicated to their predecessors. Ancient Egyptians built numerous statues depicting pharaohs, including Ramesses II and Tutankhamun, or King Tut. </p>
<p>Near the end of Pharaoh Thutmose III’s reign, between about 1479 and 1425 B.C., members of his regime attempted to erase <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/collection-insights/2018/hatshepsut-female-pharaoh-egypt">the memory of Hatshepsut</a>, his predecessor, co-regent and mother. Statues of Hatshepsut were smashed, her obelisks covered and her cartouches removed from temple walls. As <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/hatshepsut_01.shtml">Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley told the BBC</a> in 2011, Thutmose III could thereby “incorporate her reign into his own” and claim her accomplishment as his own. He could rewrite history. </p>
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<p>Because the decision of whom to remember, humiliate or ignore has always been a political choice, it should not be surprising that, as journalist Jacey Fortin has written, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/world/controversial-statues-monuments-destroyed.html">history is littered with the shattered remains of toppled statues</a>.”</p>
<p>Archaeology shows that the presentation of people, events and ideas through history has always been contentious and tied to contemporary political concerns, including nationalism, racism and xenophobia. Just like American protesters today, ancient Mesopotamians, Mesoamericans and Egyptians altered their political present by changing how they displayed their past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142029/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Kurnick receives funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>As US protesters deface monuments of once revered leaders, they are drawing from an ancient tradition used by both marginalized people and those in power.Sarah Kurnick, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado BoulderLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1434052020-08-17T12:23:46Z2020-08-17T12:23:46ZHit ’em where it hurts – how economic threats are a potent tool for changing people’s minds about the Confederate flag<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352554/original/file-20200812-18-11jt3se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C16%2C3589%2C2376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Mississippi state flag, with a representation of the Confederate battle flag, is raised one last time over the state Capitol building on July 1, 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Racial-Injustice-Confederate-Flag-Mississippi/87de408c0f404e8bb390b32c84d63636/49/0">AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Activists nationwide have resumed demanding the removal of statues and symbols that are considered racially offensive – such as of slave owners, Confederate leaders and the Confederate flag.</p>
<p>The requests – and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-24/the-confederate-flag-has-cost-south-carolina-millions-in-tourism-thanks-to-naacp-boycott">related boycotts</a> and threats of other <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2020/06/23/top-ceo-people-will-boycott-mississippi-products-if-lawmakers-put-state-flag-on-ballot/">economic protests</a> – have been part of the national controversy about racism in American life and have <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/politics/trump-bubba-wallace-nascar.html">sparked questions</a> about how to recognize traumatic elements of U.S. history.</p>
<p>Typically, the debate about the role of Confederate imagery in public life is seen as a political, social or racial issue. But in recent research, we discovered that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1065912919899725">economic concerns could be effective</a> in shifting Southerners’ attitudes about Confederate symbols. </p>
<p>Public officials and individual citizens alike are more likely to oppose the presence of Confederate symbols when they learn it may be bad for local business.</p>
<h2>Longstanding support</h2>
<p>Decisions to <a href="https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments">build Confederate monuments</a> or display the Confederate battle flag were not, of course, controversial among white Southerners. Even recently, it wasn’t common for many white Americans – either in public service or as private citizens – to actively support removing Confederate imagery.</p>
<p>Yet some organizations have long opposed Confederate symbols. For instance, the NAACP called an <a href="https://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-ends-boycott-of-south-carolina/">economic boycott of South Carolina</a> from 2000 to 2015 because the <a href="https://time.com/3930464/south-carolina-confederate-flag-1962/">Confederate battle flag flew over the State House</a> in Columbia, alongside the state and U.S. flags.</p>
<p>As recently as 2011 a plurality of white Southerners <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/04/08/civil-war-at-150-still-relevant-still-divisive/">saw the Confederate flag as more positive than negative</a>. </p>
<p>Political elites were not much different: In 2000, when South Carolina hosted a debate during the Republican presidential primaries, both George W. Bush and John McCain initially supported leaving decisions up to state officials about whether to keep the Confederate flag flying, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/20/us/after-campaigning-on-candor-mccain-admits-he-lacked-it-on-confederate-flag-issue.html">though McCain equivocated on the issue throughout the campaign</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman takes a Confederate flag off a public display." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352557/original/file-20200812-14-1t72sva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protests against public displays of the Confederate flag, including this one from Bree Newsome in North Carolina in 2015, have led to the flag’s removal from many venues.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Black-Women-Activism/e45035c175394e1e9764a596e299004f/404/0">AP Photo/Bruce Smith</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A rapid change</h2>
<p>Opposition to public display of Confederate symbols has shifted in more recent years.</p>
<p>In some cases, public officials have encountered changing political circumstances. In 2015, for instance, South Carolina <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/22/us/Transcript-Gov-Nikki-R-Haley-of-South-Carolina-Addresses-Removing-the-Confederate-Battle-Flag.html">Gov. Nikki Haley supported a bipartisan call</a> to remove the flag from the State House in the wake of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/look-for-the-patterns-in-charleston-43593">racially motivated mass shooting</a> of African Americans at a Charleston church.</p>
<p>Our research found that presenting divisive social and political issues in terms of their potential economic consequences can change the views of both political elites and the public at large.</p>
<p>This came up, for instance, during a <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-how-black-power-finally-prevailed-in-mississippi-state-flag-fight">legislative debate in Mississippi</a> in June 2020. Some of the people arguing that the Confederate flag should not be part of the state flag said that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/28/mississippi-legislators-expected-debate-removal-confederate-icon-state-flag/">keeping it might impede job creation</a> and economic development in their state. </p>
<p>Those tactics are similar to economic arguments from other groups seeking social change, such as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/28/how-lgbt-activists-beat-back-unfriendly-laws-emphasize-economics-not-just-equality/">LGBT-rights advocates</a> explaining how the business community would be hurt by continued discrimination.</p>
<h2>What’s the effect?</h2>
<p>In our research, we surveyed voters as well as elected officials at both city and county levels. We wanted to measure whether, and how much, economic interests might affect Southerners’ attitudes toward the presence of Confederate symbols. We randomly assigned the participants into one of three equal-sized groups.</p>
<p>The first group read a vignette asking them to imagine that a Confederate flag was displayed on local government property in their county, and then asked them, on a scale from 1 to 7, how likely they were to support removal of the flag.</p>
<p>The second group was given the same basic information as the first group, but with additional language indicating that the continued presence of Confederate flag on public property in their county would mean a major multinational company would not want to relocate to the community.</p>
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<p>The last group was given the same information as the second group, but with an additional assertion that the continued presence of the flag would have an effect large enough to affect the stock market in a way that would hurt the respondents’ personal economic bottom line.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A truck carrying a Confederate battle flag is parked next to a Confederate statue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=349&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=349&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=349&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352555/original/file-20200812-20-1esr1sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When told their local economies might be hurt by continued display of Confederate flags, Southerners were more likely to support removing them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/South-Carolina-Daily-Life/30b7111dc5dd459c80024884a8c382dc/266/0">AP Photo/Steve Helber</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We found that Southerners were far more likely to support removal of Confederate symbols from public property when told there would be economic harm if they stayed up. Both voters and elected officials became about a half-point more likely on our seven-point scale to support removal after receiving information about the economic threats associated with the continued presence of the Confederate flag.</p>
<p>Controversies around socially and racially divisive monuments and symbols are likely to continue in the U.S. Our findings indicate that social movements might change more people’s minds by emphasizing not only the history of Southern racial injustice, but also by using the potent threats of boycotts and other forms of economic pressure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143405/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Public officials and individual citizens alike are more likely to oppose the presence of Confederate symbols when informed it may be bad for local business.Jordan Carr Peterson, Assistant Professor of Political Science, North Carolina State UniversityChristian Grose, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1441742020-08-13T12:09:15Z2020-08-13T12:09:15ZWhat should replace Confederate statues?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351819/original/file-20200807-22-5cq7bl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=137%2C0%2C2130%2C1640&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Unveiling of a statue of Richard T. Greener, the first Black professor at the University of South Carolina, in 2018.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://uscphoto.smugmug.com/SPECIAL-EVENTS/n-5wn34/2017-18/180221-Greener-Statue-Unveiling/i-btjmcJL">Jason Ayer</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since the University of South Carolina put up a statue of <a href="http://www.sc.edu/greener/">Richard T. Greener</a> – who in 1873 became the school’s first Black professor – one of my favorite things to do has been to eat lunch on a bench nearby to watch how people interact with it.</p>
<p>Greener – who taught for four years when the university was desegregated during Reconstruction – went on to become a widely recognized lawyer, scholar, diplomat and activist for racial justice.</p>
<p>Some people come to the <a href="https://greenbookofsc.com/locations/richard-t-greener-statue/">statue</a> with a purpose, often to show it to others and take pictures. Others pass by and look at Greener’s likeness with curiosity. Usually when they read the plaque at the base, they pause with a look of surprise. I watch them read the plaque again and then walk around the statue as if to evaluate if this story could be true.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=217&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=217&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=217&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=272&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=272&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/352306/original/file-20200811-24-187wura.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=272&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A plaque honoring the University of South Carolina’s first Black professor, Richard T. Greener, lies at the base of his statue in the middle of campus. The statue was created by sculptor Jon Hair.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christian Anderson</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a <a href="http://faculty.sc.edu/anderson">historian</a> who examines the role that race played in the social and political structure of the South, especially as it relates to higher education, I know that not only is the story completely accurate, but I believe how the statue in honor of Greener came to be holds important lessons for today. This is a time when there is an <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/confederate-statues-removal-slavery-protests-2020-6">intensified movement</a> – particularly <a href="https://www.arcamax.com/politics/opeds/s-2382634">at America’s colleges and universities</a> – to <a href="https://theconversation.com/authorities-are-yanking-the-legacy-of-slaveholder-john-c-calhoun-from-public-sphere-but-his-bigotry-remains-embedded-in-american-society-140917">remove statues and names from buildings or organizations</a> that pay homage to Confederate leaders and others with racist views.</p>
<p>As part of America’s <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/27/colleges-should-face-racism-past-well-erase-it-opinion">reckoning</a> with its oppressive past, the nation now faces the question not just of what statues and other images should be taken down, but what else – if anything – should be put up in their place. What should become of the empty pedestals where some of these statues once stood? Should they remain empty or be replaced with memorials that honor the victims of – and victors over – racism?</p>
<p>I believe the story of the Greener statue helps illuminate a way forward.</p>
<h2>Harvard’s first Black graduate</h2>
<p>The story begins in the fall of 2010, when <a href="https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/education/faculty-staff/chaddock_katherine.php">Katherine Chaddock</a>, a professor of higher education, mentioned during a graduate course she was teaching that she had seen a <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/02/richard-greener-statue-univ-sc">plaque</a> near Harvard Square commemorating Greener as Harvard’s <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/4/29/greener-portrait-unveiled-annenberg/">first Black graduate</a>. A student then asked why he hadn’t heard of Greener and what there was on campus to commemorate and remember him.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.playscripts.com/play/526">play</a> about Greener’s life – and named for one of his essays, “The White Problem,” in which he <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/v3yZA1hMlZsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA156&dq=richard+t.+greener+the+white+problem">took on the ideology of white supremecy</a> – was commissioned and performed as part of the University of South Carolina’s bicentennial in 2001. But that play has not been performed since. There is a <a href="https://www.uofscalumni.org/greener_scholarship">scholarship</a> in memory of Greener given by the Black Alumni Council, and a <a href="https://sc.edu/about/our_leadership/president/speeches/2017greener_memorial_announcement.php">portrait</a> of Greener hangs in the president’s office, but these have a limited audience. </p>
<p>Chaddock started a dialogue with her graduate students and others from the <a href="https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/education/study/administration_and_leadership/higher_education_and_student_affairs/index.php">Higher Education and Student Affairs program</a>, along with me and <a href="https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/visual_art_and_design/our_people/directory/brandt_lydia.php">Lydia Mattice Brandt</a>, an art history professor.</p>
<p>Students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members all got involved. We ultimately decided that a statue was the best way to publicly honor Greener. That <a href="http://www.jonhair.com/handler.cfm?cat_id=18342&cat_id=18344&cat_id=18348&lls_inline_frame_flag=Y&med_id=107725">statue</a> was unveiled on February 21, 2018.</p>
<p>During the unveiling ceremony, I pointed out how some people wanted to forget when the campus desegregated briefly during Reconstruction and hired its first Black professor. </p>
<p>For example, when white students returned to campus after it reopened as an all-white institution in 1880 – three years after its desegregated status from 1873 to 1877 came to an end – they <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_University_of_South_Carolina/2crjAytesOIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA26&printsec=frontcover">ripped or blacked out pages</a> from the ledgers of the debating societies that had been used by Black students during Reconstruction.</p>
<h2>Who was Richard T. Greener?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2018/02/larger_than_life.php#.Xy2plC05QWo">Richard T. Greener</a> was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy at the University of South Carolina in 1873. As a student at <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfrzr">Harvard</a> (class of 1870), he won both the <a href="https://aaregistry.org/story/a-legal-and-political-advisor-richard-greener/">Boylston Prize for elocution</a> and the Bowdoin Prize for writing.</p>
<p>At the time of his appointment, the South Carolina legislature was majority Black, a radical change brought about by the revision of the <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/South-Carolina-Constitutional-Convention">state constitution in 1868</a> allowing for <a href="https://www.thestate.com/opinion/op-ed/article229676839.html">universal suffrage</a>, meaning that for the first time all men, including Black men, in the state could vote.</p>
<p>In addition to teaching philosophy, Latin and Greek, Greener served as university librarian and reorganized and modernized the library’s catalog. He also recruited Black students throughout the state and developed a preparatory program to help them succeed. While on faculty, he earned a law degree. His diploma and law license <a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/04/23/151227283/discovery-sparks-interest-in-forgotten-black-scholar">were found</a> in Chicago in 2012 and later <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-LH4y0cqGw">obtained by the University of South Carolina</a>. </p>
<p>After being forced out of South Carolina because the university was closed, Greener served as <a href="https://scafricanamerican.com/richard-greener/">dean</a> of the Howard University School of Law, as a U.S. <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/greener-richard-t-1844-1922/">diplomat</a> in Vladivostok, Russia and as the chief administrator of the <a href="http://mhsarchive.org/FullImages/GEGRCataloged-Archival-Items.pdf">Grant Memorial Association</a>. He also practiced law. His debates with Frederick Douglass about Black migration helped Douglass better understand the nature of the South. W.E.B. DuBois considered him part of the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2717313.pdf">talented tenth</a>,” whom DuBois regarded as the leaders among African Americans.</p>
<p>Greener died in 1922 in Chicago, where he had gone to live with family and practice law after leaving Russia.</p>
<p>As Chaddock explains in her biography, “<a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/uncompromising-activist">Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College</a>,” he was a complex man living in a complex time. Even though he lived only four years in the state, he always considered himself a South Carolinian, Rep. James Clyburn <a href="http://video.sc.edu/usc/greenersymposium.mp4">emphasized in his keynote address</a> at the unveiling ceremony.</p>
<h2>Why do we need new memorials?</h2>
<p>Historian <a href="https://history.columbia.edu/faculty/foner-eric/">Eric Foner</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/opinion/confederate-statues-american-history.html">has argued</a> that Americans should erect new statues because “our public monuments have not kept up.” With Greener’s statue, the University of South Carolina showed that it would recognize, <a href="https://www.dailygamecock.com/article/2020/06/letter-to-the-editor-from-faculty-co-chairs-of-the-richard-t-greener-memorial-committee">seek to understand</a> and <a href="https://www.dailygamecock.com/article/2018/04/greener-tribute">celebrate</a> forgotten parts of its past.</p>
<p>Political science professor <a href="https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/political_science/our_people/directory/shaw_todd.php">Todd Shaw</a> <a href="https://www.thestate.com/article201454829.html">connected Greener’s pioneering legacy</a> to his own in his remarks before the statue was officially unveiled. Shaw in 2017 became the first African American to chair the University of South Carolina’s political science department. “In each case, for varying reasons, both Greener and I were and are proud to serve though the road to our appointments were admittedly a long time in coming.”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLqDDFov79M%22%22">statue</a> not only celebrates Greener’s contributions, it stands as a symbol of how we can reclaim and understand a lost, misunderstood or misrepresented history.</p>
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<h2>Whom will your campus honor?</h2>
<p>Making the statue a reality required a grassroots process that took more than seven years. The process involved identifying a site with the university architect, approvals from the Board of Trustees and fundraising. President <a href="https://sc.edu/about/our_leadership/president/speeches/">Harris Pastides</a> helped push it over the finish line and supported it as a means to help “<a href="https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article204916454.html">build, not divide”</a> the community.</p>
<p>The point is that erecting new statues to replace the ones that have fallen out of favor may not always be a quick and easy process, although perhaps it could become easier given the current momentum behind efforts to replace monuments to the Confederacy and others who sought to uphold white supremacy.</p>
<p>But regardless of how long it may take and who all gets involved, what is clear is that it all must start with two simple questions: Who is and isn’t recognized on our campus? And why?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144174/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christian K. Anderson receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct a summer seminar for school teachers on Black lawmakers during Reconstruction.</span></em></p>As momentum builds to remove statutes that pay homage to Confederates and others who sought to uphold white supremacy, a historian explores questions about what should be erected in their place.Christian K. Anderson, Associate Professor of Higher Education, University of South CarolinaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1423272020-08-11T12:10:01Z2020-08-11T12:10:01ZAfrican Americans have long defied white supremacy and celebrated Black culture in public spaces<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351663/original/file-20200806-18-1phy7tm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=65%2C16%2C2609%2C1781&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters at the Richmond, Virginia monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee on June 18, 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/protesters-against-police-violence-and-racism-continue-to-news-photo/1221109212?adppopup=true">Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From Richmond to New York City to Seattle, anti-racist activists are getting results as Confederate monuments are <a href="https://hgreen.people.ua.edu/csa-monument-mapping-project.html">coming down</a> by the dozens.</p>
<p>In Richmond, Virginia, protesters have changed the story of Lee Circle, home to a 130-year-old monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. </p>
<p>It’s now a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/statue-richmond-lee.html">new community space</a> where graffiti, music and projected images turn the statue of Lee from a monument to white supremacy into a backdrop proclaiming that <a href="http://www.blacklivesmatter.com/">Black Lives Matter</a>. </p>
<p>This isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m a historian of celebrations and protests after the Civil War. And in my <a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/157750/register-kentucky-historical-society-vol-115-no-1-now-available">research</a>, I have found that long before Confederate monuments occupied city squares, African Americans used those same public spaces to celebrate their history. </p>
<p>But those African American memorial cultures have often been overshadowed by Confederate monuments that dominate public space and set in stone a white supremacist story of the past.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351665/original/file-20200806-20-1qr4rf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sketch of the ‘Colored National Convention’ in Tennessee, 1876.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sketch-of-the-colored-national-convention-in-tennessee-1876-news-photo/657153622?adppopup=true">From the New York Public Library/Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Black celebrations</h2>
<p>In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/protesters-denounce-abraham-lincoln-statue-in-dc-urge-removal-of-emancipation-memorial/2020/06/25/02646910-b704-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html">less power and money</a> than whites did to erect statues to celebrate their past. </p>
