• Assignment Overview: The assignment was to consider Confederate and racialized statues and monuments in the U.S. and read the book "Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders" which includes various perspectives on the topic.

• Historical Knowledge and Heritage: Todd Groce from the American Association for State and Local History points out that only twelve percent of high school seniors are proficient in history, and many who support Confederate symbols lack historical knowledge. He emphasizes the need for professional historians to guide public narratives.

• Community-Based Approach: Efforts to integrate diverse voices into historical spaces, such as the Chicano Movement in Colorado, show the challenges and successes of community-based approaches in redefining museum spaces.

• Debate on Monuments: The debate on Confederate monuments often pits facts against nostalgic memories, with some contributors equating the removal of such monuments to actions taken by oppressive regimes.

• Importance of Humanities Education: To address misunderstandings about history, the document suggests mandating history and humanities education throughout K-12 and higher education, to combat myths like 'The Lost Cause'.

This assignment for the class Introduction to Historical Studies was to consider Confederate and racialized statues and monuments that persist around the United States today, and to read an anthology of essays about this subject titled Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders.[1]  In this book, various contributors have added their voices to this highly charged debate in America – many of them apologetic for idyllic memories of the South, some of them contrarian, and with only few of the essayists taking a firm stand against statues and monuments.  Support for Confederate statues and monuments has lately propelled our fellow citizens to new heights of dangerous rhetoric and action, not exactly the hallmarks of free societies.  By examining some of the essays in Controversial Monuments, this paper attempts to show that destruction of statues and monuments is the only way forward in the march for equality for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized groups in America.

In Charlottesville, North Carolina, on August 4, 2017, a riot ensued downtown when white supremacists stormed the University of Virginia campus “yelling Nazi slogans and chanting, ‘Blood and soil, we’ll take our streets back.’”[2]  The riot began as a protest to the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, Confederate general, from nearby Lee Park.  On that day, Heather Heyer, an anti-racist protestor, was run over and killed in the street by a white supremacist, and two police officers died witnessing the event.  This event shocked the world.  Moreover, it exposed American citizens via real-time video streamed over the Internet to white supremacists marching and chanting under the cover of darkness with torches held high, all in a modern-day, American city.  “Events like Charlottesville show that such symbols have undergone a process—from The Dukes of Hazzard to David Duke—that has made them once more the focus of a dark vision of America.”[3]

According to Todd Groce of the American Association for State and Local History from his contribution “History, Memory, and the Struggle for the Future” from Controversial Monuments, only twelve percent of high school seniors are proficient at history.[4]  With such a statistic in mind, consider how many museums, memorials, statues, and other historical objects are curated by people without any advance training in the historical sciences.  They are left to rely on memories of the past and their own personal research to design and support installations that convey, collectively, a national and world history for Americans.  He states of survey participants “those who most adamantly supported Confederate symbols were also the people least likely to know anything about the history of the Confederacy.”[5]  In the same article, Groce explains that heritage is synonymous with the word memory.  Also, memory can vary by individual and is therefore subjective.  As the study of history has evolved more fully into a social science, it is incumbent on professional, trained historians to help guide narratives for Americans visiting historical and museum sites.  The federal government is best situated to curate and present cultural and scientific artifacts, stories, statues, memorials, and places for the public, as evidenced by the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the Muir Woods National Monument in California, among many others.

The contributions to Confederate Monuments follow a familiar pattern – contributing authors ranging from museum directors to social justice workers have advocated for the removal or reinterpretation of Confederate, American Indian, and other racially charged statuary or memorials.  Invariably, these activists have decided to make connections and compromises with white supremacists.  In one article, “Honoring El Movimiento: The Chicano Movement in Colorado” by JJ Lonsinger Rutherford, the author recounts his experience integrating the voices of the local population of Chicano/a and Latino/a people into what had traditionally been a whites-centric museum space.  At one point during the process, one community advisor on the project had to stand up and shout, “’¡Ya Basta!’ (‘Enough already!’) to discrimination and harassment,” accentuating the difficulties inherent in this community-based approach to designing historical spaces.  Successful in opening their new museum space, El Movimiento took several tries to imprint their voices into this space, and still today work for more representation in the face of racism and dissent among the competing voices of white stakeholders in the museum’s overall efforts.  “These debates essentially originate from the fundamental misunderstandings or disagreements about our collective history,” writes F. Sheffield Hale in “Challenging Historical Remembrance, Myth, and Identity: The Confederate Monuments Debate.”  These disagreements arise as history meets heritage, or facts meet memories, consuming time, resources, and energy for the stakeholders, allowing for longer and entrenched whites-only representation, and lending faux credence to specious arguments, which are again notable for their lack of objectivity.

