The purpose it serves
The debate over Confederate monuments cries out for the thoughtful public dialogue that those grotesquely un-American neo-Nazis defiled Saturday in Charlottesville.
A valued reader points me to comments three months ago by Condoleezza Rice—black and Southern-born. The former secretary of state said in answer to a question that we shouldn’t remove monuments or change names to try to “sanitize history.” She said she believed in “keeping your history before you.”
“We as a people have thankfully moved on,” she said. “You don’t have to honor the purpose of the people on the wrong side of history. But you better be able to remind people.” Two points on that:
(1) People clearly haven’t moved on. Thugs were very much in the present Saturday in Charlottesville, celebrating the Confederacy as if partying in 1860. Blacks who object to driving on a Confederate Boulevard or happening upon a Rebel general’s statue in their town’s public square think they could better move on if their street names and public spaces would please move on.
(2) Sanitizing history is bad and we mustn’t do it. But sanitizing lies in the eye of the beholder. Taking down a Rebel-glorifying statue of Robert E. Lee strikes some as sanitizing history. But erecting the statue and leaving it up—as if to say that leading a treasonous war in advancement of human bondage is something to be exalted—strikes others as sanitizing history. Either way, I know of no serious person who wants to take the Civil War out of American history textbooks or rewrite its account in a glossed-over way.
At the core of the debate is the purpose of a monument. Is it to remember and remind? Or is it to honor and celebrate?
The dictionary says a monument is for remembering. And words matter. Words mean what words mean. Yet I can’t help but wonder. Your dad’s cemetery monument— is it for remembering or does it also contain an inscription designed to honor and celebrate?
Do the John Deering statues of the Little Rock Nine on our state Capitol grounds invite us merely to remember the Little Rock Central High School crisis of 1957? Or do they also invite us to honor and celebrate those brave young people?
For that matter, does Jason Rapert merely want us to remember the Ten Commandments? Or does he want us to honor, celebrate—and obey—them?
The monument that people are working on for Levon Helm—is that merely for remembering the night they drove old Dixie down, or is it also for celebrating a hell of a song?
Is a statue of Robert E. Lee in the public square simply a commemoration of the Civil War that encourages schoolchildren to learn more about the brutal conflict and advises adults to keep it ever in mind? Or does it rather seriously imply that this is a man to be admired in his cause—a war against the United States to try to save the Southern institution of enslavement of black people, who, for that reason, may not be in much of an admiring mood?
For the record: These Civil War monuments were erected in the South from the 1880s through the early 1900s, mainly, and thus recall a period of Jim Crow laws and lynching at least as much as they recall the Civil War.
My valued reader and friend argues on Condoleezza’s side that we need to keep these statues in place to remember how horrible we were and might be again if we don’t remember.
But does anyone need to look upon a monument in the public square of Gen. William Westmoreland to remember that Vietnam was a mistake we shouldn’t dare repeat? And aren’t we capable of retaining a feeling of shame for our treatment of Native Americans without forcing them to live on their reservations with a statue of some general in the Indian War?
Those neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists and antiSemitic bigots rampaging in Charlottesville on Saturday ostensibly in defense of the Lee statue seemed to want to preserve the monument not as a reminder of what never to do again, but for fuel to wage war all over again.
I don’t relish taking all these statues out of the public square. I don’t trust that the dialogue will be worthy of the issue. I fear the spreading of the cancer that first showed up in Charlottesville.
But I do want to challenge respectfully what Condoleezza Rice said. And I wish to invite you to think seriously on these things. Challenge me if you feel obliged—respectfully, if possible, though, obviously, respectful disagreement is a steep personal challenge these days.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.