<p>Instead, they challenged white dominance of public space using <a href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/emancipation-day">holidays</a>, <a href="https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/13704/barkleybrown_negotiatingandtransforming.pdf;jsessionid=DD208F1EE358CB9A7B81FAD9BB7A0D42?sequence=1">parades</a>, <a href="https://coloredconventions.org/about-conventions/">conventions</a>, mass meetings and other events. Black people used public celebrations such as <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/historical-legacy-juneteenth">Juneteenth</a> to tell a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0JWdKmh64XgC&printsec=frontcover">positive story</a> about their history, debate and set political goals for the community, applaud the role of Black soldiers and workers, and create a legacy and <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/history-and-memory-in-african-american-culture-9780195083972?q=fabre&lang=en&cc=us">cultural identity</a> for Black men, women and children. </p>
<p>These community celebrations helped guide Black protests and organizing after the Civil War and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/06/19/heres-what-juneteenth-looks-like-in-2020-photos/#2becddaf4199">continue to inspire activists today</a>. </p>
<p>Here are just a few of the ways African Americans challenged white dominance in public spaces:</p>
<p>• On July 4, 1866, Black people <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Defining_Moments/e8M8fnMcwyUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=kathleen+clark+%22liberty+which+no+white+man+ever+yet+presumed+to+take+with+Virginia%E2%80%99s+great+work+of+art%22&pg=PA52&printsec=frontcover">gathered</a> in Richmond’s Capitol Square and decorated the statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and George Mason with garlands and flags – a radical act that a reporter from the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84024738/">Richmond Dispatch</a> fumed was “a liberty which no white man ever yet presumed to take with Virginia’s great work of art.” By claiming the Founding Fathers as their own, African Americans protested against their exclusion from public space and citizenship. </p>
<p>• In 1867 Black men and women publicly assembled at a convention in Lexington, Kentucky, where political leader William F. Butler <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=6NC-Yu-AHzgC&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q&f=false">stated</a>, “First we ha[d] the cartridge box, now we want the ballot box, and soon we will get the jury box. I don’t mean with our fists, but by standing up and demanding our rights.” Butler argued that Black men fought to maintain the Union, “but we were left without means of protecting ourselves….We need and must have the ballot box for that purpose.” </p>
<p>• A Baltimore procession in May 1870 celebrated the ratification of the <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/15th-amendment">Fifteenth Amendment</a>, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote. The event had more than 12,000 participants and 20,000 spectators. Newspapers called the procession <a href="https://msa.maryland.gov/dtroy/project/newspapers/american/">“vast and magnificent in its appointments, gorgeous in its decorations, and noble in its purposes.”</a> Participants carried banners reading, “Give us equal rights and we will protect ourselves,” and “Equity and justice goes hand in hand.” </p>
<p>These and other African American celebrations asserted their right to public spaces where previously enslaved people might have needed <a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/slave-codes">passes</a> or were supposed to be invisible. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351661/original/file-20200806-22-u0zlie.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The central part of this image, called ‘The Fifteenth Amendment,’ depicts the grand parade held in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 19, 1870.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/tr22a.html#obj11">Thomas Kelly after James C. Beard/Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Monuments and power</h2>
<p>For both Black and white residents, the actions they took to commemorate their cultures demonstrated the importance of residential and commercial spaces, such as city parks, neighborhoods and shopping districts, and especially official civic spaces such as city halls or courthouses. </p>
<p>White organizations raised hundreds of statues in public spaces, especially in the South, during the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">height of Confederate memorializing</a> in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras.</p>
<p>White supremacist groups such as the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/16/the-whole-point-of-confederate-monuments-is-to-celebrate-white-supremacy/">United Daughters of the Confederacy</a> erected these Confederate monuments to, in their words, <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009583001">“correct history”</a> by celebrating the <a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry">Lost Cause</a>, the idea that slavery was a benevolent institution and the Confederate cause was just. </p>
<p>These monuments represented a way to remind African Americans that <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/06/how-charlottesvilles-confederate-statues-helped-decimate-the-citys-historically-successful-black-communities.html">public spaces, public commemoration and public advancement</a> were not for them. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/29/why-bree-newsome-took-down-the-confederate-flag-in-s-c-i-refuse-to-be-ruled-by-fear/">And while protests</a> that Confederate flags and monuments do not belong in public spaces have grown stronger since <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/878828088/5-years-after-charleston-church-massacre-what-have-we-learned">2015</a>, resistance is not new. African Americans have been protesting against Confederate monuments since they were erected. </p>
<p>In Charleston, South Carolina, Black citizens in the 1880s and 1890s mocked and defaced the original monument to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-C-Calhoun">John C. Calhoun</a>, a South Carolina congressman and U.S. vice president, who defended slavery as a “positive good.” </p>
<p>Teacher and civil rights activist <a href="https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w68p67zx">Mamie Garvin Fields</a> remembered that as a child it seemed as if Calhoun’s statue was “looking you in the face and telling you … I am back to see you stay in your place.” She recalled bringing something to <a href="https://www.whatitmeanstobeamerican.org/places/the-south-carolina-monument-that-symbolizes-clashing-memories-of-slavery/">“scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose”</a> – perhaps leading to its replacement in 1896 with a much taller monument. </p>
<p>In 1923 the United Daughters of the Confederacy urged Congress to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/sunday/confederate-monuments-mammy.html">fund a monument</a> “to the faithful slave mammies of the South” in Washington, D.C. The National Association of Colored Women mobilized several Black activist organizations in letter-writing campaigns, petitions and editorials and crushed the plan. The monument was never built.</p>
<h2>Turning away</h2>
<p>White residents had the power to ignore Black residents’ commemorative activities. </p>
<p>Rather than watch the festivities or listen to Black speakers, they chose to leave town for the day, stay inside or express disgust among themselves. White people in Richmond celebrated the Fourth of July in the countryside, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=hGE3CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=partly+to+enjoy+the+days+relaxation+from+business+and+partly+to+avoid+the+spectacle+which+they+could+not+have+avoided+witnessing+had+they+remained+at+home.&source=bl&ots=gvRTZzZnH9&sig=ACfU3U15UP1QzeTLZvGcgxKj44Rq61ZsFw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSwe_s2bHqAhUFXc0KHcrDCvMQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=partly%20to%20enjoy%20the%20days%20relaxation%20from%20business%20and%20partly%20to%20avoid%20the%20spectacle%20which%20they%20could%20not%20have%20avoided%20witnessing%20had%20they%20remained%20at%20home.&f=false">noted the Richmond Dispatch newspaper</a>, “partly to enjoy the day’s relaxation from business and partly to avoid the spectacle which they could not have avoided witnessing had they remained at home.” </p>
<p>The Baltimore American newspaper noted that those who were too “thin-skinned” to see Black residents celebrating the Fifteenth Amendment shut their doors, “presenting the appearance that ‘nobody was in.’” White residents <a href="https://msa.maryland.gov/dtroy/project/newspapers/american/">“refused to witness the procession, declaring they could not gaze upon such a humiliating scene.”</a> </p>
<h2>Remaking public space</h2>
<p>In 2017, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia on Aug. 11-12 for the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/14/543471538/charlottesville-rally-aimed-to-defend-a-confederate-statue-it-may-have-doomed-ot">Unite the Right rally</a>, ostensibly to protect a monument of Robert E. Lee. </p>
<p>It was a battle over what vision of America would prevail in public space in the 21st century. </p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-favorite">Weekly on Wednesdays</a>.]</p>
<p>Chanting “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us,” the white supremacists violently attacked counterprotesters. </p>
<p>Today, the tables are turned. Anti-racism protesters are transforming public space by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/us/richmond-jefferson-davis-statue-pulled-down-trnd/index.html">tearing down</a> Confederate monuments or demanding their removal. Years of activism combined with these same types of activities – mourning, celebration of Black pasts, public demands for the future, politics in the streets – have led to the removal of many Confederate monuments, despite the violence and fury of white supremacists. </p>
<p>Activists are telling a <a href="https://www.vmfa.museum/about/rumors-of-war/">new story</a> of African American history out of the relics of a white supremacist past, just as they did in public celebrations in the 19th century.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142327/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon M. Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Protests of Confederate flags and monuments have grown since 2015, but resistance is not new. African Americans have been protesting against Confederate monuments since they were erected.Shannon M. Smith, Associate Professor of History, College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1438812020-08-05T18:35:28Z2020-08-05T18:35:28ZIn Confederate statue debates, common values can bring meaningful resolution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351163/original/file-20200804-14-22elhe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3903%2C2594&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Workers remove the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Richmond, Virginia on July 8, 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Racial-Injustice-Confederate-Monuments/e0f139af27cd4a268296d17e11440191/34/0">AP Photo/Steve Helber</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The U.S. is engaged in a national debate about how to deal with monuments to Confederate leaders, enslavers and other historical figures with complex, and often racist, histories.</p>
<p>As a scholar and practitioner of organizational communication, I often find myself in the middle of similarly protracted conflicts, working to get people with very different views to resolve their differences. </p>
<p>A key step in that process is for each person to confront the fact that even people who disagree with them are, in fact, fellow humans inherently worthy of dignity and respect.</p>
<p>Often, people seek clear decisions and quick action in response to disturbing feelings about the past. That may feel righteous in the moment but can be divisive, and often ignores complexities in a society’s cultural fabric.</p>
<p>My research and experience lead me to believe that the best way to resolve conflicts like the one about Confederate statues is to find shared values across a community divide. </p>
<h2>Contested statues across the globe</h2>
<p>Other countries have had similar debates to the one the U.S. now faces: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/germany-has-no-nazi-memorials/597937/">Germany</a> chose to remove Nazi statues, though not without protest. In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/06/bolzano-italian-town-defuse-controversial-monuments">Italy</a>, communities have found ways to keep, or contextualize, the effigies of fascist leaders. <a href="https://www.chicagoreporter.com/in-dealing-with-confederate-monuments-south-africa-provides-a-model/">South Africa</a> chose to remove the images of apartheid leaders. Today, they are debating how to address the statues of <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-africa-toppling-statues-is-a-1st-step-in-addressing-racism-not-the-last/">colonists</a>. </p>
<p>The discussion Americans are having is not new to history – but it is new here. Because of the nation’s complex culture of individualism, states’ rights and democratic ideals, each community will likely have to determine the fate of its own statues. </p>
<p>These statues represent people who played parts in American history. They also communicate communities’ current values and signal hopes for the future.</p>
<p>Demands to “take them down” – and the retorts to “leave them up” – serve only to polarize communities, rather than promoting understanding of each other’s history and helping to build a shared future together. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/learn-about-citizenship/citizenship-and-naturalization/citizenship-rights-and-responsibilities">rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship</a> require people – everyone in the public, not just community leaders – to do more than just take a position and hold it without retreat.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A statue of a man on horseback has a color image of a Black man projected onto its base." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351164/original/file-20200804-18-1pw0kx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, has been a canvas onto which protesters project images of Black heroes – in this case, a photo of late Georgia Congressman and civil rights pioneer John Lewis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Racial-Injustice-Confederate-Statues/8c29a2c4eb3740a1bcfd7081ca139b1a/15/0">AP Photo/Steve Helber</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Take some perspective</h2>
<p>A key to bridging gaps in understanding is to become vulnerable, to listen and engage with the alternate view. The goal is not to persuade others or allow yourself to be convinced to change your mind, but rather to identify what everyone believes in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09672559.2019.1598086?journalCode=riph20">common</a>.</p>
<p>Here is a thought experiment I might propose for people who are involved in the debate, regardless of what side they are on. For some this may seem obvious, but it won’t for others – and that’s the value of the exercise: to give everyone of all perspectives a common ground from which to work toward resolving their conflict.</p>
<h2>Become vulnerable to new ideas</h2>
<p>Imagine the statue is replaced with the likeness and name of a person who harmed you, or perhaps whom you like least in life. Every day when you leave your home, you will see that image, that symbol. It will forever look down on you.</p>
<p>Over time, the image of that person who did you wrong will become not only a fixed part of your history, but a shared story of your family, for generations. </p>
<p>Other community members may see that person as a hero, a sports star or a great politician. But all you can see is the person who violated you. How do you feel, under their image in marble or bronze? Should your great, great, great, great grandchildren have to walk beneath their gaze?</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Those who want the statues to remain up see validation in what those statues represent. They therefore may feel vulnerable or scared when a statue they identify with is removed. </p>
<p>But once people begin to understand each other, they are more likely to believe, as I do, that in a free society, nobody should have to walk among monuments to their oppressors.</p>
<p>The process of mutual understanding is, in part, why I advocate for <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332579182_Building_an_Inclusive_Climate_for_Intercultural_Dialogue_A_Participant-Generated_Framework">creative, nuanced, consensus-based approaches</a> to addressing the nation’s Confederate and colonial monuments. People must ask themselves and each other how they wish to represent the full story of history, what values they wish to uphold as a community and what they wish to see for the nation’s future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143881/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Zirulnik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Demands to remove, or preserve, the statues polarize communities, rather than building a shared future.Michael Zirulnik, Instructional Professional of Communication, Arizona State University; Research Instructor of Bioethics and Medical Humanism, University of ArizonaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1421192020-07-17T12:16:55Z2020-07-17T12:16:55ZConfederate flags fly worldwide, igniting social tensions and inflaming historic traumas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348002/original/file-20200716-27-1n0w6uk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C10%2C3369%2C2010&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Brazil's 'Festa Confederada.' Organizers say the annual event celebrates their Southern American heritage, but some Black Brazilians disagree.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jordan Brasher</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The United States isn’t the only country debating Confederate symbols. </p>
<p>The Confederate flag can be seen flying in Ireland, Germany, Brazil <a href="https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/43616/Crelling_washington_0250O_19735.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">and beyond</a>. Sometimes, the red-white-and-blue-crossed flag is seemingly displayed as kitsch, a kind of Americana. Other times, its display conveys a political meaning more reflective of the flag’s origins in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/to-fully-appreciate-black-history-the-us-must-let-go-of-lingering-confederate-nostalgia-90723">slave-holding, Southern American republic</a>. </p>
<p>Wherever the Confederacy crops up, controversy usually follows. My <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=aahQqKkAAAAJ">academic research</a> as a cultural geographer traces how Confederate iconography gets stitched into the cultural fabric of places thousands of miles from the United States. </p>
<h2>Irish ‘rebels’</h2>
<p>In the city of Cork, Ireland, fans of the local hurling and soccer teams have <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/news/confederate-flag-flew-proudly-at-a-major-irish-sporting-event">long flown</a> the Confederate flag, which is sometimes called the “rebel flag,” from the stands. Both teams are called “The Rebels,” and their team colors match those of the Confederate flag. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"896828827963469826"}"></div></p>
<p>After NASCAR banned Confederate flags at its racing courses in June 2020, a Gaelic Athletic Association administrator <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/12/ireland-is-addressing-its-own-issue-confederate-flags-being-displayed-by-sports-fans/">announced</a> that it would ban the flag at <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/cork-gaa-to-confiscate-confederate-flags-from-fans-attending-matches-1.4277385">Cork soccer games</a>, too. Some Cork Rebels fans had already <a href="https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/calls-for-cork-fans-to-abstain-from-flying-the-confederate-flag-in-croke-park-amid-violent-protests-in-virginia-36027521.html">soured on the flag</a>. In 2017 a defender of Confederate statues <a href="https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-attack-shows-homegrown-terror-on-the-right-is-on-the-rise-78242">killed anti-racism activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia</a>, cementing for many the flag’s association with white supremacy.</p>
<p>But the Red Hand Defenders, a right-wing paramilitary organization in Ireland, still brandishes the Confederate flag because of its potent political symbolism.</p>
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<p>The Protestant hardliner group emerged in the Ulster region in 1998 to oppose Northern Ireland’s possible secession from the United Kingdom and reunification with Ireland. To thwart this “home rule” campaign, the Red Hand Defenders <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/red-hand-defender-claims-belfast-bombing-1.409422">executed a series of deadly bombings</a> and in 1999 killed the Catholic human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson. </p>
<p>Ireland’s connection with the Confederacy dates back to the Civil War. Many of the Confederate generals whose statues dot the U.S. South, including Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, were Scots-Irish. Their families came from Ulster, which includes parts of both Ireland and Northern Ireland.</p>
<p>In a 2008 post called “War of Northern Aggression,” the Belfast-based photography website Extra Mural Activity featured some <a href="https://extramuralactivity.com/2008/06/04/the-war-of-northern-aggression/">murals in the Ulster region</a>, including <a href="https://extramuralactivity.com/2008/06/04/the-war-of-northern-aggression/#jp-carousel-19450">one celebrating the Ulster heritage of</a> Generals Lee and Jackson. </p>
<p>“The Confederate attempt to secede from the union is put in parallel with loyalist resistance to Home Rule,” it explains.</p>
<h2>Brazil’s Confederate roots</h2>
<p>Like Ireland, Brazil has an ancestral connection to the American Confederacy. </p>
<p>After the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, some <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/blar.12202">8,000 to 10,000</a> Confederate soldiers left the vanquished South and migrated to Brazil. There, farmland was cheap and slavery was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/slavery-sociology">still legal</a>. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/blar.12202">Historical research</a> suggests that as many as 50 Confederate families purchased over 500 enslaved Black people in Brazil. </p>
<p>Today, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazil-confederate-flag-civil-war-americana-santa-barbara/2020/07/11/1e8a7c84-bec4-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html">descendants of these “Confederados</a>,” as the Americans came to be known in Portuguese, hold an annual <a href="http://www.focusongeography.org/publications/articles/brazil_confederacy/index.html">festival in São Paulo state celebrating their heritage</a>. Dancers clad in antebellum and Civil War attire square dance to American country music on <a href="https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548">an enormous stage emblazoned with the Confederate flag</a> while visitors enjoy Southern fried chicken and biscuits and purchase Confederacy-themed souvenirs. </p>
<p>The festival, held in the <a href="https://www.sbnoticias.com.br/noticia/Festa-Confederada-acontece-neste-fim-de-semana-no-Cemiterio-do-Campo/167994">Protestant cemetery</a> where many original Confederate settlers were buried back when Brazil was predominantly Catholic, began in 1980. Since the 2017 killing in Charlottesville, the Confederados’ event has met <a href="http://www.focusongeography.org/publications/articles/brazil_confederacy/index.html">resistance from Black Brazilians</a>, who find its <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1743873X.2020.1768262">romanticization of the slaveholding South</a> and its Confederate iconography disturbing. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346771/original/file-20200710-30-zqaf57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Confederate iconography sold on miniature flags, buttons and mousepads at the 2019 ‘Festa Confederada.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jordan Brasher</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>White supremacy in Germany</h2>
<p>For Neo-Nazis in Germany, the white supremacy embedded in Confederate iconography is useful. It’s a stand-in for the Nazi swastika, which has <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/ban-of-rightwing-extremist-symbols-according-to-section-86a-of-the-german-criminal-code/9C27FD4AFAC94347A3F04EE17C9E5DCD">been banned in Germany since the Holocaust</a>. And during <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/confederates-on-the-rhine/239724/">Civil War reenactments in Germany</a>, Germans who side with the South are often acting out “Nazi fantasies of racial superiority,” Wolfgang Hochbruck, professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg, told The Atlantic in 2011. </p>
<p>In those situations, the Germans flying the Confederate flag clearly understand its historic origins and meaning. That’s not always the case. A Confederate flag spontaneously <a href="https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/43616/Crelling_washington_0250O_19735.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">appeared in the crowd at the fall of the Berlin Wall</a> in 1989, for example. </p>
<p>There, it may have been understood as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/how-us-military-came-embrace-confederate-flag/613027/">a symbol of anti-communism</a>. A recent <a href="https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/43616/Crelling_washington_0250O_19735.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">study</a> shows that German schools, like <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history">many in the United States</a>, teach the Civil War as primarily a battle over Southern states’ desire to remain “free” from federal interference – not over their desire to preserve slavery. </p>
<p>Historians have debunked this “<a href="https://qz.com/378533/for-the-last-time-the-american-civil-war-was-not-about-states-rights/">states rights</a>” theory of the conflict. But many in Germany may still view the flag as a symbol of freedom or independence.</p>
