Moving Confederate monuments does not erase their history
Naomi Carrier is no fan of the Spirit of the Confederacy monument in Sam Houston Park.
“What those Confederate monuments represent is an assumption that the Confederacy was a winner, that they were not to be messed with,” said Carrier, the CEO of the Texas Center for African American Living History.
She noted Friday that the monument, like many of its ilk, was built in the 20th century — after the Civil War, after Reconstruction — as an attempt to valorize the so-called “Lost Cause” and ignore the role of slavery in the conflict.
That’s not to say Carrier wants to see such monuments mothballed, toppled, or smashed to rubble. Quite the opposite.
“I want them to stand because I want them to be used to tell the story of our oppression,” she said.
And the Spirit of the Confederacy monument will stand, albeit in a different place — one where it will be given historical context.
Mayor Sylvester Turner on Thursday announced that by June 19 — Juneteenth — the monument will be relocated to the Houston Museum of African American Culture. The city’s other Confederate monument, a statue of Confederate artillery officer Richard “Dick” Dowling, is also scheduled for removal this week. Turner wants it transported to the Sabine Pass Battleground State Historic Site, in Port Arthur.
The announcement might seem like an abrupt reaction to current events. In reality, the planned removal of Houston’s Confederate monuments is the result of a deliberative process that yielded well-considered recommendations from a panel of experts. Turner commissioned a task force on the city’s Confederate monuments in 2017, after a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., sparked nationwide discussions. Task force members recommended in March 2018 that the two monuments not be located on public property — but also
that they not be destroyed.
The result is one that Carrier, for example, considers appropriate.
“I can go over there and teach people about ‘em,” she said.
Other cities should take note.
The killing of George Floyd, the African-American man raised in Houston, at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis has led to soul-searching into what many believe is the systemic racism that continues to characterize American life.
Many progressives have called for the removal of hundreds of Confederate monuments that still speckle the South, as well as stripping the names of Confederate leaders from military installations, including Texas’ Fort Hood.
Needless to say, President Donald Trump — who famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” after clashes between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville in 2017 — disapproves of renaming military installations.
“THOSE THAT DENY THEIR HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!” Trump tweeted, somewhat menacingly, on Thursday.
A slightly more nuanced version of this argument came from U.S. Sen John Cornyn, who likened removing monuments and renaming bases to tearing pages out of a history book.
“There’s no question that America was an imperfect union when we were founded. We obviously betrayed our own ideals by treating African Americans as less than fully human and we’ve been paying for that original sin ever since then,” Cornyn told reporters on a conference call. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes as a race, a human race and as an American people, but I think we need to learn from those and not try to ignore them or erase them.”
“What happens next?” he wondered. “Then somebody says you can’t teach about the Civil War or slavery in your textbooks.”
That concern seems far-fetched. What Cornyn may not realize — and what Trump would probably refuse to acknowledge — is that the advocates for change want their fellow Americans to know more about history, not less.
The Spirit of the Confederacy monument, for example, was erected in 1908 by the Robert E. Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It’s dedicated, euphemistically, to “all heroes of the South who fought for the Principles of States Rights.”
To relocate a monument like that to an African-American history museum isn’t analogous to tearing pages out of a history book, as Cornyn put it. It’s more like removing a self-published screed from the shelves of a library where it didn’t belong in the first place.
Americans on both sides of the aisle can see that.
This week, for example, a GOP-led Senate panel approved a plan by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to remove the names of Confederate leaders from military installations and other assets. And here in Texas, the Republican-led Tarrant County Commissioners Court voted to remove a marker dedicated to Confederate veterans from the courthouse grounds.
In similar vein, Texas recently became one of just a handful of states to offer an African-American studies course as an elective for high school students. The Republican-led State Board of Education unanimously approved the change in April.
“It’s something I wish I could have taken when I was young,” said board member Aicha Davis, a Democrat from Dallas, at the time.
Although Trump is attempting to turn the debate over Confederate monuments into an election-year wedge issue, the fact is that Republicans are capable of working with Democrats to tell a fuller and more accurate story about our history, even its most painful parts.