Monuments are coming down: Whom should we memorialize, and why?
Desert Sage column
Algernon D'Ammassa
This week there is speculation that the Union is finally ready to declare victory in the Civil War.
This week, 155 years after Jefferson Davis was captured at Irwinville, a statue commemorating him was knocked down in Virginia Wednesday night.
More monuments around the country are coming down as people continue to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a long list of people of color who have died violently in police custody or languishing in our prisons.
Meanwhile, New Mexicans are once again questioning the merits of all our monuments to Spanish conquistadors, and in El Paso a prominent statue of Don Juan de Oñate was vandalized. Christopher Columbus statues were beheaded and knocked down, too, prompting Gov. Andrew Cuomo to defend Columbus as a symbol of "the Italian-American contribution to New York."
It is sometimes protested that criticism and actions taken against monuments represent "presentism," an unfair projection of contemporary opinion on figures of the past and perhaps a distortion of history; but monuments are not neutral expressions of disinterested fact.
Arguments about displaying the familiar confederate battle flag and monuments to the short-lived Confederate States of America are not new.
An overwhelming majority of these monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era, as well as the incorporation of the battle flag into state flags in the latter 20th century, with civil rights for Black people in contention. One could make a reasonable argument that these were, in essence, monuments to a failed Reconstruction; and yet, generations later, there might be a tipping point.
The Marines, followed by the Navy, banned displays of the battle flag, and then NASCAR did it. The Army is expected to make a decision soon.
And retired Army General David Petraeus wrote an essay for The Atlanticarguing that the names of confederate leaders should be stripped from U.S. military installations. I confess I learned only from his essay that 10 U.S. Army bases are named after officers who fought against the United States in the Civil War.
Fort Bragg, named for a confederate general — and a poor one, to boot. Fort Benning, named for another confederate general. Fort Polk, named for an Episcopalian bishop who disrobed to fight for the confederacy. Fort Gordon, named for still another confederate general and later a U.S. senator, who also may have been a higher-up in the Ku Klux Klan — though he denied that.
Somehow I was ignorant of this; and to read Petraeus' piece, it sounds like a lot of people on active duty don't know it, either.
Moreover, these are not merely figures who fought against the United States: They fought on behalf of something. They were a part of white settler culture that fought hard for slavery and white supremacy. We defeated their fledgling republic but not their founding idea that all people are not created equal.
Monuments, staring down at us from pedestals, are fair game for re-evaluation. Let us talk openly about whom to memorialize and why. We may erect statues and name schools after people in one century who don't seem worth honoring in a later century.
We may conclude for our time that the neglected contributions of indigenous ancestors, men and women, of those who have been pushed to the margins of history, and the maintenance of white supremacy are due for correction without any loss to history.
The path beyond is long and challenging, but how exhilarating it would be to turn this corner and begin to place racist ideology and how it functions at the front of American conversation; and to see it led by people of color and local communities, rather than political saviors.
Desert Sage welcomes responses via adammassa@lcsun-news.com. Find him on Twitter at @AlgernonWrites.
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