<p>Sometimes, people in Germany and elsewhere seem to see the Confederate flag as simply part of American culture. The Confederate iconography spotted at a country music festival in <a href="http://ruthellengruber.com/blog/2015/06/23/confederate-flag-in-europes-wild-westcountry-scene/">Geiselwind</a> in 2007, for example, was probably seen as kitsch.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346763/original/file-20200710-18-vfb2cd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Confederate flag among German flags as the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Culture wars</h2>
<p>Though Confederate iconography takes on different meanings in other countries, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=aahQqKkAAAAJ">research shows</a> it often crops up along those countries’ own political fractures, religious conflicts and racial divides. Flying it tends to inflame simmering social tensions, reopen old wounds and spur debates about history like those underway in the United States. </p>
<p>For Americans, who are almost evenly split <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-floyd-protests.html">on whether the Confederacy represents racism</a>, the Confederate flag is today an unmistakable signal of a deeply divided society. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/politics/confederate-statues-removal-robert-e-lee-jefferson/index.html">In a 2020 poll, 52% said they support</a> removing Confederate monuments from public space.</p>
<p>That’s <a href="https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3663">up 19 percentage points</a> since 2017, when modern blood was shed over the 19th-century Confederacy. Charlottesville has forced people everywhere to contend with both the historic reality of the American South and, increasingly, its surprisingly worldwide 21st-century legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142119/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Brasher has received funding from the National Security Education Program's David L. Boren Fellowship, The University of Tennessee’s Thomas-Penley-Allen Fellowship, the W.K. McClure Scholarship for the Study of World Affairs, and the Stewart K. McCroskey Memorial Fund. Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers and a Research Fellow with Tourism RESET, a collaborative research and outreach initiative dedicated to identifying, studying, and challenging patterns of social inequity in the tourism industry. </span></em></p>Symbols of the Confederacy can be seen in Brazil, Ireland, Germany and beyond. While some people may not grasp their racist history, others clearly fly the ‘rebel flag’ to defend white supremacy.Jordan Brasher, Assistant Professor of Geography, Columbus State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1409172020-06-26T12:32:27Z2020-06-26T12:32:27ZAuthorities are yanking the legacy of slaveholder John C. Calhoun from public sphere, but his bigotry remains embedded in American society<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343843/original/file-20200624-132982-1jd1ctm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Construction workers extracted a Calhoun statue in Charleston, South Carolina on June 24, 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/workers-use-a-cherry-picker-to-access-the-statue-of-john-c-news-photo/1222328146?adppopup=true">Sean Rayford/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I toured the <a href="https://www.scgovernorsmansion.org/">South Carolina Governor’s Mansion</a> in 2019, I noticed the multi-volume <a href="https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/projects/catalog/john-calhoun">papers of John C. Calhoun</a> on display. It struck me as remarkable that Calhoun’s ideas would be featured so prominently given his vigorous defense of slavery and his role in laying the groundwork for the Civil War.</p>
<p>But the reality is <a href="https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/calhoun-john-caldwell/">Calhoun’s legacy</a> until now has been quite prominent in American society – and not just in the South.</p>
<p>His statue stands between the two chambers of the House and Senate in the South Carolina Statehouse. However, a separate statue in Charleston has been <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/24/882681085/crews-begin-removal-of-john-c-calhoun-statue-in-south-carolina">removed</a> from the town square following nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd during an encounter with police. The statue had stood for 124 years just a block from <a href="https://motheremanuel.com/">Mother Emanuel Church</a>, site of the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/16/charleston-church-shooting-mother-emanuel-five-years/3193054001/">horrific shooting massacre in 2015</a> of nine Black worshipers by an avowed white supremacist. The church is also located on Calhoun Street. </p>
<p>Despite his historic prominence, Calhoun’s days as a revered icon in the public sphere are gradually coming to an end.</p>
<h2>Calhoun is all around us</h2>
<p>Numerous cities and counties, streets and roads, schools and other public places are named for Calhoun, a <a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/fort-hill/african-americans.html">slaveholder</a> who served as <a href="https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/calhoun-john-caldwell">secretary of state</a>, <a href="https://history.army.mil/books/Sw-SA/Calhoun.htm">secretary of war</a>, <a href="https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Calhoun.htm">a U.S. senator</a>, and two terms as <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_John_Calhoun.htm">vice president</a>.</p>
<p>For instance, the <a href="https://www.historiccolumbia.org/tour-locations/john-c-calhoun-state-office-building">Calhoun State Office Building</a> sits in the capitol complex in Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital city.</p>
<p>There are counties named for him in his <a href="https://calhouncounty.sc.gov">home state</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.calhouncounty.org">Alabama</a>, <a href="https://calhouncounty.arkansas.gov">Arkansas</a>, <a href="http://calhouncountyga.com">Georgia</a> and elsewhere in the South. There is even a <a href="https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2020/06/12/calhoun-county-named-white-supremacist-slavery-michigan-john-c-calhoun/5334260002/">Calhoun County in Michigan</a> named for him. </p>
<p>Major streets in Columbia and Charleston, still bear his name.</p>
<h2>Colleges and universities</h2>
<p>Despite his prominence elsewhere, Calhoun is about to become less prominent on the landscape of American higher education.</p>
<p>The board of trustees at Clemson University, a public university, <a href="https://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/clemson-trustees-approve-honors-college-name-change-request-authority-to-restore-original-name-of-tillman-hall/">announced</a> on June 12 that its Honors College would no longer be named after Calhoun.</p>
<p>South Carolina’s “<a href="https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess113_1999-2000/bills/4895.htm">Heritage Act</a>” prevents renaming of buildings without legislative approval, but the honors college is an organizational unit, not a building.</p>
<p>This is a particularly significant development given that Clemson University sits on what was once <a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/fort-hill/">Calhoun’s plantation</a>, which his daughter and her husband, Thomas Clemson, inherited.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Football players at Clemson University lead the March for Change on their campus on June 13, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/clemson-university-football-players-lead-a-march-for-change-news-photo/1249471210?adppopup=true">Maddie Meyer/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While public memorials of Calhoun appear to be on the decline, what I find more significant – and more troublesome – is the way that Calhoun’s ideology has been ingrained in the American culture and psyche – thanks in large part to the way his ideas were embraced in U.S. institutions of higher learning long after his death.</p>
<p>I make this observation as a historian and author of a chapter for the book “<a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Persistence-through-Peril">Persistence Through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South</a>.”</p>
<h2>Who was he?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/john-c-calhoun.html">Calhoun</a>, who was born in 1782 and died a decade before the Civil War began, in 1850, was not only a <a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/fort-hill/african-americans.html">slaveholder</a> and an ardent defender of slavery, but a chief architect of the political system that allowed slavery to persist.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Engraved portrait of John C. Calhoun.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/engraved-portrait-of-american-politician-former-us-vice-news-photo/164287442?adppopup=true">Stock Montage/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More enduring than the effects of his political career – which included the <a href="https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/annexation/part4/page2.html">annexation of Texas</a> to expand the number of slaveholding states – are the repercussions of his political ideology. </p>
<p>As a political theorist, Calhoun is best known for two ideas: “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2210719.pdf">concurrent majority</a>” and “nullification.” A concurrent majority is the notion that a minority of the electorate – namely, one with money and property – can veto a political majority.</p>
<p>This idea is related to his belief in <a href="https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/nullification/">nullification</a> theory, which is the idea that a state can void federal laws. Nullification made the idea of South Carolina seceding from the nation – and the creation of the Confederacy – a political possibility and then a reality. </p>
<p>Calhoun laid out his arguments for these ideas in his treatise “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/disquisition-on-government-and-a-discourse-on-the-constitution-and-government-of-the-united-states/oclc/1308732">A Disquisition on Government</a>.”</p>
<p>While some Americans defended slavery as a “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/necessary-evil-slavery-and-the-debate-over-the-constitution/oclc/32092358">necessary evil</a>” Calhoun viewed slavery as “<a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/">a positive good</a>.”</p>
<p>He held <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/conquest-of-mexico/">paternalistic views of Blacks as well as other non-whites</a>, declaring: “We make a great mistake when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government.”</p>
<h2>The Calhoun curriculum</h2>
<p>Calhoun’s political doctrines were taught explicitly in college classrooms for decades after his death. There are still <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/06/09/defeat-systemic-racism-institutions-must-fully-integrate-truly-diverse-subject">remnants</a> in the curriculum.</p>
<p>His own views on nullification theory, states’ rights and secession were formed when he studied at Yale University where the college’s president, <a href="https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/3810">Timothy Dwight</a>, introduced to him the espoused the idea that New England could leave the young nation and become a separate country. Yale named a residential college in his honor in 1931. It <a href="https://news.yale.edu/2017/02/11/yale-change-calhoun-college-s-name-honor-grace-murray-hopper-0">renamed it in 2017</a> after the intense pressure from students and alumni that followed the Charleston massacre at the Mother Emanuel Church.</p>
<p>In the chapter that I am writing for “Persistence through Peril,” I am explaining how Calhoun’s ideologies permeated Southern institutions of higher education. His views were taught at the Military Academy of South Carolina, before, during and after the Civil War. When those cadets studied the U.S. Constitution, their professors and texts emphasized Calhoun’s interpretation of it.</p>
<p><a href="https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/thomasmull/id/33/">John Peyre Thomas</a>, a Citadel graduate and Confederate Army colonel who served as professor, superintendent and later trustee at The Citadel, heaped praise upon Calhoun, having served as editor for <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/07015660/">The Carolina Tribute to Calhoun</a> in 1857.</p>
<p>In a speech given at Clemson University on June 22, 1897, Thomas declared, “It is conceded that Calhoun’s standard in the science of government is so lofty as in some respects to be unattainable in our day and generation.”</p>
<h2>The road ahead</h2>
<p>Decades of teaching a particular doctrine do not fade easily or quickly. The United States is now witnessing another <a href="https://theconversation.com/minneapolis-long-hot-summer-of-67-and-the-parallels-to-todays-protests-over-police-brutality-139814">racial awakening</a> with protests for social justice. Symbols of racism and white supremacy are being removed from higher education. </p>
<p>On June 17, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees <a href="https://www.unc.edu/posts/2020/06/17/unc-trustees-lift-moratorium/">reversed</a> its <a href="https://www.greensboro.com/z-no-digital/unc-cant-rename-buildings-with-racist-history-professors-are-trying-to-change-that/article_946e5b6d-c2db-54f3-b21e-496f9c9412ad.html">16-year moratorium</a> on renaming buildings, put in place after the statue known as “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/805250903/judge-voids-uncs-controversial-settlement-over-confederate-statue-silent-sam">Silent Sam</a>” was torn down in 2018.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.onlineathens.com/news/20200618/university-system-of-georgia-to-review-names-of-buildings-uga-ready-to-rsquoassist-and-supportrsquo-says-morehead">University System of Georgia</a>, which includes the University of Georgia, also moved in June 2020 to review the names of its buildings. This would include the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism, which is named after Henry Grady, an <a href="https://www.ajc.com/blog/get-schooled/opinion-has-moment-come-strip-grady-name-from-atlanta-high-school-and-uga-college/A8ks9IdMLwdHvE14SGdb1N/">avowed white supremacist</a>.</p>
<p>After Calhoun’s death in 1850, his colleague in the Senate, <a href="https://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-the-man-who-started-the-civil-war.htm">Thomas Hart Benton</a> of Missouri, remarked about him: “He is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.” He was prophetic in his words. </p>
<p>Calhoun’s ideologies <a href="https://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-the-man-who-started-the-civil-war.htm">fueled the Civil War</a>, gave comfort to those who believed in the “<a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the">Lost Cause</a>” (that is, to show the Civil War in the best light possible from the Confederate point of view) and perpetuated the teaching of racist and white supremacist attitudes.</p>
<p>Because the ideas he espoused have flourished, I believe that dismantling his legacy will take much more than just removing statues of his likeness or renaming buildings, streets and other public places named in his honor.</p>
<p>[<em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christian K. Anderson receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct a summer seminar for school teachers on Black lawmakers during Reconstruction. </span></em></p>Despite his defense of slavery, the former vice president and US senator from South Carolina has been honored with statues and streets, schools and counties. That’s finally changing.Christian K. Anderson, Associate Professor of Higher Education, University of South CarolinaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1411562020-06-19T14:18:51Z2020-06-19T14:18:51ZLatest legal hurdle to removing Confederate statues in Virginia: The wishes of their long-dead white donors<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342975/original/file-20200619-43187-1xbllfx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C5472%2C3587&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Richmond's towering 1890 Robert E. Lee statue is transformed by protests following the killing of George Floyd.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-image-of-george-floyd-along-with-the-black-lives-matter-news-photo/1219836149?adppopup=true">John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A controversial statue of Robert E. Lee will remain in place in Richmond, the former capital of the American Confederacy –- at least temporarily.</p>
<p>On June 18, a judge <a href="https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/updated-richmond-judge-extends-injunction-barring-removal-of-lee-statue-on-monument-avenue/article_2494d3df-fcf5-5c5d-b66e-5fe3c01e9481.html">extended an injunction</a> barring the removal of the Confederate general’s statue, stating that “the monument is the property of the people,” not the state of Virginia, which seeks its removal. </p>
<p>In early June Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/northam-to-remove-lee-statue/2020/06/04/0b2c013c-a603-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html">vowed to dismantle</a> the prominent Lee statue in Richmond, the state capital, following <a href="https://www.citylab.com/design/2020/06/confederate-monuments-statues-richmond-virginia-protests/612691/">sustained, nationwide protests over police brutality and racism</a>. That plan was blocked by <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/09/872707016/virginia-judge-blocks-plan-to-remove-statue-of-robert-e-lee">a 10-day court injunction</a> – now extended through late July – based on the petition of a man whose ancestor, Otway Allen, gave Virginia the land the the sculpture sits on.</p>
<p>In his petition, William C. Gregory claimed that dismantling the Lee statue would violate the conditions of his great-grandfather’s <a href="http://virginiamemory.com/transcribe/scripto/transcribe/4096/14116">1890 land deed</a>, which says Virginia “will faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.”</p>
<p>Richmond isn’t the only Virginia city where a centuries-old land deed is a legal hurdle in removing monuments to men that many see as defenders of white supremacy. Nearby Charlottesville has <a href="https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-seeks-lawsuit-s-dismissal-so-it-can-move-forward-with-lee-statue-sale/article_eb002250-2471-11e7-865c-77334390b7a1.html">faced similar questions</a> about the intentions of the philanthropist who donated its contested Robert E. Lee statue.</p>
<h2>‘Irreparable harm’</h2>
<p>Richmond’s Lee sculpture sits atop a pedestal on a traffic circle at the gateway to Monument Avenue, an architectural paean to white Richmonders’ long tradition of gracious, segregated living. </p>
<p>The land <a href="https://www.newsleader.com/story/news/history/2017/08/24/lee-monument-richmond-celebrated-confederacys-deathless-dead/596700001/">was a gift</a> to the state from real estate investor Otway S. Allen and his sisters, Bettie F. Allen Gregory and Martha Allen Wilson. The donors hoped that putting the monument on the tree-lined boulevard would hasten development of the <a href="https://www.livingplaces.com/VA/Independent_Cities/Richmond_City/Monument_Avenue_Historic_District.html">prestigious</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/its-not-just-the-monuments/612940/?fbclid=IwAR0jH2-A3U-nHG5TbQuV-Z3zbgLTN1gTEUc4lL8w87c9oBCG2AupcRgZ1Zk">whites-only</a> residential neighborhood planned for the area. </p>
<p>Back in the 19th century, the Lee monument was on the outskirts of the city. Over the next 40 years, four more Confederate monuments were erected along the avenue, which traverses what is now central Richmond.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Lee-complaint.pdf">injunction request</a>, Gregory claimed that removing the statue would cause “irreparable harm” because his family “has taken pride for 130 years in this statue resting upon land belonging to his family.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Richmond postcard from the early 20th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flic.kr/p/rBwunh">VCU Library Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To many locals, especially black Richmond residents, the sculptures have always been <a href="https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/is-monument-avenue-set-in-stone/Content?oid=2909428">colossal reminders of the South’s</a> history of enslavement and the violence wrought on black lives. The governor and city leaders <a href="https://www.richmond.com/news/local/updated-richmond-leaders-want-confederate-monuments-removed-a-small-town-mayor-was-ready-to-take/article_a0583665-36f9-5e15-8c81-1fe18c8cfd20.html">now seemingly agree</a>, saying that monuments glorifying the region’s white supremacist history should not displayed on public land.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Richmond’s Lee statue <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/along-historic-richmond-street-residents-grapple-with-confederate-legacy/2020/06/12/86944d42-aaa5-11ea-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html">still has its defenders</a>. On June 15, six Monument Avenue homeowners <a href="https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/six-monument-avenue-residents-sue-to-stop-lee-statues-removal/article_cf0be699-55d0-56df-9fa6-8ac9039e32ea.html">filed their own separate lawsuit</a> to block its removal, claiming that dismantling the “priceless work of art” would lead to the “degradation of the internationally recognized avenue on which they reside.”</p>
<h2>Charlottesville’s ‘princely giver’</h2>
<p>An hour away in Charlottesville, another Robert E. Lee statue has been embroiled in legal challenges since 2017, when a <a href="https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-a-step-in-our-long-arc-toward-justice-82880">city council vote for its removal</a> triggered a deadly white supremacist rally.</p>
<p>Charlottesville’s statue was a gift of a <a href="https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/what-did-mcintire-really-want/article_20040940-bbce-5e87-9cc5-c425e98c5f2f.html">prominent local philanthropist</a>, Paul Goodloe McIntire. McIntire, born during the Civil War, was the son of the Charlottesville’s mayor when the city surrendered to General Custer’s Union troops in 1865. </p>
<p>McIntire made his money on the stock exchanges in Chicago and New York before returning to Charlottesville, a <a href="https://www.c-ville.com/paul-goodloe-mcintire-goodwill-men/">city shaped by his philanthropy</a>. Funding Charlottesville’s first library and building an amphitheater for the University of Virginia, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=WBz3LgKePpQC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=McIntire+princely+giver+of+gifts&source=bl&ots=9smhE-zJER&sig=ACfU3U3z7FYE6W6wzif0T5eF5hMwwIF_PQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC-szP6IbqAhVdSTABHVzyBbAQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=McIntire%20princely%20giver%20of%20gifts&f=false">McIntire earned the sobriquet</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/10/charlottesvilles-confederate-statues-still-stand-still-symbolize-racist-past/">“princely giver” of gifts</a>. </p>
<p>In 1918 McIntire <a href="http://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Monument-Fund-v.-City-of-Charlottesville-complaint-2017.pdf">donated land</a> to the city for use as a public park, to be called Lee Park. The deed stipulated that <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/395627/robert-e-lee-confederate-monument-charlottesville/">a sculpture of the Virginia-born Confederate general</a>, commissioned and paid for by McIntire, would be installed and maintained. </p>
<p>Among <a href="https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-seeks-lawsuit-s-dismissal-so-it-can-move-forward-with-lee-statue-sale/article_eb002250-2471-11e7-865c-77334390b7a1.html">other objections to the statue’s removal</a>, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Monument Fund and a small group of local citizens cited this land deed in their successful <a href="http://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Monument-Fund-v.-City-of-Charlottesville-complaint-2017.pdf">March 2017 legal complaint</a>. They claimed that removing the statue would violate the terms and conditions of McIntire’s gift.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Since 2017 Charlottesville’s contested Lee statue has been alternately shrouded in black, barricaded and given police protection.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/member-of-the-virginia-state-police-waits-outside-the-park-news-photo/1015049006?adppopup=true">Win McNamee/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Courts side with progress</h2>
<p>Both Virginia lawsuits argue that the land donors’ original wishes are inviolable. </p>
<p>But my <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3202660">legal research</a> on <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2680466">charitable gifts</a> shows that donor wishes are not always set in stone, so to speak. Under state law, Virginia’s included, courts can <a href="https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title64.2/chapter7/section64.2-731/">modify gift conditions</a> when fulfilling them is no longer possible or practicable.</p>
<p>Gifts with problematic racial restrictions and segregationist intentions have troubled many American institutions, from <a href="https://casetext.com/case/colin-mck-grant-home-v-medlock">nursing homes</a> established by donors to benefit elderly, white Presbyterians to <a href="https://casetext.com/case/tinnin-v-first-united-bank-of-miss">church scholarships mandated to fund white students only</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richmond’s graffiti-covered Lee statue, June 13, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-visit-the-graffiti-covered-statue-of-confederate-news-photo/1249586748?adppopup=true">Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In such cases, judges have often declined to preserve the outdated wishes of long-dead donors, allowing discriminatory gift conditions to be eliminated. That renders the gifts usable in the modern era.</p>
<p>Rice University, for example, was founded in 1912 with a <a href="https://www.law.uh.edu/ihelg/monograph/11-08.pdf">charitable bequest</a> on the condition that the school educate only “the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas.” In 1963, seeking to integrate the university, Rice trustees filed a motion to modify the racial restrictions. </p>
