Not our heroes

Replace Capitol monuments to war

Awedding ring reveals marital status. A flag reveals nationality. A mascot reveals school affiliation. Symbols are both reflectors of our allegiance and shapers of our culture. They make concrete that which is abstract. Symbols matter.

If they did not matter, thousands of protesters (myself included) would not have chosen the steps of the state Capitol as the backdrop to their demonstrations over the past two weeks. The state Capitol is a metaphor for power. It is the central place our leaders gather to make, interpret, and enforce laws.

In this moment of change and as a member of the governor’s task force to address issues of systemic racial bias in policing, I find it necessary to also ask our great state to confront explicit racial oppression that persists in the form of monuments to the Confederacy. We must wrestle with our nation’s original sin of slavery.

If the state Capitol complex is a symbol for power, then what does the presence of not one but two Confederate monuments displayed prominently on its grounds implicitly say about who holds that power? It says to me, a black citizen, that this state is not and has never been fully mine.

But wait. Surely one could argue that having the monuments in plain view is a means of confronting our collective history and allowing it to serve as a lesson to never repeat such atrocities again. This argument seems valid on its surface. The decision of the state of Arkansas in 1861 to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy to fight for the continued enslavement of black Americans was a shameful one. This history should be remembered, not buried.

However, there is a line between memory and glorification. These statues cross that line. It is no more appropriate to glorify a Confederate soldier than it is to glorify a klansman. We would never place a statue of a man on a horse wearing a pointed white hood in our public square. We have collectively acknowledged that such symbols of racial hatred and white superiority are immoral. The continued reverence for the Confederacy is the ultimate badge of white dominance. The time has long come for us to acknowledge this truth, this treason.

These statues attempt to rewrite the narrative and distort history, to say either the Civil War was not fundamentally about slavery or that slavery itself was not so bad. Both would be a lie. Each Confederate state was a slaveholding state that built its economy on the backs of free black labor. And every day of slavery brought with it a form of trauma to those who were enslaved as does repeatedly seeing these modern-day reminders.

Where are the monuments to the black men and women who suffered untold deprivations and cruelty during slavery? Did not their struggle matter in the eyes of Arkansas? Do their Black Lives not matter?

Some might contend that these Confederate monuments make no such glorification of the “Lost Cause.” But the monuments indict themselves. Inscribed on the north side of the Confederate Soldiers Monument are the words: Our furled banner/wreathed with glory/and though conquered/we adore it … The

south side states: Arkansas remembers/the faithfulness/ of her sons/and commends/ their example/to future generations. We ought not adore or ask our children to model any individuals who owned other individuals. They are not our heroes.

A 12-foot bronze angel sits above the 8-foot bronze Confederate soldier. The message portrayed is that there was something righteous, angelic, and God-sanctioned about the fight of the Confederacy. Not so.

The strange irony is that the state Capitol itself was built in the very place where the state penitentiary once stood and was erected at the hands of those very prisoners. To add further insult, one of the monuments is in the line of sight of the monument to the Little Rock Nine — heroes whose actions are worthy of imitation.

It is important to remember the statues were not just erected with private dollars. The Arkansas General Assembly allocated funds for half of the $10,000 price tag for the Confederate Soldiers Monument in 1903. Historians have long documented that this post-war Jim Crowera push to commemorate the Confederacy was an attempt to remind the then-free black Americans of their once lowly place on the social ladder. Their construction and their meaning were an intentional act of white supremacy. Now, more than 100 years later we must be just as intentional and deliberate in dismantling these symbols.

A more appropriate place for the Confederate Soldiers Monument, Monument to Confederate Women, and others like them is in a museum where they can be placed in proper historical context. The citizens of Arkansas should compel legislators to replace them with monuments that honor those worthy of honor. Policy proposals like a duty to intervene and body cameras for officers and funding for mental health and substance-abuse first responders must be made in conjunction with symbolic change to lead us toward a better Arkansas.