More states taking down statues

‘Remembering and commemorating aren’t the same,’ student says

DETROIT — A nearly 80-year-old statue depicting a European settler with a weapon in his hand towering over a Native American that some say celebrates white supremacy has been dismantled by crews in southwestern Michigan’s Kalamazoo.

And at the University of Michigan, regents have voted to strip a former school president’s name from a campus science building because he lent his scientific expertise to groups in favor of selective reproduction, also known as eugenics.

Vestiges of racism and intolerance are slowly being moved and removed in Michigan and other northern states. In some cases, the efforts are being led by students and faculty at prestigious universities, community leaders and elected officials taking harder looks at their history and potentially divisive issues while being spurred by more widespread efforts in the South.

“I think it’s very much in line with the things we’re seeing happen across the country,” said Josh Hasler, a recent University of Michigan graduate.

Little was the school’s president from 1925 to 1929. He supported sterilization of what eugenics referred to as the “unfit” and also backed immigration restrictions and laws against the mixing of racial groups, including marriage. He was scientific director of a tobacco research advisory board in the 1950s and was accused of sowing doubt about smoking and cancer.

“No one is trying to erase history,” Hasler said. “It goes to show that remembering and commemorating aren’t the same thing.”

Only time will tell if calls to remove monuments will continue to grow, according to Paul Brest, professor emeritus and former law school dean at Stanford University.

“I think it has more to do with a moment in history when there is a lot of consciousness of people’s conduct … a period where people are socially conscious about this behavior in the past,” Brest said. “The Civil War monuments are a particular example of that.

“The things that may seem innocuous today may — 100 years from now — seem like bad deeds. It calls for a degree of caution.”

Brest chaired a committee that developed principles and procedures for renaming buildings at the northern California school. The committee was put together after some students and faculty demanded that Junipero Serra’s name be removed from campus buildings and signage. Serra was the Roman Catholic founder of nine California missions, and many of the missions were built on land native to the Ohlone Indians.

Stanford says it will consider renaming buildings, streets, monuments, endowed positions and prizes when there is strong evidence that retaining the name is inconsistent with the university’s integrity or is harmful to its research and teaching missions and inclusiveness.