<p>Despite opposition by a group of alumni who sought to keep the school segregated, the court concluded that strict adherence to the donor’s racial restrictions was no longer practicable and that the terms of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=921901346000076013&q=coffee+v.+rice+university&hl=en&as_sdt=6,47&as_vis=1">Rice’s charter could be modified</a> to admit black students.</p>
<p>On July 23, a Richmond court is expected to hold a new hearing to determine whether land given to Richmond by a private citizen making a very public statement about Southern racial inequality can instead be used to <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/cookout-at-confederate-statue-monument-richmond-virginia">celebrate new and different histories</a>. </p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/dead-white-men-get-their-say-in-court-as-virginia-tries-to-remove-robert-e-lee-statues-140813">story</a> originally published June 17, 2020.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Allison Anna Tait does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A Richmond court says the city cannot remove its controversial Robert E. Lee sculpture because an 1890 land deed gave the Confederate monument ‘to the people’ of Virginia, not its government.Allison Anna Tait, Professor of Law, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1408132020-06-17T22:36:05Z2020-06-17T22:36:05ZDead white men get their say in court as Virginia tries to remove Robert E. Lee statues<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342465/original/file-20200617-94054-o22ozd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C147%2C5111%2C3374&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Richmond's towering Robert E. Lee statue is transformed by protests following the killing of George Floyd. Is removal next?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-image-of-george-floyd-along-with-the-black-lives-matter-news-photo/1219836149?adppopup=true">John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The latest chapter in the United States’ ongoing debate about Confederate monuments involves some unexpected opinions: those of long-dead land donors.</p>
<p>Responding to <a href="https://www.citylab.com/design/2020/06/confederate-monuments-statues-richmond-virginia-protests/612691/">sustained, nationwide protests over police brutality</a>, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on June 4 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/northam-to-remove-lee-statue/2020/06/04/0b2c013c-a603-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html">vowed to dismantle</a> a prominent statue of the Virginia-born Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, the state capital.</p>
<p>That plan was put on pause just four days later when a state judge issued <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/09/872707016/virginia-judge-blocks-plan-to-remove-statue-of-robert-e-lee">an injunction</a> based on the petition of a man whose ancestor, Otway Allen, gave Virginia the land the the sculpture sits on.</p>
<p>In his petition to the court, William C. Gregory claimed that removal of the statue would violate the conditions of his great-grandfather’s <a href="http://virginiamemory.com/transcribe/scripto/transcribe/4096/14116">1890 land deed</a>, which says Virginia “will hold said Statue and pedestal and Circle of ground perpetually sacred to the Monumental purpose … and that she will faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.”</p>
<p>On June 19, a judge will decide whether to let the 10-day injunction expire, enabling Richmond to dismantle its Lee monument, or to obey the donor’s wishes – at least temporarily. </p>
<p>Richmond isn’t the only Virginia city where a centuries-old land deed is a legal hurdle in removing Confederate monuments many see as a symbol of white supremacy. Nearby Charlottesville has <a href="https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-seeks-lawsuit-s-dismissal-so-it-can-move-forward-with-lee-statue-sale/article_eb002250-2471-11e7-865c-77334390b7a1.html">faced similar questions</a> about the intentions of the philanthropist who donated its controversial Robert E. Lee statue.</p>
<h2>‘Irreparable harm’</h2>
<p>Richmond’s Lee sculpture sits atop a pedestal on a traffic circle at the gateway to Monument Avenue, an architectural paean to white Richmonders’ long tradition of gracious, segregated living. </p>
<p>The land <a href="https://www.newsleader.com/story/news/history/2017/08/24/lee-monument-richmond-celebrated-confederacys-deathless-dead/596700001/">was a gift</a> to the state from real estate investor Otway S. Allen and his sisters, Bettie F. Allen Gregory and Martha Allen Wilson. The donors hoped that putting the monument on the tree-lined boulevard would hasten development of the <a href="https://www.livingplaces.com/VA/Independent_Cities/Richmond_City/Monument_Avenue_Historic_District.html">prestigious</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/its-not-just-the-monuments/612940/?fbclid=IwAR0jH2-A3U-nHG5TbQuV-Z3zbgLTN1gTEUc4lL8w87c9oBCG2AupcRgZ1Zk">whites-only</a> residential neighborhood planned for the area. </p>
<p>Back in the 19th century, the Lee monument was on the outskirts of the city. Over the next 40 years, four more Confederate monuments were erected along the avenue, which traverses what is now central Richmond.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Lee-complaint.pdf">injunction request</a>, Gregory claimed that removing the statue would cause “irreparable harm” because his family “has taken pride for 130 years in this statue resting upon land belonging to his family.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342467/original/file-20200617-94060-h0m99e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Richmond postcard from the early 20th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flic.kr/p/rBwunh">VCU Library Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To many locals, especially black Richmond residents, the sculptures have always been <a href="https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/is-monument-avenue-set-in-stone/Content?oid=2909428">colossal reminders of the South’s</a> history of enslavement and the violence wrought on black lives. The governor and city leaders <a href="https://www.richmond.com/news/local/updated-richmond-leaders-want-confederate-monuments-removed-a-small-town-mayor-was-ready-to-take/article_a0583665-36f9-5e15-8c81-1fe18c8cfd20.html">now seemingly agree</a>, saying that monuments glorifying the region’s white supremacist history should not displayed on public land.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the Lee statue still has its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/along-historic-richmond-street-residents-grapple-with-confederate-legacy/2020/06/12/86944d42-aaa5-11ea-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html">defenders in Richmond</a>. On June 15, six Monument Avenue homeowners <a href="https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/six-monument-avenue-residents-sue-to-stop-lee-statues-removal/article_cf0be699-55d0-56df-9fa6-8ac9039e32ea.html">filed their own separate lawsuit</a> to block its removal, claiming that dismantling the “priceless work of art” would lead to the “degradation of the internationally recognized avenue on which they reside.”</p>
<h2>Charlottesville’s ‘princely giver’</h2>
<p>An hour away in Charlottesville, another Robert E. Lee statue has been embroiled in legal challenges since 2017, when a <a href="https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-a-step-in-our-long-arc-toward-justice-82880">city council vote for its removal</a> triggered a deadly white supremacist rally.</p>
<p>Charlottesville’s statue was a gift of a <a href="https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/what-did-mcintire-really-want/article_20040940-bbce-5e87-9cc5-c425e98c5f2f.html">prominent local philanthropist</a>, Paul Goodloe McIntire. McIntire, born during the Civil War, was the son of the Charlottesville’s mayor when the city surrendered to General Custer’s Union troops in 1865. </p>
<p>McIntire made his money on the stock exchanges in Chicago and New York before returning to Charlottesville, a <a href="https://www.c-ville.com/paul-goodloe-mcintire-goodwill-men/">city shaped by his philanthropy</a>. Funding Charlottesville’s first library and building an amphitheater for the University of Virginia, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=WBz3LgKePpQC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=McIntire+princely+giver+of+gifts&source=bl&ots=9smhE-zJER&sig=ACfU3U3z7FYE6W6wzif0T5eF5hMwwIF_PQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC-szP6IbqAhVdSTABHVzyBbAQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=McIntire%20princely%20giver%20of%20gifts&f=false">McIntire earned the sobriquet</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/10/charlottesvilles-confederate-statues-still-stand-still-symbolize-racist-past/">“princely giver” of gifts</a>. </p>
<p>In 1918 McIntire <a href="http://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Monument-Fund-v.-City-of-Charlottesville-complaint-2017.pdf">donated land</a> to the city for use as a public park, to be called Lee Park. The deed stipulated that <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/395627/robert-e-lee-confederate-monument-charlottesville/">a sculpture of the Confederate general</a>, commissioned and paid for by McIntire, would be installed and maintained. </p>
<p>Among <a href="https://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-seeks-lawsuit-s-dismissal-so-it-can-move-forward-with-lee-statue-sale/article_eb002250-2471-11e7-865c-77334390b7a1.html">other objections to the statue’s removal</a>, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Monument Fund and a small group of local citizens cited this land deed in their successful <a href="http://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Monument-Fund-v.-City-of-Charlottesville-complaint-2017.pdf">March 2017 legal complaint</a>. They claimed that removing the statue would violate the terms and conditions of McIntire’s gift.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342468/original/file-20200617-94078-szdx4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Since 2017 Charlottesville’s contested Lee statue has been alternately shrouded in black, barricaded and given police protection.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/member-of-the-virginia-state-police-waits-outside-the-park-news-photo/1015049006?adppopup=true">Win McNamee/Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Courts side with progress</h2>
<p>Both Virginia lawsuits argue that the land donors’ original wishes are inviolable. </p>
<p>But my <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3202660">legal research</a> on <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2680466">charitable gifts</a> shows that donor wishes are not always set in stone, so to speak. Under state law, Virginia’s included, courts can <a href="https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title64.2/chapter7/section64.2-731/">modify gift conditions</a> when fulfilling them is no longer possible or practicable.</p>
<p>Gifts with problematic racial restrictions and segregationist intentions have troubled many American institutions, from <a href="https://casetext.com/case/colin-mck-grant-home-v-medlock">nursing homes</a> established by donors to benefit elderly, white Presbyterians to <a href="https://casetext.com/case/tinnin-v-first-united-bank-of-miss">church scholarships mandated to fund white students only</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342469/original/file-20200617-94040-yovldl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Richmond’s graffiti-covered Lee statue, June 13, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-visit-the-graffiti-covered-statue-of-confederate-news-photo/1249586748?adppopup=true">Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In such cases, judges have declined to preserve the outdated wishes of long-dead donors. Instead, they’ve allowed discriminatory gift conditions to be eliminated, rendering the gifts usable in the modern era.</p>
<p>Rice University, for example, was founded in 1912 with a <a href="https://www.law.uh.edu/ihelg/monograph/11-08.pdf">charitable bequest</a> on the condition that the school educate only “the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas.” In 1963, seeking to integrate the university, Rice trustees filed a motion to modify the racial restrictions. </p>
<p>Despite opposition by a group of alumni who sought to keep the school segregated, the court concluded that strict adherence to the donor’s racial restrictions was no longer practicable and that the terms of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=921901346000076013&q=coffee+v.+rice+university&hl=en&as_sdt=6,47&as_vis=1">Rice’s charter could be modified</a> to admit black students.</p>
<p>Now, a Richmond court must tackle a similar issue. The ruling will determine whether land given to Richmond by a private citizen making a very public statement about the South’s legacy of racial inequality can be used to <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/cookout-at-confederate-statue-monument-richmond-virginia">celebrate new and different histories</a>. </p>
<p>What happens in this former capital of the Confederacy may influence similar cases in Charlottesville and beyond. </p>
<p><em>This story has been updated to reflect latest developments. You can find the updated version <a href="https://theconversation.com/latest-legal-hurdle-to-removing-confederate-statues-in-virginia-the-wishes-of-their-long-dead-white-donors-141156">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140813/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Allison Anna Tait does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On June 19, a court will decide whether Virginia must obey a 1890 deed that gave the state a plot of prime Richmond land as long as it would ‘faithfully guard’ the Robert E. Lee statue erected there.Allison Anna Tait, Professor of Law, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1297502020-03-17T20:09:38Z2020-03-17T20:09:38ZWhy activists are vandalizing statues to colonialism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/320770/original/file-20200316-128091-12mhni6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=71%2C0%2C2842%2C1935&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald being cleaned after it was vandalized in Montreal in 2018.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2018, statues of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/cornwallis-statue-removal-1.4511858">Edward Cornwallis</a> and <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/john-a-macdonald-statue-victoria-city-hall-lisa-helps-1.4782065">John A. Macdonald</a> were removed from their respective pedestals in Halifax and Victoria. Across Canada, colonial statues <a href="https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreals-john-a-macdonald-statue-vandalized-in-anti-racism-protest">have also been vandalized</a> as an act of protest. </p>
<p>Statues and monuments have become major <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/26/statue-wars-what-should-we-do-with-troublesome-monuments">flashpoints</a> of political conflict over the past decade.</p>
<p>After the 2015 <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612517">Charleston Massacre</a>, in which a neo-Confederate white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a movement to remove <a href="https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/08/what-the-history-of-street-renaming-can-teach-us-about-americas-confederate-monument-battle/538161/">Confederate monuments and place names</a> swept across the United States. </p>
<p>Another wave of Confederate statue removals and place renamings occurred in the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/confederate-white-nationalist-monuments-removed-cities-2018-2#san-diego-california-2">aftermath</a> of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.</p>
<p>In South Africa, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall">#RhodesMustFall movement</a> led to the removal of a statue honoring the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in 2015. This inspired efforts to challenge Rhodes’s legacy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall">elsewhere</a> as well.</p>
<p>Monument controversies are not unique to the 21st century. <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Political_Life_of_Urban_Streetscapes.html?id=QkYrDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">Commemorative landscapes</a> have been radically transformed during political regime changes throughout history. Following the Second World War, monuments to the Nazi regime <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/20/why-there-are-no-nazi-statues-in-germany-215510">were toppled</a>. Similarly, the <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?output=instlink&q=info:xxSvJBR675sJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&scillfp=4590667571675176265&oi=lle">fall of the Soviet Union</a> and the <a href="https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/18536/ASC-075287668-313-01.pdf?sequenc">end of apartheid in South Africa</a> led to significant changes to the memorial landscape.</p>
<h2>The legacies of settler colonialism</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240">Settler colonialism</a> is a process of colonization based upon the replacement of Indigenous or colonized peoples with a settler society. This involves both the disposession of Indigenous land and the erasure, either through assimilation or elimination, of Indigenous peoples. </p>
<p>Colonial statues and place names are part of the political infrastructure of settler place-making in Canada. As a result, they have become focal points for challenging settler-colonial power and testing the limits of reconciliation. </p>
<p>On Jan. 31, 2018, the Cornwallis statue was taken down from its pedestal in Halifax. As an honorific commemoration for the “founder” of Halifax, Mi'kmaw elders <a href="https://www.thecoast.ca/RealityBites/archives/2017/07/14/daniel-paul-on-protest-to-topple-cornwallis-statue-if-it-goes-it-goes">have long viewed</a> the statue as a sign of the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and called for its removal.</p>
<p>As if answering the East Coast, the John A. Macdonald statue was removed from the entrance to City Hall in Victoria on Aug. 11, 2018. The decision to remove the Macdonald statue was made as part of the city’s <a href="https://www.victoria.ca/EN/main/city/reconciliation.html">formal reconciliation process</a> with the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations. </p>
<p>As Canada’s first prime minister, Macdonald was chief architect of its residential school system and promoted genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples. His monumental presence at the entrance to City Hall was a major barrier to reconciliation efforts.</p>
<p>A year later, the city of New Westminster followed suit, removing a statue of the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/controversial-statue-judge-begbie-removed-new-westminster-courthouse-square-1.5203029">“Hanging Judge” Matthew Begbie</a> from the grounds of the provincial courthouse. </p>
<p>Those opposed to the removal of statues often propose adding historic plaques as a way to recontextualize statues while leaving them in public spaces. Some activists, however, have chosen a different option: vandalism.</p>
<h2>Vandalizing colonial statues and monuments</h2>
<p>Across Canada, contentious statues and monuments linked to settler colonialism have been targeted with vandalism. In Montréal, the <a href="https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreals-john-a-macdonald-and-queen-victoria-statues-vandalized-again">John A. Macdonald and Queen Victoria monuments</a> have been regularly spray-painted. Macdonald statues have been vandalized in <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/01/11/sir_john_a_macdonald_statue_vandalized_in_kingston.html">Kingston</a> and <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/4400541/regina-john-a-macdonald-statue-vandalized-for-the-second-time-this-year/">Regina</a> as far back <a href="https://leaderpost.com/news/local-news/statue-of-john-a-macdonald-in-victoria-park-vandalized">as 2012</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1030603454555648001"}"></div></p>
<p>Accompanying the campaign to remove the Cornwallis statue in Halifax were several <a href="https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/edward-cornwallis-statue-vandalized-with-red-paint-after-controversial-vote-1.2901121">incidents</a> of <a href="https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/edward-cornwallis-statue-vandalized-with-red-paint-after-controversial-vote-1.2901121">vandalism</a> as well.</p>
<p>These are not random acts of hooliganism. The vandalism of colonial statues is an expression of political protest against the celebration of settler colonialism in Canada.</p>
<p>The political content of monumental vandalism is often communicated by those who commit such acts in the form of accompanying communiqués. Often posted online anonymously, these communiqués explain the motivations behind acts of political vandalism. In <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=f19mDwAAQBAJ&dq=politics+of+attack+communiques+michael+loadenthal&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjk9YS_hevnAhUEITQIHV7KAxYQ6AEIKTAA">The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence</a></em>, author Michael Loadenthal describes communiqués as “the communicative component of an insurrectionary attack.”</p>
<p>A group called the Montréal May Anarchists <a href="https://itsgoingdown.org/montreal-macdonald-monument-queen-victoria-statue-vandalized-again/">claimed responsibility</a> for the vandalism of Montréal’s Macdonald and Queen Victoria monuments in 2019. They targeted these monuments to oppose celebrations of white supremacy and genocide.</p>
<p>In their communiqué, the Montréal May Anarchists made reference to previous acts by <a href="https://itsgoingdown.org/macdonald-monument-vandalized/">#MacdonaldMustFall</a>, inspired by the <a href="https://za.boell.org/en/2018/02/19/rhodesmustfall-it-was-never-just-about-statue">#RhodesMustFall</a> campaign and the <a href="https://itsgoingdown.org/montreal-two-queen-victoria-statues-vandalized-with-green-paint/">Delhi-Dublin Anti-Colonial Solidarity Brigade</a>.</p>
<p>Citing other monument controversies and social struggles, these communiqués place themselves as part of a broader activist community. These groups frame their acts of vandalism as an expression of their commitment to anti-colonial and decolonization movements internationally.</p>
<h2>The future is not cast in stone</h2>
<p>The removal of statues and monuments is often equated with “<a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/mckenna-says-you-cant-erase-a-troubled-history-by-removing-statues">erasing history</a>.” But history itself is a process that has witnessed countless changes to commemorative landscapes. </p>
<p>In settler-colonial societies such as Canada, the creation of monumental landscapes celebrating colonialism has played a significant role in the process of <a href="https://www.blogtalkradio.com/sacredearthradio/2018/09/26/mapping-original-place-names-and-the-erasure-of-indigenous-histories">erasing Indigenous histories</a> and ties to the land. There is a difference between the repressive erasure by dispossession that colonialism has unleashed and the restorative erasure of removing colonial statues to restore an Indigenous sense of place.</p>
<p>Colonial statues are a visible barrier to decolonization and reconciliation because they embed white supremacy in public spaces. </p>
<p>Various far-right groups have rallied to defend colonial monuments subject to controversy. For example, members of the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.4189447/who-are-the-proud-boys-who-disrupted-an-indigenous-event-on-canada-day-1.4189450">Proud Boys</a> disrupted a Mi'kmaq protest against the Cornwallis statue. Similarly, the right-wing group Students for Western Civilisation bemoan what they see as an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StudentsForWesternCiv/posts/1334480076728638">erasure of European culture</a>. Commemorating colonialism with monuments aligns with the goals of a growing number of white supremacist groups in Canada.</p>
<p>The question of whether colonial statues must fall or remain is not a matter of history alone. It is part of the process of reckoning with the ongoing injustices of settler colonialism in the present in order to work toward decolonizing the future. </p>
<p>Removing a statue, monument, or place name does not erase history. It serves as a reminder that the future is not cast in stone.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129750/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Reuben Rose-Redwood is an Associate Professor of Geography and Chair of the Committee for Urban Studies at the University of Victoria. He is also a member of the Indigenous Solidarity Working Group in Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories. His research on the politics of statues, monuments, and place naming is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wil Patrick is a PhD student in Geography at the University of Victoria. He is a collective member of Camas Books and Infoshop, an autonomous activist space that recognizes and supports the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. His research on monument controversies and local politics of space is funded by the British Columbia Graduate Scholarship.</span></em></p>The vandalism of colonial statues is an expression of political protest against the celebration of settler colonialism in Canada.Reuben Rose-Redwood, Associate Professor, University of VictoriaWil Patrick, PhD Student, University of VictoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1285032019-12-19T13:52:28Z2019-12-19T13:52:28ZConfederate Christmas ornaments are smaller than statues – but they send the same racist message<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307509/original/file-20191217-58302-hef1w6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C0%2C3435%2C2297&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Decorated with ornaments purchased, created and inherited for years, even generations, Christmas trees are a reflection of a family's history and tastes.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flic.kr/p/7j8ZcZ">John Morgan/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As Christmas approaches, many families undertake a familiar ritual: an annual sojourn to the attic, basement or closet to pull out a box of treasured ornaments bought, created and collected over years, even generations. </p>
<p>Hanging these ornaments on the tree is an opportunity to reconnect with memories of personal milestones, holiday icons and, in many cases, destinations visited. </p>