“Facts alone are dry, callous things that stack up on each other like so much firewood, ready to be consumed by the fiery glances of angry zealots. Without the subtlety of empathy and the gentle caress of relatable stories, facts are ignored or denied as the pitiable outrage of a misguided ‘opposition.’ Where then, is the place for righteous anger and indignant shouts?”[6]  The editors tell the reader that professionals armed with facts are now become ‘angry zealots’, that their outrage is ‘pitiable’, and question whether there is a place for ‘righteous anger’ today.  When adjacent to their commentary is the text of Robert K. Krick, Author of Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain writing at people who reject racist monuments and statues to “include zealots eager to obliterate any culture not precisely their own, destroying monuments in the fashion of Soviets after a purge, and antiquities in the manner of ISIS,”[7] as though marginalized groups’ voices are completely meaningless and cries for human decency are like those from ‘zealots’, ‘Soviets’, and ’ISIS’.  Or as though Confederate artifacts are ‘antiquities’, for that matter.

“These recent public debates about memorials and the vitriol they have produced should, however, show how important humanities education, especially history, is.”[8]  One remedy is to institute laws that mandate history and humanities education throughout the K-12 experience.  Further, universities and colleges could also be mandated to provide such instruction.  Throughout the chapter “Empty Pedestals” the editors have compiled short vignettes from various professionals and other stakeholders.  They offer a milieu of positions on the fate of Confederate monuments.  The chapter epitomizes the nature of the discussion around the myth of ‘The Lost Cause’ that has infected the minds of our uneducated populace, that somehow the Civil War in America was about anything other than slavery.  The myth that the cause of this conflict was states’ rights or individual freedom is absurd, prima facie.  The editor's note that “from the very beginning of the Civil War, southern leaders of the Confederacy were explicit about why they wanted to secede from the United States—they wanted to preserve slavery.”[9]  With more focused and mandated education and other programs, the United States is poised to assist in the maintenance and creative process for national monuments and appropriate statues.  In these ways, the Confederate Monuments reads as an apology, one about making connections, as historians are won't to do, with an otherwise disinterested and uneducated public.  The historical sciences could turn inward, and enlist the aid of government, to help change the page for many away from memory and towards a fact-based conceptualization of their still unique, fascinating, and historical selves.

The world has pressing problems to solve today, modern-day problems that include climate change, global inequality, and social technology.  The old-fashioned ideations about heritage and ‘The Lost Cause’ aren’t real problems for Americans today.  The arguments of sufferers from the ills of ‘The Lost Cause’ are canards – thinly veiled, recycled arguments that arise from those very modern problems that humanity faces today.  Instead of whining about heritage (memories), those that cling to the past could instead choose to help build a better future.  They could start by smashing their monuments and uploading videos of the process to YouTube, as proposed by Megan Kate Nelson, independent scholar and author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War, who contributes to Controversial Monuments writing that “the ruins of Confederate memorials in cities across the nation would suggest that while white supremacists have often made claims to power in American history, those who oppose them can, and will, fight back.”[10]

Bibliography

Allison, David B. Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Footnotes

[1] David B. Allison, Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

[2] Allison, 1.

[3] Allison, 217.

[4] Allison, 35

[5] Allison 36.

[6] Allison, 51.

[7] Allison, 107.

[8] Allison, 155

[9] Allison, 6.

[10] Allison, 108.