Christine Flowers misses the point about Rizzo statue
To the Times:
I wanted to let go of “The Crusade to Erase,” Christine Flowers’ most recent distortion of fact and logic, but it wasn’t possible. There is just so much wrong in that one piece that it demands a response.
Flowers is suggesting that removal of a statue of Frank Rizzo on Thomas Paine Plaza (of all places) is somehow a destruction of history. It is not. Zenos Frudakis, the creator of the statue, expressed his relief that it came down, noting that statues are “just symbols.” Actual history resides in documents from the past, including people’s words and descriptions of their actions. That is the real stuff of the past, and no one is suggesting that the historical records of Frank Rizzo’s career be destroyed.
It is the total disconnect between Rizzo’s disgraceful record and a celebratory, hero-like bronze image that led to the statue’s removal. It was the city government’s agreement with protesters that the statue symbolized Philadelphia’s hypocrisy: Calling itself the city of brotherly love and then celebrating a man who was anything but loving toward any brothers who did not agree with him.
Christine Flowers tried to use George Orwell’s words against the protesters, but by inviting us to think about Orwell and his book 1984, Flowers actually reminds us that Rizzo was precisely the sort of unlawful autocrat who Orwell was warning against.
In June, 1973, the United States District Court in Pennsylvania ruled, in Farber v. Rizzo, that Philadelphia’s
mayor had willfully ignored a legal restraining order and ignored the Constitutional right to free speech and free assembly when he set police wielding truncheons on a crowd of citizens peacefully protesting the Vietnam War on, yes, Independence Mall. He wanted the space cleared because President Nixon, master practitioner of racial division, was making an appearance in Rizzo’s town. Sound familiar? Of course it does. President Trump denied in an interview with FOX News that he was quoting a racist southern sheriff in saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Oh, no, he told the interviewer; he was quoting Mayor Rizzo, who he admires as a “tough” leader.
Flowers offered not one scintilla of actual historical evidence that Rizzo was a mayor who helped make Philadelphia a great city. She claims the statue should stand because Rizzo “was the only Italian Catholic to hold the most important seat in municipal politics.” Removal of the statue was, she says, an “implicit attack on my mother’s heritage.” Really? Haven’t Italian Americans spent decades trying to erase the stereotype of Italians as violent? You really want to wrap your arms around a mayor who, literally, packed a truncheon in his tuxedo cummberbund, just to show how tough he was? That’s the guy whose bronze body and Mussolini-style raised arm you want as the symbol of Italian American history? Please, Ms. Flowers, look deeper into that history.
Italian-American politicians were not always hostile to black people. Indeed, Italians were not always Italians. In the early decades of the 20th century, when shared poverty often meant shared neighborhoods, African Americans lived next to immigrants who thought of themselves as Sicilian, Lombardi, Tuscani - not as “Italians.” These peoples from the factionalized region called Italy were mistreated in those years of massive emigration to the U.S. They were called awful names, accused of importing organized crime - the muchfeared, mythical “Black Hand” – and, most importantly, were distrusted for their darker skin.
Some racist leaders asked if people from Italy were really white. The practical answer was: Yes. They were white because they always had the right to vote, could marry any white person they wanted to marry, were not segregated from other whites in the military, and could move to a white, middle-class neighborhood if they had the money. In that way, Italians were able to follow a different path than blacks, a path out of poverty and segregation. Ironically, it was the need to coalesce to resist prejudice that caused immigrants’ children to think of themselves as one ethnicity: Italian.
Still, Italian’s racial equality was sufficiently in doubt that a very strict quota on Italian immigration was part of the deeply racist legislation of 1924 which sought to protect America for white people. Here’s where Italian American political history – not the culture – took a strategic turn toward aligning with white supremacy. During the decades when Italian Americans had to face the racial insult of being virtually excluded as immigrants, their political leaders had a choice to make: Continue to be supporters of blacks at the workplace and in public life or demonstrate their whiteness by joining the racist mainstream? They chose the latter, time and again, in city after city. In neighborhoods, labor unions, and political organizations Italian Americans assured their status as white people by aligning with whiteness. When Frank Rizzo told his supporters to “vote white,” that call carried a long historical tail of anger that Italians’ whiteness was ever questioned in immigration law.
No, Ms. Flowers, taking down Frank Rizzo’s statue is not an act of erasing “our institutional history.” No one is throwing out the records of Rizzo’s administration or the books (celebratory and critical) that have been written about him. Taking down the statue means facing history and deciding that Philadelphia, home of the Declaration of Independence, the City of Brotherly Love, does not want to celebrate, on Thomas Paine Plaza, a man who violated the principles put forth by William Penn, Thomas Paine, and so many historical figures in our Museum of the American Revolution.
As for forcing a private business owner to paint over the mural of Rizzo – yes, you have a point there. Attacking private property is not consistent with our principles of free speech. Maybe the whole column should have focused on that? But suggesting you might start a campaign to remove the Paul Robeson mural proves you are missing the whole point: This is not about removing images of those we disagree with. It is about removing celebrations of men who have used force and violence to enslave black people and threaten Americans’ right to free speech and free assembly.