<p>But, I argue, it may be time to take some of these old travel keepsakes off the tree. </p>
<p>In researching my 2019 book, “<a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2869-8.html">Confederate Exceptionalism</a>,” I studied sites throughout the American South whose <a href="https://theconversation.com/slave-lifes-harsh-realities-are-erased-in-christmas-tours-of-southern-plantations-125042">histories are tied to enslaved labor</a>. Seemingly charming souvenirs are sold to commemorate many of these places – from the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, to Stone Mountain, a Georgia cliffside carved with images of Confederate generals.</p>
<p>Christmas ornaments are among them. And while these keepsakes may seem apolitical, their very circulation enables Confederate myths and symbols to become “normal” features of people’s daily lives. My research suggests they can thus desensitize Americans to the destructive nature of such stories and icons. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=317&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307512/original/file-20191217-58339-1phcofe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The front and back of a Christmas ornament commemorating Georgia’s Stone Mountain, the ‘Mt. Rushmore of the Confederacy,’ screengrab Dec. 17, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.zazzle.com/stone_mountain_atlanta_georgia_ornaments-175760156339078337?rf=238840279726397180&tc=EAIaIQobChMIhvGY5pe95gIVWNyGCh1JOwU7EAQYASABEgJ3RfD_BwE&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=us_shopping&utm_term=z175760156339078337&ca_chid=2001810&ca_source=gaw&ca_ace=&ca_nw=g&ca_dev=c&ca_pl=&ca_pos=1o1&ca_cid=381150128120&ca_agid=77529482133&ca_caid=6483100273&ca_adid=381150128120&ca_kwt=&ca_mt=&ca_fid=&ca_tid=pla-542343087558&ca_lp=9004354&ca_li=1015519&ca_devm=&ca_plt=&gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhvGY5pe95gIVWNyGCh1JOwU7EAQYASABEgJ3RfD_BwE">www.zazzle.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Contesting Confederate symbols</h2>
<p>In recent years the U.S. has seen heated conversations about public symbols that commemorate the Confederacy, centered on the Confederate battle flag and statues of Confederate generals. </p>
<p>After a white shooter’s <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/charleston-church-massacre-2015/">deadly 2015 massacre of nine black congregants at Emanuel AME Church</a> in Charleston, South Carolina, activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole outside the state capitol to <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/6/27/15880052/bree-newsome-south-carolinas-confederate-flag">remove the Confederate flag flying there</a>. </p>
<p>After Newsome’s act of civil resistance, then-President Barack Obama referred to the Confederate battle flag as “<a href="https://gawker.com/obama-on-confederate-flag-a-reminder-of-systemic-oppr-1714239113">a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation</a>.” But some <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/why-conservatives-love-defending-the-confederate-flag.html">in the U.S.</a> and <a href="http://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548">even abroad</a> still see the flag as a symbol of “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/19/does-the-confederate-flag-breed-racism/the-confederate-flag-is-a-matter-of-pride-and-heritage-not-hatred">heritage not hate</a>.”</p>
<p>Statues of Confederate generals that dot courthouse lawns and public plazas across the United States have prompted similar controversy. In 2017 plans to remove a Robert E. Lee statue triggered violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist at the <a href="https://time.com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/">“Unite the Right” rally</a> killed activist counter-protester Heather Heyer.</p>
<p>That tragedy spurred more cities, towns and colleges to <a href="https://theconversation.com/tearing-down-confederate-statues-leaves-structural-racism-intact-101951">remove or relocate Confederate statues</a> seen as offensive. Nationwide debates followed on how best to grapple appropriately with this <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-confederate-statue-graveyard-could-help-bury-the-old-south-118034">chapter of American history</a>. </p>
<h2>Consuming the Confederacy</h2>
<p>Beyond the scope of these national discussions, my <a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2869-8.html">research on Confederate myths and memory</a> finds, many unexamined Confederate symbols have made their way into people’s kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms. </p>
<p>Take “Confederate cookbooks” that help modern-day chefs recreate the recipes of the Old South and stuffed animals based on Little Sorrel, the <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-skin-of-little-sorrel-lexington-virginia">taxidermied war horse of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson</a>, for example.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307760/original/file-20191218-11951-o3hc0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Little Sorrell was the favored war horse of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flic.kr/p/oeZBsc">Internet Archive Book Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>People probably don’t reflect on the horrors of slavery when baking an apple pie or purchasing a cuddly toy for their child. They aren’t meant to. But they are <a href="https://ugapress.org/book/9780820331690/dixie-emporium/">participating in that history and its mythologies</a> nonetheless.</p>
<p>In that way, seemingly apolitical objects like cookbooks, toys and Christmas ornaments commemorating Confederate history serve to normalize – rather than problematize – the objects, rituals and stories surrounding the Confederacy.</p>
<h2>More than a souvenir</h2>
<p>As a result, tree ornaments depicting the White House of the Confederacy, a <a href="https://www.stratfordhall.org/">home of Gen. Robert E. Lee</a> or the carvings of Stone Mountain are not simply mementos of a leisurely visit. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307515/original/file-20191217-58321-191iz7t.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A decorative ornament on sale at the White House of the Confederacy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://acwm.org/product/white-house-ornament">American Civil War Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These places and people are also icons of the “<a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the">Lost Cause</a>,” an ideology that romanticizes the Confederacy by portraying the American Civil War as a battle of “states’ rights” rather than a fight to preserve slavery. </p>
<p>The Lost Cause is <a href="https://www.jacksonville.com/news/national/2017-08-22/how-civil-war-taught-school-depends-where-you-live">still taught in some Southern schools</a>, demonstrating that the vestiges of the Confederacy are powerful and lasting. Like Confederate statues and flags, Confederate Christmas ornaments strengthen this myth that the Confederacy – an entity built on white supremacy – was about southern “heritage.”</p>
<p>What appears to be a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0160738390900856">nostalgic trip reminder</a>, then, is in fact deeply implicated in a complex matrix of memory, history and racism in the United States. It’s just packaged in a seemingly benign way.</p>
<p>Christmas ornaments communicate something about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10510970109388553?needAccess=true">the person or family that displays them</a>. They reveal their history, passions and aesthetic taste. </p>
<p>So pause to consider whether your Christmas tree represents your values. Does a keepsake from Stone Mountain really belong between an ornament crafted in a kindergarten classroom and a glass nutcracker gifted by your grandmother? </p>
<p>[ <em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128503/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole Maurantonio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Take a good look at those old Christmas ornaments before hanging them on the tree – you may find it’s time to retire some family keepsakes.Nicole Maurantonio, Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Communication Studies and American Studies, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1180342019-07-26T13:03:40Z2019-07-26T13:03:40ZA Confederate statue graveyard could help bury the Old South<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/285786/original/file-20190726-43136-xpbabp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A damaged Confederate statue lies on a pallet in a warehouse in Durham, N.C. on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2017, after protesters yanked it off its pedestal in front of a government building. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Confederate-Monument-Protest-Statue-Toppled/15d7476fae6e4d1d887d525278683db8/81/0">AP Photo/Allen Breed</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An estimated <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">114 Confederate symbols</a> have been removed from public view since 2015. In many cases, these cast-iron Robert E. Lees and Jefferson Davises were <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/08/05/633952187/where-do-confederate-monuments-go-after-they-come-down">sent to storage</a>.</p>
<p>If the aim of statue removal is to build a more racially just South, then, as many analysts have <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-taking-down-confederate-memorials-is-only-a-first-step-78020">pointed out</a>, putting these monuments in storage is a lost opportunity. Simply unseating Confederate statues from highly visible public spaces is just the first step in a much longer process of <a href="http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/5597/">understanding, grieving and mending the wounds</a> of America’s violent past. Merely hiding away the monuments does not necessarily change <a href="https://theconversation.com/tearing-down-confederate-statues-leaves-structural-racism-intact-101951">the structural racism that birthed them</a>. </p>
<p>Studies show that the environment in which statues are displayed <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936042000252769?journalCode=rscg20">shapes how people understand their meaning</a>. In that sense, relocating monuments, rather than eliminating them, can help people put this painful history into context. </p>
<p>For example, monuments to Confederate war heroes first appeared in cemeteries <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/585508">immediately following</a> the Civil War. That likely evoked in visitors a direct and private honoring and grieving for the dead. </p>
<p>By the early 1900s, hundreds of Confederate statues dotted courthouse lawns and town squares across the South. This prominent, centrally located setting on government property sent an <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future">intentionally different message</a>: that local officials endorsed the prevailing white social order.</p>
<p>So what should we do with rejected Confederate monuments? We have a modest proposal: a Confederate statue graveyard.</p>
<h2>Lessons from the Soviet past</h2>
<p>Our <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780815354260">research as cultural geographers</a> recognizes that Confederate monument controversies – while typically considered regional or national issues – are in fact part of <a href="https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548">global struggles</a> to recognize and heal from the wounds of racism, white supremacy and anti-democratic regimes.</p>
<p>The idea of a Confederate monument graveyard is modeled after ways that the former communist bloc nations of <a href="http://www.mementopark.hu/">Hungary</a>, <a href="http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/">Lithuania</a> and <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/noukogude-aegsete-monumentide-valinaitus">Estonia</a> have dealt with statues of Soviet heroes like <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/russia/history-of-the-soviet-union">Joseph Stalin</a> and Vladimir Lenin.</p>
<p>Under communist Soviet rule between 1945 and 1991, Eastern European countries suffered <a href="https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin">mass starvation</a>, land theft, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/4477/iron-curtain-by-anne-applebaum/9781400095933/">military rule and rigid censorship</a>. An estimated <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Great-Terror-Reassessment-Robert-Conquest/dp/0195317009">15 million</a> people in the Soviet bloc died during this totalitarian reign.</p>
<p>Despite these horrors, many countries have opted not to destroy or hide their Soviet-era monuments, but they haven’t left them to rule over city hall or public plazas, either. </p>
<p>Rather, governments in Eastern Europe have altered the meaning of these politically charged Soviet statues by relocating them. Dozens of Soviet statues across Hungary, Lithuania and Estonia have been pulled from their pedestals and placed in open-air parks, where interested visitors can reflect on their new significance.</p>
<p>The idea behind relocating monuments is to dethrone dominant historical narratives that, in their traditional places of power, are tacitly endorsed.</p>
<h2>A statue graveyard</h2>
<p>The Eastern European effort to create a new <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-008-9201-5">memorial landscape</a> has been met with mixed public reaction. </p>
<p>In Hungary, some see it as <a href="https://urbanlabsce.eu/budapests-memento-park-an-example-for-america/">a step in the right direction</a>. But, in Lithuania, people have expressed that re-erecting the statues of known dictators is in “<a href="https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/08/30/how-lithuania-dealt-with-its-soviet-statues">poor taste</a>” – an affront to those who suffered under totalitarianism. </p>
<p>The relocation of Soviet statues in Estonia has taken an even more interesting turn. </p>
<p>For the past decade, the <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee">Estonian History Museum</a> has been collecting former Soviet monuments with the intention of <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/noukogude-aegsete-monumentide-valinaitus">making an outdoor exhibition</a> out of them. For years it kept a decapitated Lenin and a noseless Stalin, among other degraded Soviet relics, <a href="https://www.timetravelturtle.com/soviet-statue-graveyard-tallinn-estonia/">in a field next to the museum</a>. </p>
<p>The statues weathered Eastern European winters and languished in a defunct, toppled state. Weeds grew over them. The elements took their toll. </p>
<p>Travel writer <a href="https://www.timetravelturtle.com/soviet-statue-graveyard-tallinn-estonia/">Michael Turtle</a>, who visited the museum in 2015, called the field a “statue graveyard.”</p>
<p>“Everything here seems to fit into some kind of purgatorial limbo,” he wrote on his blog. “The statues are not respected enough to be displayed as history but are culturally significant enough to not just be destroyed.” </p>
<p>To this we would add that these old statues, when repurposed thoughtfully and intentionally, have the potential to mend old wounds.</p>
<h2>Confederate monument graveyard</h2>
<p>What if the United States created its own graveyard for the distasteful relics of its own racist past? </p>
<p>We envision a cemetery for the American South where removed Confederate statues would be displayed, perhaps, in a felled position – a visual condemnation of the white supremacy they fought to uphold. Already crumpled monuments, like the statue to “The Boys Who Wore Grey” that was <a href="https://www.apnews.com/dace53761754407a8d48c193d52d522e">forcefully removed from downtown Durham, North Carolina</a>, might be placed in the Confederate statue graveyard in their <a href="https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article224038660.html">defunct state</a>. </p>
<p>One art critic has even <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2019/02/15/getty-monument/#624ec6e452c5">suggested</a> that old monuments be physically buried under tombstones with epitaphs written by the descendants of those they enslaved. </p>
<p>We are not the first to suggest relocating Confederate statues.</p>
<p>Democratic presidential candidate <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elizabeth-warren-president-confederate-monuments-museum-a8830841.html">Elizabeth Warren</a>, for example, has proposed that toppled Confederate statues be housed in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-museum-of-confederate-statues-could-help-end-the-american-civil-war-82934">history museum</a> – “where they belong.” </p>
<p>That has proven <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/are-museums-right-home-confederate-monuments-180968969/">challenging for curators</a>. </p>
<p>When The University of Texas moved a statue of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its pedestal on campus to a campus museum, some <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Happened-When-One/244481">students criticized</a> the ensuing exhibit’s “lack of focus on racism and slavery.” One suggested that the statue’s new setting inadvertently glorified Davis, given the inherent value conferred on objects in museums. </p>
<p>And since statues in museums are typically exhibited in their original, upright position, Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee still tower over visitors – maintaining an imposing sense of authority.</p>
<p>We believe felled and crumpled monuments, in contrast, would create a somber commemorative atmosphere that encourages visitors to grieve – without revering – their legacy. A carefully-planned and aesthetically sensitive Confederate monument graveyard could openly and purposefully undermine the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2747/0272-3638.23.1.31">power these monuments once held</a>, acknowledging, dissecting and ultimately rejecting the Confederacy’s roots in slavery.</p>
<p>Planning a Confederate monument graveyard will prompt many questions. Where should it be located? Will there be one central Confederate monument graveyard or many? Who will design and plan the graveyard?</p>
<p>Answering these questions would not just be part of a conversation about steel and stone but about the serious pursuit of peace, justice and racial healing in the nation — and about putting the Old South to rest. </p>
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<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers</a></p>
<footer>The association is a funding partner of The Conversation US.</footer>
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<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Derek H. Alderman is a member of the American Association of Geographers</a></p>
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</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118034/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Derek H. Alderman is a member of the American Association of Geographers</span></em></p>Where do old Confederate statues go when they die? The former Soviet bloc countries could teach the US something about dealing with monuments from a painful past.Jordan Brasher, Doctoral Candidate in Geography, University of TennesseeDerek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1116522019-02-15T12:10:24Z2019-02-15T12:10:24ZMarx and Thatcher: how memorials have become the lightning rods of 21st-century protest<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259268/original/file-20190215-56229-1wzbhsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marx's tombstone was vandalised with a hammer in February 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paasikivi via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In January 2018, Westminster Council <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/23/plans-margaret-thatcher-statue-westminster-rejected">turned down plans</a> for a four-metre high statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square. The council explained that a new statue in the square, which is already home to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela, would lead to “monument saturation”. </p>
<p>But there were also concerns that a memorial in London to Britain’s first female prime minister – still a divisive figure – would be likely to provoke protest and potential vandalism. A year later, when Grantham – where Thatcher grew up – announced it would <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-47134760">host the memorial</a>, it said the 10-foot statue would be placed on a plinth of equal height to deter vandals. </p>
<p>At around the same time this decision was announced, on February 5, the grave stone of Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/05/karl-marx-london-grave-vandalised-suspected-hammer-attack-highgate-cemetery">was vandalised</a> by an unknown assailant using a hammer. The chief executive of the charity that maintains the cemetery has remarked that the Grade I listed monument would “never be the same again”. A fortnight before that, the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park was similarly vandalised, although this time the perpetrators used white paint. It was the fourth time in only six years that the memorial has been defaced.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, various other memorials are provoking increasingly intense debate, especially in the US and Britain, where campaigns for the removal of statues of Confederate leaders, transatlantic slavers, and empire builders continue to garner support. So why are memorials and monuments provoking such interest and even anger?</p>
<h2>Power and memory</h2>
<p>In part, the answer is that this is by no means new. After all, despite their apparent “concrete” qualities, memorials invariably provoke intense debate – and those arguments do not simply disappear once the memorial is built. This is particularly the case following regime change: see, for example, the attacks made on royalist sculptures and statues during the American Revolution or the removal of Soviet era statues in places like Hungary and Poland. </p>
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<p>And who can forget the iconic images of the toppling of the huge statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad during the invasion by US-led forces in 2003? To destroy or remove a memorial is a recognised mechanism through which a newly arrived power asserts its presence and delegitimises its predecessor.</p>
<p>Of course, such moments of “regime change” are relatively rare – and the recent acts of vandalism noted above are clearly of a different order and scale. But they are indicative of the same essential truth: that public sculpture is always inherently political. Seen in this light, a society’s commemorative architecture is a very visible record of its politics of power. </p>
<p>This would explain why in Britain the memorial landscape bequeathed by the Victorians and Edwardians is so disproportionately <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/03/i-sorted-uk-s-statues-gender-mere-27-cent-are-historical-non-royal-women">white and male</a>. This was the class and gender in power – and the events and individuals they commemorated are, in a sense, reflections of themselves. </p>
<p>It was a similar situation in the early 20th-century American South, an age of legalised segregation and racist violence – and the Confederate memorials made in its midst are its commemorative signature, the architecture of Jim Crow. For many African-Americans, these were the purposefully intimidating statues often established in Southern cities by the very same people as were simultaneously adding racially discriminatory statutes to Southern law books. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights campaign launched a courageous attack on the law books – but many of the statues remain.</p>
<h2>Contesting the past</h2>
<p>In recent years, various interest groups have emerged to contest the existing commemorative landscape, challenges that are expressive of a thriving politics of social protest – as well as of changing ideas of exactly what and who is worthy of veneration. Those involved, many of whom are simultaneously protesting against inequalities in the present, rightly perceive that public sculpture is never value-free. This is why they question the continued legitimacy of signs and symbols that are decidedly out of step with the values of 21st-century multicultural democracy – see, for instance, the ongoing debate about the legacy of the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-45825768">slave-trader Edward Colston</a> in Bristol. </p>
<p>These challenges and campaigns have in turn helped produce new statues suggestive of modern ideals, such as the one dedicated to Millicent Fawcett in London, or the removal of “old” statues to those now seen as divisive figures, such as the memorials to Confederate leaders in the US.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, this era of engaged commemorative discussion and debate has also produced a far more shadowy set of activities: acts of monument vandalism. Such acts are clearly very different in purpose and process to the carefully planned removal of, for instance, Confederate memorials, with the latter the product of local campaigns and legislative oversight. But acts of vandalism nonetheless exist at the other – illegitimate – end of the same spectrum of activity, one which finds in certain monuments a power and presence to contest.</p>
<p>This has also been intensified by the rise of social media, where details of a planned attack – or some other form of “intervention” – can circulate and recirculate and draw new waves of energy, support or anger. And this can double back on the memorial itself. Suddenly, thanks to the echo chambers of social media, a statue that has been in place for longer than anyone can remember, takes on new meaning and potency. </p>
