Statues are embodiment of brutality and bondage

Dear Editor:

As a proud former resident of Kingston and graduate of Kingston High School, I write in response to Gene Gruner’s letter about statue removal (“Letter: Removing statues won’t change history,” June 25, 2020).

I am a history professor at City College of San Francisco and teach Colonial and constitutional history. I am also a former editor of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King

Jr. Papers Project. Our country was built by our original native inhabitants (the Lenni Lenape in Ulster County), the British, Dutch, French and Spanish original settlers, and slave labor.

I honor all of those roots in my classroom. I also pay tribute to the war and the constitutional amendments that ended slavery and rose us all up to citizenship, equal protection under law, the right to due process, and the dream of the vote.

My grandmother cast her first vote in Kingston as a proud Republican in 1920. Confederate statues were installed to deny those amendments existed and to perpetuate the myth that ex-slaves’s lives were still inferior, even undesirable. Taking down these statues remedies that nonsense and dastardly untruth.

Martin Luther King’s promissory note remains uncashed and undelivered. Frederick Douglass maintained about independence, “This is your Fourth of July, not mine.” Black poet Langston Hughes wrote, “America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath/ America will be!”

Yes, we can still be. Take down these distressing embodiments of brutality and bondage.

Susan Englander San Francisco, Calif.