<p>This is becoming increasingly visible given the social fractures and fissures recently exposed in the US, Britain and Europe by the rise of new populist nationalisms as well as the connected emergence of competing visions of both the past and present. In this moment, the stone and statuary of earlier times have become the lightning rods of a politics of protest and counter-protest as various groups and individuals contest the commemorative landscape of 21st-century society – both in situ and online.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111652/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Edwards has previously received funding from the ESRC, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the US Army Military History Institute.</span></em></p>Statues to divisive figures are increasingly becoming the target of protest and vandalism.Sam Edwards, Senior Lecturer in History, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1019512018-08-24T10:40:51Z2018-08-24T10:40:51ZTearing down Confederate statues leaves structural racism intact<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233318/original/file-20180823-149481-1v81bhy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters toppled the 'Silent Sam' Confederate statue on Aug. 20 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Confederate-Monuments/4e1df664e05f4d88af0ee42b86ecb663/3/0">Gerry Broome/AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When protesters tore down the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/08/21/640435962/after-a-year-of-rising-tensions-protesters-tear-down-confederate-statue-on-unc-c">“Silent Sam”</a> Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on Aug. 20, it wasn’t just <a href="https://chapelboro.com/news/unc/sbi-assisting-silent-sam-investigation-amid-questions-policing-tactics">destruction of state property</a> - a crime for which the protesters are now being investigated.</p>
<p>Rather, the protesters knocked a powerful symbol of white supremacy from its pedestal - both literally and figuratively. Silent Sam, after all, was meant to pay tribute to those who wanted to maintain slavery.</p>
<p>With the backing of the state, Silent Sam has stood proudly and defiantly at UNC Chapel Hill <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/08/22/scholars-explain-the-racist-history-of-uncs-silent-sam-statue/#52cb10b0114f">since 1913</a>. Now the statue has become one of many in <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/08/21/which-confederate-statues-were-removed-running-list.html">dozens of cities and municipalities</a> where monuments of Confederate soldiers and generals have been removed – mostly with official sanction.</p>
<p>But what, if anything, will this latest removal of a Confederate statue accomplish?</p>
<p>While the removal of Silent Sam was a joyous moment for protesters who had long requested that the university acknowledge that the statue was a divisive symbol of white supremacy – for the opposing side, it was an example of what they call the intolerance of the left, particularly among those <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/08/21/640435962/after-a-year-of-rising-tensions-protesters-tear-down-confederate-statue-on-unc-c">who oppose the views and policies of President Trump</a>.</p>
<h2>Slavery at root of divide</h2>
<p>This divide has deep historical roots. Silent Sam and the other <a href="https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments">700-plus Confederate statues</a> still standing in the U.S. represent a legacy of slavery and the structural racism that followed.</p>
<p>My book, “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/weeping-time/5508CF20D6430EA872C661B8E0BC7995">The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History</a>,” documented one important aspect of antebellum slavery. The harsh and devastating reality of slave auctions meant that profit mattered more than people. My book is <a href="https://annecbailey.net/slavery-was-not-choice-but-listening-to/">one of many new books</a> that seek to <a href="http://www.beacon.org/African-Voices-of-the-Atlantic-Slave-Trade-P579.aspx">remind</a> a <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807859162/slavery-and-public-history/">forgetful</a> public of <a href="http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/america-s-original-sin/343774">America’s original sin</a>.</p>
<p>Beginning first in Virginia in 1662, with the other colonies and states following suit, officials enacted laws to specify that slave status followed the condition of the mother. This continued right up to the eve of the Civil War in 1861 where the enslaved were still bought and sold on the open market. And so, until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, to be black in America was synonymous with a separate and unequal status. </p>
<p>The American Civil War was fought to settle the question as to whether blacks should continue to be separate and unequal or whether the United States of America would finally be united – united in its commitment to the notion of justice and equality put forth in the Declaration of the Independence.</p>
<p>The simple fact is that the North won the war, and in winning it, the North preserved the union. The Confederate statues, therefore, represent a step backwards – a symbol of what the United States once was – not what it is now.</p>
<h2>Averting a civil war over statues</h2>
<p>Today, the nation is experiencing what some call a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/28/baltimore-remove-confederate-monuments-mayor-new-orleans">civil war over statues.</a>
The only way to avert this new civil war – in some ways a symbolic one over the outcome of the original Civil War - is to have dialogue. And after dialogue, actions must follow. It could be that protesters who toppled Silent Sam acted out of a sense that <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/21/protesters-tear-down-confederate-statue-unc-chapel-hill">dialogue had reached a standstill</a> after years of debate. </p>
<p>Communities may decide to take the statues down or replace them with monuments that honor abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, <a href="https://worldhistoryproject.org/1859/us-senator-william-seward-sells-harriet-tubman-house-in-auburn-new-york">William H. Seward</a> or <a href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/remarkable-radical-thaddeus-stevens">Thaddeus Stephens</a>. They may also choose to keep the Confederate statues intact with a plaque that gives a more balanced view of the causes of the war. In this way, they would be used as a tool to teach about the Civil War – one of the bloodiest chapters in American history and one that none of us should want to repeat.</p>
<p>Tearing down Confederate statues may actually do little to further the goal of ending the legacy of slavery. It will not bring about systemic change or end notions of white supremacy or eradicate structural racism.</p>
<p>The more difficult work when it comes to dismantling the legacy of slavery involves ending some of slavery’s byproducts, such as <a href="http://genup.net/connect/action-portal?id=101">mass incarceration of black and brown bodies</a> and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/the-education-inequality_b_8790322.html">systemic educational inequities</a> for children of color. The hope is that those protesters will channel their zeal and apply it to these thorny and persistent problems. There is <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-farmer-calls-out-liberal-racism-in-powerful-facebook-message_us_5925a027e4b0650cc020eb4d">no easy fix.</a> But if and when that fix does come, 100 years from now, America will be remembered not only for its technological advances – such as its computers, its robots or its driverless cars - but for its commitment to human rights.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101951/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne C. Bailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Toppling statues devoted to Confederate soldiers may be a joyous moment for protesters who fight white supremacy, but after the statues fall, structural racism remains, a scholar on slavery argues.Anne C. Bailey, Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1005712018-08-07T10:42:48Z2018-08-07T10:42:48ZThink Confederate monuments are racist? Consider pioneer monuments<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230308/original/file-20180801-136667-8m7n1w.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Early Days.' Detail of Frank Happersberger's pioneer monument, San Francisco, California, 1894. Photo by Lisa Allen.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cynthia Prescott</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In San Francisco, there is an an 800-ton monument that retells California history, from the Spanish missions to American settlement. Several bronze sculptures and relief plaques depict American Indians, white miners, missionaries and settlers. A female figure symbolizing white culture stands atop a massive stone pillar.</p>
<p>The design of the “pioneer monument” was celebrated in newspapers across the country when it was erected in 1894. Today, however, <a href="https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/22/17040208/pioneer-monument-native-american-racist-statue-removal">activists have argued</a> that the monument – particularly its depiction of a Spanish missionary and Mexican “vaquero,” or cowboy, towering over an American Indian – is demeaning to American Indians.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230309/original/file-20180801-136649-17y2mw0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Frank Happersberger’s pioneer monument, San Francisco, California, 1894. Lisa Allen.</span>
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<p>Should the city take down part of this 125-year-old monument? </p>
<p>Many cities are removing or reinterpreting their Confederate monuments, with the understanding that they commemorate racism. But few Americans realize that pioneer monuments placed across the country are also racist. </p>
<p>As my <a href="https://pioneermonuments.net/">research</a> and <a href="https://pioneermonuments.net/book/">forthcoming book</a> on pioneer monuments since the 1890s show, most early pioneer statues celebrated whites dominating American Indians.</p>
<h2>Confederate and pioneer monuments</h2>
<p>Since at least 2015, cities across the United States have debated what to do with <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20180604/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">more than 700</a> Confederate monuments.</p>
<p>After the Civil War, grieving widows raised funds to place monuments to soldiers in southern cemeteries. But most statues of Confederate leaders and foot soldiers were put up around 1900 by heritage organizations to honor the “Lost Cause.” </p>
<p>The “Lost Cause” is the idea that that the Civil War began as a heroic defense against northern aggression. In fact, the Civil War was primarily fought to <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2011/04/12/135353655/slavery-not-states-rights-was-civil-wars-cause">defend slavery</a>. </p>
<p>In the past few years, cities such as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/05/20/529232823/with-lee-statues-removal-another-battle-of-new-orleans-comes-to-a-close">New Orleans</a>, Louisiana and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/baltimore-takes-down-four-confederate-statues-after-charlottesville-violence-n793101">Baltimore</a>, Maryland have chosen to remove their Confederate statues. Activists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/14/protesters-in-north-carolina-topple-confederate-statue-following-charlottesville-violence/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8305ab18a6d1">tore down</a> a Confederate soldier statue in Durham, North Carolina last year.</p>
<p>By contrast, there has been far less attention on the roughly <a href="https://pioneermonuments.net/">200 pioneer monuments</a> erected for similar reasons around the same time. </p>
<p><iframe id="Wroll" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Wroll/5/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>The earliest pioneer monuments were put up in midwestern and western cities such as <a href="https://pioneermonuments.net/search-monuments/?city=Des%20Moines%2C%20IA">Des Moines</a>, Iowa and San Francisco, California. They date from the 1890s and early 1900s, as whites settled the frontier and pushed American Indians onto reservations. </p>
<p>Those statues showed white men claiming land and building farms and cities in the West. They explicitly celebrated the dominant white view of the Wild West progressing from American Indian “savagery” to white “civilization.” </p>
<p>Deviations from that script produced public controversy. For example, Denver residents in 1907 <a href="http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7029/">vocally opposed</a> prominent American sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’s plan for a pioneer monument. MacMonnies proposed a large stone pillar surrounded by bronze hunters, miners and settlers similar to San Francisco’s celebrated monument. MacMonnies’s model included a mounted Plains American Indian warrior atop the pillar to show American Indians yielding to white settlement.</p>
<p>But Denver residents expected the figure at the top of the pillar to represent the pinnacle of progress, like “Eureka,” the female figure representing the spirit of California on San Francisco’s monument. </p>
<p>Denver’s residents argued that the monument needed a white man on top, so MacMonnies revised his design, replacing the American Indian warrior with frontiersman and American Indian fighter Kit Carson, on horseback.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230312/original/file-20180801-136652-vcfysq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">August Leimbach, Madonna of the Trail, Springfield, Ohio, 1928.</span>
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<p>By the 1920s, whites controlled most western lands, and they stopped depicting American Indians in their pioneer monuments. New pioneer monuments from Maryland to California focused on western women. Pioneer mothers in sunbonnets stood for white “civilization” winning in the West. And they offered a conservative model of womanhood to contrast <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-flapper-part-1-a-call-for-freedom-11957978/">flappers</a> wearing short dresses and bobbed hair and women’s growing <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2012/10/birth-control-marriage-and-womens-sexuality/">sexual freedom</a>.</p>
<p>More recent monuments, such as Goodland, Kansas’s “<a href="https://pioneermonuments.net/search-monuments/?city=Goodland%2C%20KS">They Came to Stay</a>” and Omaha, Nebraska’s “<a href="https://pioneermonuments.net/search-monuments/?sculpture=Pioneer%20Courage">Pioneer Courage</a>,” do not directly engage racial politics. As their titles suggest, these statues honor pioneer families’ grit, and they teach local history.</p>
<p>But these statues still represent a racist view, ignoring the cost of white settlement on Native lands. Like earlier monuments, they reinforce white dominance and erase ethnic diversity in the American West.</p>
<h2>Pioneer monuments today</h2>
<p>The recent debate about Confederate monuments has sparked some discussion of pioneer monuments in a few places. In April, Kalamazoo, Michigan <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fountain-depicting-armed-white-settler-towering-over-native-american-be-removed-kalamazoo-180968855/">removed</a> its 1940 “Fountain of the Pioneers” because local residents disliked its depiction of a white settler looming over an American Indian.</p>
<p>After decades of protest, San Francisco <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Proposal-to-remove-Early-Days-statue-in-SF-12992952.php">debated</a> taking down the depiction of a Spanish missionary towering over an American Indian from the 1894 pioneer monument. </p>
<p>In the 1990s, activists persuaded the city to <a href="https://sfgov.org/arts/sites/default/files/100217_Pioneer_Monument_Staff_Report.pdf">place a plaque</a> telling the dark side of California history in front of the statue. But today’s protesters argued that plaque, hidden by landscaping, is not enough. They want “Early Days” – if not the entire monument – taken down. </p>
<p>The San Francisco Arts Commission agrees, but the Board of Appeals <a href="https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/bay_area/san-francisco-board-votes-to-keep-controversial-statue/article_fbe0eb72-4446-11e8-b17c-873a0ac9c795.html">blocked</a> its removal in April.</p>
<p>On September 14, 2018, the “Early Days” statue was removed from the San Francisco monument and placed in storage. In April 2019, about 150 Native American leaders and youth from across California posed for photographs on the empty base where “Early Days” once stood. The photos will be part of the San Francisco Art Commission’s American Indian Initiative.</p>
<p>Each pioneer monument has its own history and local meaning. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But communities are beginning to consider removing or reinterpreting these monuments to white conquest.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100571/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cynthia Prescott receives funding from the Whiting Foundation. </span></em></p>Many cities are removing their Confederate statues. But pioneer monuments represent a racist past, too. There are at least 200 of them, and their future is now being debated.Cynthia Prescott, Associate Professor of History, University of North DakotaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/871042017-11-08T23:54:18Z2017-11-08T23:54:18ZDemocrats’ sweep of Virginia shows the state is moving beyond its Confederate past<p>In its first election since Trump became president, Virginia gave Democrats a sweeping victory. This <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/06/12/virginia-is-no-longer-a-purple-state/?utm_term=.306f2f6768f5">one-time swing state</a> and former Confederate capital elected Democrats in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/11/08/daily-202-anti-trump-backlash-fuels-a-democratic-sweep-in-virginia-and-elections-across-the-country/5a023fd230fb0468e76541b3/">all three statewide races</a> – governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. </p>
<p>Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a mild-mannered physician from Virginia’s eastern shore, led the ticket with a platform focused on women’s reproductive rights, climate change and racial justice. He defeated Republican Ed Gillespie with <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/election-results-virginia-new-jersey-n818406">just under 54 percent of the vote</a>. </p>
<p>Northam saw particularly strong support from a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/democrats-send-trump-and-trumpism-a-message-with-election-night-wins/2017/11/07/5e6a7b5c-c308-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html?utm_term=.843e830ea452">diverse population of suburban voters</a> in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties, where Virginia’s Confederate history figures less prominently than in the state’s more rural and southern parts. <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/exit-polls-how-ralph-northam-won-in-virginia/">Black voters</a> in Tidewater and Richmond, the capital, also rallied around Northam. </p>
<p>The Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, drew his base from the same areas. <a href="http://www.roanoke.com/news/politics/fairfax-wins-va-lieutenant-governor-race-becomes-second-african-american/article_37aed012-3978-583f-ad94-25a791939868.html">He beat out</a> Republican House of Delegates member Jill Vogel, 53 percent to 47 percent. Fairfax will be the first black politician to hold statewide office in Virginia since <a href="https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/jan-13-1990-douglas-wilder-becomes-first-elected-african-american-governor-in-u-s/">former Gov. Douglas Wilder became lieutenant governor in 1985</a>. </p>
<p>Fairfax, who has never held elected office, is now in a position to follow the path of Governor-elect Northam and <a href="http://www.ltgov.virginia.gov/lghistory.htm">seven other Virginia lieutenant governors</a> who’ve risen to the state’s highest office. If he were to do so, he would become only the second African-American ever to lead Virginia. </p>
<p>Race is never an <a href="https://theconversation.com/robert-e-lee-george-washington-and-the-trouble-with-the-american-pantheon-82665">afterthought in southern politics</a>. And in Virginia’s election, it was a central factor. As a political analyst who focuses on race, I interpret this Democratic triumph as a sign that the Old Dominion has entered a new era – one characterized by definite urban-rural divisions. </p>
<h2>City vs. country</h2>
<p>In modern Virginia, urban areas have <a href="http://www.diversitydata.org/Data/Profiles/Show.aspx?loc=1412">considerable racial and ethnic diversity</a>, especially in <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/10/northern-virginia-diversity-race/18079525/">northern Virginia</a>. These cities vote overwhelmingly democratic.</p>
<p>Republican Ed Gillespie, a Washington lobbyist who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/gillespie-schedules-1-pm-news-conference-amid-speculation-that-he-will-concede/2014/11/07/6bff3a98-6689-11e4-9fdc-d43b053ecb4d_story.html?utm_term=.5abe7ee870d4">almost defeated incumbent senator Mark Warner in 2014</a>, knows this. So he ran a campaign clearly aimed at appealing to the Trump base throughout rural Virginia. </p>
<p>Gillespie favored retaining statues of Confederate icons like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, a particularly hot-button issue in Virginia since alt-right, pro-Confederacy protesters <a href="http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/unite-the-right-torch-rally-ends-in-violence-at-the/article_32a1a082-7f0a-11e7-9f72-f3433c42fb49.html">killed one person in Charlottesville in August</a>. </p>
<p>Gillespie also attacked Northam on Gov. McAuliffe’s policy of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/mcauliffe-restores-voting-rights-to-13000-felons/2016/08/22/2372bb72-6878-11e6-99bf-f0cf3a6449a6_story.html">restoring the voting rights of former felons</a>, and he opposed sanctuary cities. Gillespie ran television ads implying that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/virginia-republicans-ad-ties-opponent-to-ms-13-democrats-compare-it-to-willie-horton/2017/09/20/28d673bc-9e49-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html">immigrants would join violent gangs like MS-13</a>, which did not play well in liberal urban areas.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Anti-immigrant campaign ads did not play well in Virginia’s liberal cities.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a result, Northam actually <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/democrat-ralph-northam-projected-the-winner-in-virginia-gov-race-1090841155581">fared better in northern Virginia suburbs</a> – a key population center – than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Arlington voters gave Northam 80 percent, Fairfax 67 percent, Loudoun 59 percent and Prince William 61 percent.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Virginia/Norfolk/Race-and-Ethnicity">heavily black cities like Norfolk</a> and Hampton, too, Northam saw a robust win. Statewide, 87 percent of black voters and 67 percent of Latino voters <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/virginia-politics/governor-exit-polls/?utm_term=.843c0aac48cd">supported the Democratic candidate</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"928120799965466625"}"></div></p>
<p>Even before polls officially closed at 7 p.m., it was clear that this diverse coalition of black Virginians, northern Virginia suburbanites and city-dwellers had become a powerful voting bloc. Together, these communities put Northam, Fairfax and <a href="https://wtop.com/virginia/2017/11/virginia-house-delegates-results-democrats-republicans/">over a dozen Democratic General Assembly delegates</a> into office. </p>
<h1>A new era</h1>
<p>This strong Democratic showing suggests that Virginia is entering a new era. </p>
<p>History is the foundation of the Old Dominion, one of America’s 13 original colonies. However, in my assessment, the 2017 gubernatorial election proved that forward-thinking Virginians now place a greater value on the future than on the past. </p>
<p>Although it is a southern state, Virginia rejected ads that sought to racially divide and frighten the electorate. Even the rallying cry of the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments did not deter voters from writing new history. With little fanfare, the state carried a <a href="http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/government-politics/fairfax-wins-va-lieutenant-governor-race-becomes-second-african-american/article_7c1db5a4-25ae-5f81-af51-cd9bacbd0af5.html">black attorney into the office of lieutenant governor</a>. </p>
<p>This Democratic shift is only likely to grow. I believe rural Virginia voters will gradually lose their political clout – even in the representative General Assembly – as lack of jobs <a href="http://www.roanoke.com/townnews/work/wallmeyer-lack-of-job-skills-hurts-rural-virginia/article_9ce46ea4-0d18-53db-8611-93e4a23ace68.html">continues to shrink the rural population</a>. </p>
<p>In contrast, <a href="http://statchatva.org/2017/01/30/virginias-population-is-growing-at-its-slowest-pace-since-the-1920s/">census data show</a> that Virginia’s urban areas will expand. That likely means more Democratic voters.</p>
<p>The big question now is whether the Democrats’ victory in Virginia portends a national trend. In <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/2018-election/">2018</a>, 36 states and three territories elect governors. More than 30 senators will face election.</p>
<p>I see Virginia’s “off-off-year” election as a repudiation of Trump’s policies. The state showed that African-Americans, suburbanites and millennials could be the vanguard of future Democratic contests. Next year, all America will find out if Virginia was the start of something bigger.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87104/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Toni-Michelle C. Travis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In Virginia, suburbanites, city-dwellers and black voters together rebuffed racism as an electoral strategy and handed Dems a huge win. Is this diverse coalition the future of Old Dominion politics?Toni-Michelle C. Travis, Professor of American Politics, George Mason UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/828782017-11-02T02:54:41Z2017-11-02T02:54:41ZWhat the history of iconoclasm tells us about the Confederate statue controversy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188062/original/file-20170928-2939-1sqtnls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Confederate statue lies on a pallet in a warehouse in Durham, North Carolina after protesters toppled and defaced it.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Confederate-Monument-Protest-Statue-Toppled/15d7476fae6e4d1d887d525278683db8/4/0">AP Photo/Allen Breed</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the last few months, a new American civil war seems to have broken out. It isn’t being fought with weapons. Instead, it’s being fought with statues and symbols, and at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether statues of Confederate heroes should be allowed to stand.</p>
<p>After a violent “Unite the Right” rally ostensibly intended to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, an enthusiastic mob <a href="http://time.com/4900779/durham-north-carolina-confederate-statue-pulled-down-protesters/">pulled down a bronze figure in North Carolina</a>, massive Confederate statues in Baltimore <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/baltimore-confederate-statues_us_5994274fe4b009141641806b">were surreptitiously removed at night</a> and New York City <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/397022/confederate-symbols-removed-nyc/">is formally reviewing</a> which of its public statues should be allowed to remain in place. </p>
<p>The President <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/346929-trump-revives-defense-of-confederate-monuments">has weighed in</a>, along with his chief of staff, John Kelly, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-chief-of-staff-kelly-decries-removal-of-monuments/2017/10/31/f46b2702-be24-11e7-9294-705f80164f6e_story.html?utm_term=.36fbbc09e2b3">who said</a> their removal would set a “very, very dangerous” precedent. It’s even become <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/confederate-monuments-become-hot-button-issue-in-va-governors-race/">an issue</a> in the Virginia governor’s race.</p>
<p>How did a bunch of statues (most of which are conventional in their appearance) become a canvas for passion, vitriol and violence? Are the defenders of the Confederate statues correct when they say their destruction or their removal sets a dangerous precedent?</p>
<p>To answer these questions, it’s helpful to look at the issue through the lens of history – to when the destruction of statues became a political act. </p>
<h2>‘I will hack up the flesh’</h2>
<p>The art of the cavemen tended to use animals as its subject; the representation of humans – aside from female fertility statues – is rare. The images of people that do exist mostly show them in animal guise or animal costume, presumably shamans. Art was religious but apparently not very political.</p>
<p>This changed with the advent of agriculture and the emergence of Middle Eastern city-states – empires ruled by kings who claimed support from gods and who maintained strict forms of social hierarchy. These rulers asserted their power with statues of themselves and their gods. And it was during this period in human history that <a href="http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/iconoclasm.htm">iconoclasm</a> – the destruction of images for political and religious reasons – first emerged.</p>
<p>If these kingdoms were overthrown, it was standard practice to subject their rulers and military leaders to horrible forms of public torture and execution: flaying them alive, cutting off of eyes, noses and other body parts and then displaying them. </p>
<p>“I will hack up the flesh and then carry it with me, to show off in other countries,” <a href="http://www.jmhinternational.com/news/news/selectednews/files/2009/05/20090519_SpiegelOnline_TheWorstWaysToDie_TorturePracticesOfTheAncientWorld.pdf">proclaimed Ashurbanipal</a>, an Assyrian king who ruled from 668 to 627 B.C. (<a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=32865001&objectid=366859">A well-known relief</a> in the British Museum shows Ashurbanipal consuming a sumptuous meal, while the severed head of Teuman, King of Elam, hangs from a nearby tree as a marker of his power.)</p>
<p>Statues and memorials of rulers were subjected to similar forms of mutilation. For example, a copper statue of an Akkadian ruler from Nineveh <a href="https://www.learner.org/courses/globalart/work/266/index.html">was famously defaced</a>, very likely when the Medes sacked Nineveh in 612 B.C. The head was severed from the body, the ears were cut off, the eyes were gouged out and the lower part of the beard was trimmed, as if an actual captive were being tortured and humiliated. (Today, its “remains” live in the National Museum of Iraq.)</p>
<p>In many ways, the destruction of a statue mimicked attacks on real people, and this aspect of iconoclasm surely remains central to the practice today.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-uAZa4H1vk">In videos</a> of the Durham, North Carolina statue of a Confederate soldier being roped around the neck and pulled from his pedestal, what’s striking is the glee of the crowd in mutilating it. Aggressive instincts were clearly at work, not unlike those present in a lynching, or that led to the dismemberment of the Akkadian effigy.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H-uAZa4H1vk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters topple a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Religious iconoclasm</h2>
<p>While such vandalism has most often been directed at images of warriors and rulers, it’s been directed toward religious images as well. </p>
<p>In Egypt, the Pharaoh <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/english-literature-1499-biographies/akhenaten">Akhenaten</a> created a monotheistic religion that worshiped the sun god, Aten. He ordered the destruction of all images of other gods, a practice rescinded after his death. (Most likely the edicts reflected a political struggle of some sort between Akhenaten and powerful priests.)</p>
<p>But perhaps <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/european-history-450-1000/byzantium-iconoclast-era-c-680850-history?format=PB">the most famous instance of iconoclasm</a> still isn’t very well-understood, since we have accounts only from the victors, written years after the fact. </p>
<p>During the early Christian period, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III ordered the destruction of all Christian images, on the grounds that they represented idolatry and were heretical. The policy deeply divided the empire and caused the pope in Rome to anathematize and excommunicate the emperor’s iconoclast followers. The dispute finally ended about 842 with the compromise that henceforth icons would be venerated but not worshiped in the Byzantine Empire. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188061/original/file-20170928-1488-ja3sun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The destruction of a church during the Byzantine era.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:48-manasses-chronicle.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What’s fascinating is that a theological debate – how to treat religious icons – also served as a focal point for political and cultural rivalries within the empire. We see echoes of this today in the Confederate statue debate, with various political and cultural factions picking sides.</p>
<h2>Monuments to…losers?</h2>
<p>Confederate monuments are unusual in that they celebrate not the victors of a war, but the losers. </p>
<p>When Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in 1865, <a href="http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/es/alston/econ4524/readings/South%20After%20the%20Civil%20War-%20Atack%20and%20Passell.pdf">the South was in shambles</a>. Beyond the defeat of its military, courts, law enforcement capabilities and local economies had collapsed. </p>
<p>In order to gloss over the extent of this disaster, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/its-time-for-the-lost-cause-of-the-south-to-get-lost">the region devised a series of fictions</a>, among them the notion that the leaders of the defeated Confederate Army were unblemished heroes, or perhaps hadn’t even been defeated in the first place. It was a way to impose some sort of order on a society that risked descending into pure anarchy – and also a sham front to all sorts of dysfunctional things (above all a nasty, codified racial hierarchy).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188060/original/file-20170928-2939-435ari.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A frieze from a Confederate monument in Virginia depicts a Confederate soldier kissing a black baby.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Confederate_Monument_-_NE_frieze_mammy_-_Arlington_National_Cemetery_-_2011.JPG">Tim1965</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Confederate statues, which were erected into the mid-20th century, were an outgrowth of this attitude. What’s surprising is how many of them there are: While there doesn’t seem to be an exact count, they number <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy#findings">well over 1,000</a>. For more than a century they stood mute, unquestioned and largely unnoticed in thousands of public squares. </p>
<p>Rather abruptly, that’s changed.</p>
<h2>A symbolic hollowness</h2>
<p>A matter that’s intriguing to me, given the vehemence of the outcry, is that most Confederate monuments aren’t particularly interesting. As purely visual statements, they’re not very expressive. With a few exceptions, they take one of two forms – that of a standing foot soldier, or that of a colonel or general riding a horse. </p>
<p>For the most part, they’re indistinguishable from monuments celebrating Union soldiers; absent historical context, it would be hard to deduce that they celebrate racism – or anything, for that matter. </p>
<p>Their distinguishing characteristic is a sort of symbolic hollowness.</p>
<p>As “works of art” they’re strangely similar to Marcel Duchamp’s <a href="https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.291">famous urinal</a>, a store-bought object which became an artistic masterpiece not because an artist made it but because an artist – the eponymous R. Mutt – signed his name to it, and thereby transformed an ordinary object into a work of art. Similarly, the message attached to these Confederate statues has little to do with their visual appearance. It’s almost entirely arbitrary. The central factor in determining their meaning is the name we assign to them: Bragg, Branton and Bratley (Confederate heroes), or Banks, Burnside and Butler (who fought for the Union). </p>
<p>But iconoclasm tends to almost entirely ignore visual and artistic considerations. Instead, the monuments and statues are seen as assertions of political power. Mutilating a statue becomes equivalent to killing or mutilating an enemy. Both major and minor works of art are destroyed impartially. </p>
<p>The impulse toward destruction often seems to override normal inhibitions. Byzantine and Protestant iconoclasts, for example, destroyed images of the mother and child; in most social situations, mothers and children are people we’re urged to safeguard and protect. Symbolic meaning overrode normal social instincts.</p>
<p>It’s a bit scary to witness the primitive instincts – at times the raw violence – that these monuments set in motion on both sides of the issue. Clearly, they touch on social wounds that have been festering for centuries, and they’ve eliciting a divergent range of responses among historians, politicians and the public.</p>
<p>One would hope that the controversy can be one that will lead not just to destruction or to erasure of history, but to thoughtful reexamination and acknowledgment of the injustices and sores of the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82878/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Adams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over the course of human history, symbols and monuments have invoked violent impulses and destruction.Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/834832017-09-06T00:39:43Z2017-09-06T00:39:43ZIn defense of HBO’s counterfactual ‘Confederate’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184749/original/file-20170905-32271-z27b43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Assault on Fort Sanders' by Kurz & Allison (1891).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Kurz_%26_Allison_-_Assault_on_Fort_Sanders.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In late July, HBO announced its forthcoming alternate history series “Confederate,” a show that will take place in a world in which the South successfully seceded from the Union and the institution of slavery persisted.</p>
<p>The backlash was immediate. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-confederate-tweets-during-game-of-thrones-20170731-story.html">Some decried it</a> for being the brainchild of two white men, “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/opinion/hbo-confederate-slavery-civil-war.html?_r=0">In The New York Times</a>, Roxane Gay compared it to “slavery fan fiction.” Ta-Nehisi Coates <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/">argued in The Atlantic</a> that it would perpetuate the South’s enduring belief in the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy">Lost Cause</a>,” which celebrates the Civil War as a heroic struggle and minimizes the role of slavery in the conflict. </p>
<p>Then the tragic events of Charlottesville happened, and some people started saying that the fictional scenario of the South winning the Civil War was happening in real life. Jamie Broadnax, a leader of the Twitter boycott group #NoConfederate, <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/after-charlottesville-hbo-show-9698ba18cf54/">insisted</a> that the “alternate history of what the South would be like if it won [the war]…is play[ing] out right before our eyes.” </p>
<p>“People have been joking on social media,” <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/after-charlottesville-hbo-show-9698ba18cf54/">she declared</a>. “But it’s really the truth…we’ve already seen episode one of 'Confederate.‘”</p>
<p>At times, this may seem to possess nuggets of truth. After all, plenty of people in the South continue to defend Confederate “heritage,” whether it’s in the form of monuments, flags or building names. And the timing of a series on the Confederacy winning the Civil War could easily be misunderstood given ongoing racial tensions in the United States. </p>
<p>But as a historian who studies counterfactual histories, I think the critics of “Confederate” are mistaken to suggest that today’s racial tensions make the HBO series redundant, or that imagining a world in which the South won is inherently apologetic to the Confederate cause.</p>
<p>They overlook the fact that alternate histories of the Civil War have long existed, with each possessing its own agenda. Many mirror the concerns of the era in which they were created. Some have leaned to the right, while others have leaned to the left. Some fantasize about how things might have turned out better, while others offer nightmarish scenarios of a world in which events could have been much, much worse. </p>
<p>By holding a mirror up to society and reflecting its aspirations and shortcomings, alternative histories can advance our national dialogue about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.</p>
<h2>A fantasy and a nightmare</h2>
<p>In 1930, British politician Winston Churchill <a href="http://www.unz.org/Pub/Scribners-1930dec-00587">published an essay</a> in Scribner’s Magazine called “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” </p>
<p>As the title indicates, the essay is an alternate history within an alternate history. It’s narrated by an unnamed writer who inhabits a world in which the South won the war, and reflects on how much worse history would have been had the South been defeated.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184754/original/file-20170905-28027-e0pafc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winston Churchill’s dismay over the horrors of World War I made him fantasize about whether a southern victory could have prevented the Great War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Churchill_HU_90973.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this imaginary world, Robert E. Lee is able to triumph only after agreeing to abolish slavery, which convinces the British to support the Confederacy. The South and North then split into two nations and go their separate ways. </p>
<p>But at the start of the 20th century, they join forces with Great Britain to form an imperial alliance. This has huge ramifications: It prevents the nations of Europe from going to war in 1914. </p>
<p>When writing this essay, Churchill clearly had contemporary concerns on his mind. His country had just emerged from the catastrophic Great War. What if it could have been avoided? </p>
<p>It also indicates that Churchill was concerned about the future of the British Empire. At the essay’s outset, the narrator expresses relief that northern forces didn’t win the war. Had they done so, he notes, they would have irresponsibly extended “equality” and suffrage to the “simple African race” and thereby brought “parliamentary government into…disrepute.” </p>
<p>At a time of growing anti-colonial movements – <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-violence-that-helped-india-break-free-from-colonial-rule-57904">especially in India</a> – the last thing avowed imperialists like Churchill wanted was for subjugated peoples to be inspired by the goals of social and political equality. Portraying a Confederate victory as a positive event that restores order, thus, was appealing to some.</p>
<p>At first glance, Churchill’s narrative lends credence to the claims of HBO’s critics that a Confederate victory in the Civil War can easily dovetail with racist fantasies.</p>
<p>But other tales – told from a more humane point of view – portray a Confederate victory as a nightmare. In 1953, the American writer Ward Moore published his classic novella “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=PiiLDgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Bring+the+Jubilee&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz16_O7ozWAhXGMyYKHdkoDFYQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Bring the Jubilee</a>.” It, too, was set in a world in which the South won the Civil War. But it devoted less attention to its impact on the South than on the North. </p>
<p>Tellingly, Moore inverted real history, with the defeated North reacting to military defeat in the same way as the South did – by scapegoating African-Americans in a violent campaign of lynching and forced deportation. </p>
<p>The book ends on a note of tragic irony when its protagonist – having accidentally gone back in time and helped the North defeat the South – thinks he’s improved the course of history, only to realize that the craven compromises following the election of 1876 portend <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_reconstruct.html">the end of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow</a>.</p>
<h2>A biting satire and a liberal pipe dream</h2>
<p>A more recent alternate history was African-American filmmaker Kevin Willmott’s brilliant 2004 film “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389828/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">C.S.A.</a>” </p>
<p>The biting satire took the form of a film within a film: a mock British documentary about the South’s victory in the Civil War that is broadcast – complete with bluntly racist commercials – to an American audience that remains under Confederate rule. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ypIbTpnuNgg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A satirical commercial from the documentary ‘C.S.A.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The film is unsparing; it’s the farthest thing from an endorsement of the “Lost Cause.” Not only does the South continue to oppress African-Americans by preserving chattel slavery (adapting it to modern technology), it also helps Hitler persecute the Jews, invades Latin America with the goal of subjugating Latinos and enslaves Asian laborers on the West Coast. </p>
<p>The unpredictable political valence of Civil War alternate histories was underscored, finally, by liberal journalist John Tierney’s 2006 New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/opinion/04tierney.html">op-ed</a> “Disunited States of America.” </p>
<p>While in his fantasy, the Confederates win, he optimistically argues that a drop in world cotton prices in the 1870s would have led the South to unilaterally abolish slavery. </p>
<p>But the real meat of his vision emerges thereafter. The South’s secession, he argues, would have permitted the North to develop on its own without being held back by the reactionary states of the Confederacy. Written at a time when liberals were bemoaning the conservative administration of George W. Bush – who had been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege2000.svg">elected</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege2004.svg">twice</a> thanks to southern voters – Tierney’s essay expressed the belief of some northerners that they would be happier divorced from the states of the former Confederacy.</p>
<p>These narratives represent but a small fraction of the total number of alternate histories on the subject of the South winning the Civil War. But their diversity is representative, and should prompt critics of HBO’s “Confederate” to rethink their inclination to condemn the show as guilty until proven innocent. </p>
<p>In truth, it’s impossible to know how a southern victory in the Civil War would have changed the course of American history. Historians <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/11/15599148/civil-war-trump-slavery-jackson-compromise-history">continue to debate</a> whether slavery was compatible or incompatible <a href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/SlaveryCapitalism/150787">with industrial capitalism</a>, whether it would have continued into the present or died out on its own. </p>
<p>Yes, this ambiguity can create openings for misinterpreting the motives of writers, and a southern victory is a premise that understandably makes many recoil. But in stimulating debate about how the Civil War might have unfolded differently, alternate histories like “Confederate” can help advance our understanding of how it really was – and how its legacy may evolve in the future. As with all forms of cultural expression, the show’s fate should ultimately be determined in the free marketplace of ideas.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83483/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gavriel D. Rosenfeld does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Those calling it slavery fan fiction are ignoring the long, nuanced tradition of articles and films that wonder what would have happened if the South had won.Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Professor of History and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Judaic Studies, Fairfield University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/826652017-08-25T13:31:16Z2017-08-25T13:31:16ZRobert E Lee, George Washington and the trouble with the American pantheon<p>When the US president, Donald Trump, was asked to clarify his position on the violence that unfolded in <a href="https://theconversation.com/global/topics/charlottesville-attack-41864">Charlottesville</a>, Virginia during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York, he poured gasoline on a raging fire. </p>
<p>In a <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/15/politics/read-president-trumps-q-and-a-at-trump-tower/index.html">comment</a> about the historical monument to Confederate general Robert E Lee, which had become a flashpoint in the protests, Trump remarked:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This week it’s Robert E Lee … I wonder is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For years, a debate about Confederate monuments has been growing in intensity, setting protesters and city counsellors around the country against activists who see the monuments to southern civil war heroes as a part of the region’s heritage – even though the majority of them were erected <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf">long after the war</a>. Indeed, most were put up around the beginning of the 20th century, as African-American disfranchisement began to well and truly bite across the country and in the 1950s and 1960s, largely in reaction to the civil rights movement and desegregation. Though they might hold a civil war figure aloft, monuments to the Confederacy commemorate white supremacy in marble. This is the message. The rest is historical window dressing.</p>
<p>A few of these statues make this fact plain. Most do not. All of them trade in a historical bait and switch. The statues memorialising the Confederacy gave segregationists the historical justification they needed to act, while at the same time allowing them to cast their efforts in a regional history of lost causes rather than white supremacy and the perpetuation of slavery.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ix3764QIBIc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But Trump’s stance also raise questions about not so much whether monuments ought to be taken down, but the company that Robert E Lee keeps in the pantheon of the republic’s most important civic icons. Here too there are problems, but not only the ones you might think.</p>
<p>On the surface, the president’s remarks make no sense to anyone who has read in any depth about American history. Thomas Jefferson wrote the document that set the American colonies down the road to independence. He was a president, as was George Washington. <a href="https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-virginia-the-history-of-the-statue-at-the-centre-of-violent-unrest-82476">Lee</a> was a decorated soldier – but a founding father he was not. He renounced his citizenship, joined a cause to break up the Union and stood at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia which inflicted incredible damage on the United States and killed tens of thousands of American soldiers. Washington and Jefferson helped to build the republic. Lee was out to destroy it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183323/original/file-20170824-28045-1mi5ggc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/volvob12b/31098162420/in/photolist-Po3df9-dZx56C-94LU4W-c4WZeL-NpRea-dB2Jg-9zkUxC-KEtQE-a1yTcv-9xpBLq-azPTqV-4nokJ-qb4pWh-dgztGa-dWs5n1-dWs8Ko-7Q6kfL-WxhDtC-9p5HEC-5SxQyQ-5SxSoU-4k4xLN-4k4zMJ-7jj7yd-hPtQzM-5SxTCW-5SxQh9-8U4863-9p5J3W-KDrm8-2zbu49-5Stznv-2nddMo-5SxMS3-8MzdYq-4k4xhy-cxDdzW-8PKMg4-4k4yuG-bBycax-9A3qGD-5SxS5N-4k4sKh-bbV5ST-677ePw-4A8pAV-5CEZWw-bBycHF-fvrjXU-ff2NcP">Bernard Spragg</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, one of the odd and understudied by-products of the war is that, despite the all-consuming talk of treason and loyalty during and immediately following the conflict, by the later decades of the century former Confederate citizens could wrap themselves in the American flag and still erect monuments to their Confederate heroes, all without irony or sanction from the rest of the country.</p>
<p>For a good many Americans, Lee is held up as a national hero – even if he had a hand in almost tearing the republic to pieces. The historical narrative that wraps Lee, Washington and all the rest into one whole is a story of misdirection. It is a memory of the war that few who survived the conflict would have recognised. And it is certainly not how those who were slaves when the war began remembered it.</p>
<h2>An accidental challenge</h2>
<p>But there is more to think about here. By associating Lee, Washington and Jefferson, Trump made an unintended but instructive point about the problem of whiteness, slavery and power in American history more broadly.</p>
<p>For all of the plaudits historians and the broader public throw at the feet of the so-called founding fathers, there is something to the idea that by holding them up and casting aspersions on Lee, we are somehow scrubbing up the former, and heaping scorn on the latter. The fact remains that most of the most powerful Americans in the first century of the republic’s history traded in slaves or profited from their labour. Few institutions were untouched by slavery’s influence. Though white nationalists might deny it, it is difficult to point on a map to any part of the United States that was not settled, improved or made profitable through the labour of African Americans in chains.</p>
<p>Trump was by no means out to make this point, but in his profound desire to lash out at his enemies and expose their weaknesses, his words inadvertently ought to force historians and the broader public to think again – and think again a lot harder – at the historical assumptions we make. No monument erected or destroyed can obscure the reality that racism remains one of the most powerful markers in American society. A darker reckoning with the nation’s history is sorely needed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82665/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erik Mathisen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In defending white nationalists in Charlottesville, Donald Trump took aim at the founding fathers.Erik Mathisen, Teaching Fellow, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/829342017-08-24T11:13:37Z2017-08-24T11:13:37ZA museum of Confederate statues could help end the American Civil War<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183145/original/file-20170823-13316-1pvsjhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/fischerfotos/7826449982/in/photolist-cVAAUN-XyUyRr-XyV9xV-Wvhtg9-Xb5Pao-vRTfRz-RTDxee-dPMtyx-9i7wzt-XyUyoT-XH2zsE-XM6A34-UsA9Ek-XyUzNM-9iaivd-XyVc7n-XM7geF-Wvii17-UpJv8J-nuULzw-XyV6L2-UpGDNJ-CNfRwC-UsAbUk-XM7t6r-xJ3EMb-pwBXZk-Mddnme-UpGByo-U4TrKw-r4jQTR-xcsL6o-WviiJb-WvhPnG-KqLmcF-UAmcUC-XyULmR-U4TuE9-rLcpMf-DHESS7-wVigCU-UpHTbo-UAkyV7-wDqAZE-wVicBY-Lnh4PZ-8m3rnc-8m6AZW-8m3rti-SWuwh4">Mark Fischer</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Across America, bronze rebels are falling. Confederate monuments have come down in <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/05/20/529232823/with-lee-statues-removal-another-battle-of-new-orleans-comes-to-a-close">New Orleans</a>, Louisiana, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/baltimore-begins-taking-down-confederate-statues/2017/08/16/f32aa26e-8265-11e7-b359-15a3617c767b_story.html?utm_term=.df604688ef9c">Baltimore</a>, Maryland, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/8-now-charged-in-toppling-of-durham-n-c-confederate-statue/">Durham</a>, North Carolina, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/us/ut-austin-confederate-statues-removed/index.html">Austin</a>, Texas and even <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-hollywood-forever-monument-20170815-story.html">Hollywood</a>, California. And over the coming weeks, this list will almost certainly grow.</p>
<p>This campaign has prompted a fierce debate about the politics of history, from the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/17/politics/trump-tweet-confederate-statues/index.html">babbling myopia</a> of Donald Trump to more serious proposals about what to do with the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-to-do-with-confederate-statues-81736">statues</a>. To varying degrees of sophistication, most suggestions have circled around a crucial question: how can we learn from the past without celebrating its ugliest features?</p>
<p>I want to sketch out one possibility.</p>
<p>Rather than scrapping these monuments or packing them away, bring them back into the clear light of day – only this time, in a completely different setting. Collect these fallen Confederates in a vast, outdoor museum space, carefully presented and properly contextualised. If done thoughtfully, such a museum could transform objects of veneration into tools for edification, and move the US one step closer towards a fair reckoning with its past.</p>
<h2>Memories in context</h2>
<p>First and foremost, this museum would require contextualisation in the form of detailed histories for each monument. That would take the sheen off these statues by explaining who these men really were: slaveholders at the helm of a rebellion against the US government. Many of them were large landowners, who amassed fortunes on the backs of the human beings that they owned. In an effort to preserve and extend slavery, they shattered the Union in a war that claimed an estimated 750,000 lives – a higher death toll than all other American military conflicts put together.</p>
<p>But such a museum would need to move well beyond the Civil War and into the Jim Crow era. That’s in fact when the majority of these monuments were <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future">erected</a>. The high-tide of Confederate monument-making took place during the early 20th century. It was synchronous with a wave of legislation designed to disempower African Americans across the South. A second spike in Confederate memorialisation occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, when black people began rolling back some of those exclusions. These monuments represent the reactionary rebuttal to the civil rights movement. Or, to borrow a more recent slogan, it was a white supremacist effort to make the South great again.</p>
<p>With period photographs, audio recordings, and video footage, the museum could document how particular monuments became contested political sites, from the civil rights movement to the present day. Accompanying displays could spotlight prominent national figures, like the perennial presidential candidate <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/14/us/george-wallace-segregation-symbol-dies-at-79.html?mcubz=0">George C. Wallace</a>, who incorporated Confederate iconography into a segregationist and white supremacist platform.</p>
<p>The museum could also bring together more recent objects, like the mangled bronze of Durham’s Confederate monument, famously <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/confederate-statue-pulled-down-north-carolina-trnd/index.html">torn down</a> by protesters following the events in Charlottesville. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Time/YouTube.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There should also be a recording of the powerful speech delivered by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0jQTHis3f4">Mitch Landrieu</a>, mayor of New Orleans, on the removal of rebel statues from his city. These are reminders of how history informs our present moment.</p>
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<p>This would not be a museum to dead Confederates so much as a tribute to the people who stood against their rebellion and its pernicious legacies. To this end, the museum could commission new monuments and memorials to place in conversation with these slaveholding rebels: from the former slaves who took up arms against their masters during the Civil War, to the black leaders of the post-emancipation period, to the champions of the civil rights movement, to the victims of the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. This, in effect, would be a museum to a century-and-a-half of civil rights struggle.</p>
<p>Confederate monuments and the history they represent were never confined to the South, however. The museum should therefore include a large interactive map to display the location of <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">over 700 Confederate monuments and statues</a>, and indicate which have been removed and which remain in place. </p>
<p>As monuments continue to fall, this annotated map would serve as an important catalogue of America’s evolving commemorative landscape. Visitors might be surprised to learn that, while most of these monuments are concentrated in the former Confederate states, quite a few were erected in the <a href="http://nypost.com/2017/08/18/bronx-community-college-removes-confederate-busts/">North</a> and the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-waite-socal-confederates-20170804-story.html">West</a> as well.</p>
<h2>Drawbacks</h2>
<p>There are, of course, substantial obstacles in the way of such a museum – above and beyond sheer expense. The Smithsonian’s exhibit of the <a href="http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/enola/">Enola Gay</a> – the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – demonstrated how political firestorms can engulf public history. Some might also worry that any concentration of Confederate monuments could become a pilgrimage site for white supremacists.</p>
<p>But detailed explanations and a proper contextualisation of these statues would hopefully prevent such an outcome. Plus, admission fees (not to mention a strict <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/business/media/charlottesville-tiki-torch-company.html?mcubz=1&_r=0">no-tiki-torch</a> policy) are nice deterrents to large gatherings of racist agitators. To be sure, some white nationalists may still visit such a museum. But they would find little to celebrate in a place that exposes the treason of Confederate leaders and documents the heroism of black activists and their allies.</p>
<p>What to do with these monuments remains an immensely sensitive and often explosive question. A museum could, however, steer a middle path between those who worry about the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/27/why-we-need-confederate-monuments/?utm_term=.6696040299fb">erasure of history</a> and those who want relics to white supremacy removed from their literal and figurative pedestals.</p>
<p>The Confederacy surrendered over 150 years ago, but Americans are still fighting over the Civil War. Such a longstanding struggle over historical memory deserves a museum of its own, where relocated statues of Confederate generals can bear witness to the sins of the past and point towards a better future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82934/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Waite does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Displaying Confederate statues in a carefully curated museum would help end a toxic debate about the difference between remembering and venerating.Kevin Waite, Assistant Professor of Modern American History, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/827292017-08-19T12:07:18Z2017-08-19T12:07:18ZThe Confederate statue debate: 3 essential reads<p><em>Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of archival stories related to the debate over what to do with Confederate statues.</em></p>
<p>The impetus for the “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12 was a proposal to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park.</p>
<p>In the wake of the violence that erupted in Charlottesville, protesters toppled a Confederate statue in <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/346557-protesters-topple-confederate-statue-in-north-carolina">Durham, North Carolina</a>, while the city of Baltimore swiftly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/16/us/confederate-monuments-removed.html">removed four statues</a>.</p>
<p>President Trump made his views clear in a series of Thursday morning tweets:</p>
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<p>Our scholars explore all sides of the debate, with a case for removal, a case for preservation and a look to post-Soviet Russia for possible alternatives.</p>
<h2>A tool of oppression</h2>
<p>Penn State’s Joshua F.J. Inwood and Derek H. Alderman study the way memory and places interact with trauma. They think the original intention of most Confederate statues – and the context in which they were built in the years after the Civil War – <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-taking-down-confederate-memorials-is-only-a-first-step-78020">make it tough to defend keeping them in place:</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“white elites employed these statues to take advantage of the racial anxieties of poor whites and to remind civil rights-seeking black communities of who really mattered and belonged…in the city.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While it certainly doesn’t solve problems of inequality that exist today, removing memorials that continue to “exact a painful toll on the sense of belonging and place of African-Americans” is, at very least, a step in the right direction. </p>
<h2>A symbol of past crimes</h2>
<p>University of North Carolina law professor Al Brophy notes that the debate isn’t new. For decades, cities and towns around the country have been grappling with what to do with Confederate memorials. Many have simply moved the statues from visible public squares to less prominent places, like cemeteries.</p>
<p>In recent years, however, some states have passed “Heritage Protection Acts” that prohibit the removal of Confederate monuments from public property – and even the renaming of public buildings.</p>
<p>While he’s no fan of the Confederacy, Brophy <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-case-for-the-removal-of-confederate-memorials-isnt-so-clear-cut-44218">makes a case for preservation</a>, arguing that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“we risk forgetting the connections of past racial crimes to current racial inequality.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>What did the Russians do?</h2>
<p>Tufts University political scientist James Glaser looks to Russia for answers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Russians wondered what to do with all the symbols associated with the old order. It wouldn’t make sense to knock down buildings – <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/07/29/stalins-seven-sisters/383950fd-fd19-4458-968c-638d13dcfbcc/?utm_term=.53c5bd0ee989">like the seven skyscrapers Stalin constructed in Moscow</a> – that were still in use. </p>
<p>Statues, however, served no practical purpose. Moving them from public spaces, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-to-do-with-confederate-statues-81736">Glaser writes</a>, “was one of the first impulses the Russian people had after the fall of the Soviet Union.”</p>
<p>It’s important to note that the statues weren’t all destroyed. Instead, many were relocated to a sculpture garden. </p>
<p>“It’s our past and we embrace it,” one Moscow resident told Glaser, “We lived it. We can’t just wish it away.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82729/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Should they stay or should they go?Nick Lehr, Arts + Culture EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/824432017-08-17T22:56:56Z2017-08-17T22:56:56ZCharlottesville and the politics of fear<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182157/original/file-20170815-26751-1scgwed.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Did Trump's rhetoric played a part in radicalizing the far-right protesters in Charlottesville?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Steve Helber</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I have spent nearly 16 years studying how the risk of violence grows in societies around the world and running programs designed to stem the tide. I have seen toxic rhetoric from political leaders result in violence in countries like Iraq and Kenya. </p>
<p>On August 12, the same thing happened in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-virginia-overview.html">Charlottesville</a>, Virginia. The violent clash there came about in part because of a resonance between President Donald Trump’s language and domestic extremist groups who see a doorway open to their goals – goals most Americans have long thought buried for good. </p>
<p>This homegrown horror represents a potentially greater threat than any we face from foreign terrorist groups. Foreign groups can certainly kill, but they have no power to divide our society. That deeper threat belongs to us alone – but the solution is also in our hands. </p>
<h2>Fear and anger make for strong motivation</h2>
<p>Let’s consider how the president’s words have encouraged violence.</p>
<p>This <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-russia-probe-demeaning-to-our-constitution/article/2630600">quote from Trump</a>, speaking at a rally in West Virginia, predates the angry clash in Charlottesville by just nine days:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“They can’t beat us at the voting booths, so they’re trying to cheat you out of the future and the future that you want. They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us, and most importantly, demeaning to our country and demeaning to our Constitution.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The counterprotesters in Charlottesville – <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/13/543175919/violence-in-charlottesville-claims-3-victims">one of whom was killed</a> – are implicitly among the “they” in this speech. </p>
<p>Fear and anger defined Trump’s candidacy and continue to define his presidency, as in other <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/watch-live-trump-speaks-campaign-rally-huntington-west-virginia/">recent</a> speeches condemning the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/business/trump-calls-the-news-media-the-enemy-of-the-people.html?_r=0">media</a>, the president’s political <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/04/politics/trump-mueller-political-argument/index.html">opponents</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/20/i-think-islam-hates-us-a-timeline-of-trumps-comments-about-islam-and-muslims/?utm_term=.2ecfdee2fdcb">immigrants</a> and the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/06/23/killing-trump-lefts-violent-assault-on-american-president.html">left</a>. </p>
<p>The language Trump uses resembles <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Maduro-Blasts-CIA-Plot-Demands-Response-from-Colombia-Mexico--20170724-0031.html">the language</a> Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is currently using to galvanize anti-protest violence, declaring his willingness to take up arms in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/lawmakers-injured-in-violent-attack-on-venezuelan-assembly/532749/">patriotic terms</a>: “If Venezuela was plunged into chaos and violence and the Bolivarian Revolution destroyed, we would go to combat… We would never give up, and what couldn’t be done with votes, we would do with weapons.” Trump’s language also echoes language right-wing extremist and white supremacist groups use to define the conditions under which violence – toward the government or towards other citizens they see as enemies – becomes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYGUfWC84wg">legitimate</a> in <a href="https://www.oathkeepers.org/critical-warning-to-u-s-military-and-federal-leo-do-not-follow-orders-to-waco-ammon-bundy-occupation-in-oregon-or-you-risk-starting-a-civil-war/">their worldview</a>. </p>
<p>Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t come out of nowhere. Going back at least to the “southern strategy” in the 1960s, the GOP has spent decades <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/130039/southern-strategy-made-donald-trump-possible">mobilizing</a> fear and anger. As candidates, Republican presidents like <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/jeb-bush-willie-horton-118061">George H.W. Bush</a> leveraged fear to secure votes from the white, Christian, male and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/02/this-astonishing-chart-shows-how-republicans-are-an-endangered-species/">ideologically extreme</a> demographic to offset the party’s growing distance from an increasingly diverse and progressive American society. Trump’s use of the same tropes is not an aberration, but the culmination of this tactic. </p>
<p>By mirroring extremists’ language, Trump encourages groups already primed for violence by suggesting that the enemy and the situation they have prepared for are present here and now. By refusing to clearly denounce <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/video/david-duke-says-he-was-at-charlottesville-rally-to-fulfill-promise-of-trump-1023420483642">the extremists</a> – and suggesting a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-defends-organizers-of-white-supremacist-rally-in-charlottesville/2017/08/15/de01ff66-81f9-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory">moral equivalency</a> between right-wing violence and counterprotesters – he further excuses and reinforces the idea that the right’s violence is defensible, honorable and legitimate.</p>
<h2>The patriot paradox</h2>
<p>We’ve heard this language from within the “<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/timeline-history-militias-america/">patriot movement</a>” for a long time. </p>
<p>Consider <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh">the following words</a>, spoken by Timothy McVeigh in an interview explaining why he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding nearly 700 more.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Those who betray or subvert the Constitution are guilty of sedition and/or treason, are domestic enemies and should and will be punished accordingly. It also stands to reason that anyone who sympathizes with the enemy or gives aid or comfort to said enemy is likewise guilty. I have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I will.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Every extremist group in history describes its own violence as the legitimate response to a threat that was forced on them. In a South African white supremacist paramilitary training camp, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3038508/Preparing-race-war-South-African-white-supremacist-bootcamps-training-thousands-youths-fight-blacks-create-apartheid-state.html">recruits are told</a> “South Africa is bleeding… And this is why we have to train our people to be prepared. There’s millions and millions of blacks around you, smothering you… and killing you… So you have to implement certain systems to survive…” This is the same sentiment reflected in the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/18/dylann-roof-rhodesian-flag_n_7616752.html">Rhodesian flag</a> worn by the white supremacist Dylann Roof, convicted of killing nine at an African-American church in South Carolina. </p>
<p>When right-wing extremists and white supremacists view Trump critics, “liberals” and progressive protesters as enemies of the state – and therefore legitimate targets – they feel emboldened to demonstrate more overtly. Indeed, Trump’s <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-elites-20170725-story.html">anti-elite</a> accusations and claims that the “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/business/trump-calls-the-news-media-the-enemy-of-the-people.html">lying media</a>” is the enemy of the American people hold significantly the same meaning as McVeigh’s words. </p>
<p>American extremist websites exhort the belief that they are <a href="http://www.govtslaves.info/leaked-military-bulletin-labels-patriot-groups-militia-domestic-terrorists/">defending</a> the Constitution, stopping the theft of the political process from the people and resisting takeover by <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/larry-klayman">hostile powers</a>. They draw on <a href="http://www.originalintent.org/edu/patriotmovement.php">the narrative</a> that true Americans are not only able but expected to throw off such oppression. </p>
<p>Even before 20-year-old James Alex Fields <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/james-alex-fields-charlottesville-driver-.html">drove his car</a> into the crowd on August 12, individual <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html?_r=0">acts of violence</a> linked to racism and extremist American politics were on the increase. In Trump’s presidency, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/hate-crime-america-muslims-trump-638000">a pattern</a> of increasing hate crimes has continued to grow. </p>
<p>In Charlottesville, white supremacists shouted “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/charlottesville-far-right-crowd-with-torches-encircles-counter-protest-group">Jews will not replace us</a>.” Meanwhile, Eric Trump denounces his father’s critics as “<a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-eric-trump-calls-father-s-critics-not-1496849988-htmlstory.html">not even people</a>.” They’re the same dehumanizing echoes used to justify levels of violence from <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human">cruelty to genocide</a>.</p>
<h2>What can be done?</h2>
<p>As criticism for Trump’s Charlottesville stance grows, his popularity wanes. The president is becoming increasingly reliant on campaign-style speeches to connect with those who still support him. We must be on guard for the rhetoric of theft and threat, and the implicit call to violence, to intensify. </p>
<p>Many years of experience in dealing with extremism has taught me the threat can be reduced – first and foremost through consistent political involvement by the greatest possible number of people; a strong, united stand against fear and anger; and communication between communities and security providers. </p>
<p>The Department of Homeland Security’s focus on analyzing and countering domestic terrorism, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-extremists-program-exclusiv-idUSKBN15G5VO">dismantled</a> under Trump, should be rebuilt. The October 2016 <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/16_1028_S1_CVE_strategy.pdf">strategy</a> for countering violent extremism, which stresses community policing and inclusive governance, should be expanded and improved as a model for cities and states as well as the nation. </p>
<p>Political radicalism isn’t inherently bad. Indeed, the American Revolution wouldn’t have happened without it. The violence perpetrated by domestic radicals, however, cannot be condoned. A former IRA soldier in Northern Ireland once told me of the peace process there, “just because a wave breaks on the beach doesn’t mean the tide isn’t going out.” For Americans horrified at this violence, it’s important to remember that there is no endpoint in politics – only process. What’s wrong now can be changed.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-america-domestic-extremists-are-a-bigger-risk-than-foreign-terrorism-58841">an article</a> originally published on May 31, 2016.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82443/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Alpher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Trump is a master of using anger to motivate his base. An anti-terrorism researcher explains how to stem the tide.David Alpher, Adjunct Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.