Keep them there
Let Foster and ‘Uncle Ned’ remain in public view
From the sculpture of George Washington and the Seneca leader Guyasuta on Grandview Avenue overlooking the city to the eagle-topped columns on the Boulevard of the Allies at Grant Street, Pittsburghers have been fortunate to live amid great public art. The sculpture of Stephen Collins Foster in Oakland is part of that rich tradition and should stay where it is, despite the controversy over the figure of a black man sitting at the songwriter’s feet.
Though questions about the sculpture have percolated on and off for years, the controversy brewing now is an extension of the battles being waged in the South over statues of Confederate leaders, such as that of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Foster was no Confederate leader meriting 21st-century opprobrium. He was no saint, either. He was a product of his time.
Deane Root, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for American Music, described him as the “first songwriter to put enslaved people into his songs — texts that made them much less a caricature.” But Foster’s songs contained language now universally regarded as racist, and in a 2014 piece about the songwriter in The New Yorker, Michael Friedman noted that the second verse of “Oh, Susanna” is so offensive that it simply isn’t sung anymore.
All of this may be troubling to Pittsburghers’ sensibilities, but the black banjo player at Foster’s feet is the bigger lightning rod that has some calling for the statue’s removal from its prominent location. The black figure is believed to be “Old Uncle Ned,” the title and subject of a Foster song. The song combined the 19th century’s vernacular references to blacks with the humanizing qualities Mr. Root mentioned. To some, the banjo player is a metaphor for the racial injustice still plaguing the nation.
A Pitt task force and the city Art Commission are poised to act on the sculpture’s future. So far, nearly 1,300 people have signed an online petition demanding the statue’s relocation. Support for moving it also has come from Mr. Root and other members of Pitt’s Music Department; Jo Ellen Parker, president and CEO of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh; and Elena Foster Dryden, Foster’s great-great-niece. Others, including Pitt history professor Laurence Glasco, a prominent scholar of Pittsburgh’s African-American history, have defended the statue.
Of course, Foster, who died in 1864, is not responsible for the way he was depicted in a statue dedicated in 1900. But that is not the only reason that the clamor to move the statue is misplaced. History must be confronted, unpacked and understood. It cannot be evaded by moving its artifacts to out-of-the-way locations. Relocating a statue might make us feel good, but it isn’t good for us.
Prominently displayed sculptures like the one of Foster serve as reminders of the nation’s mistreatment of blacks and other minorities — a troubling record that should remain in the forefront of the public consciousness. The Foster sculpture in recent weeks has served one of the most important purposes of art, provoking hard questions, debate and discussion about the culture that created it.
It has made people angry. We should be angry, not only about slavery and Jim Crow in the South but also about discrimination in the North before and after the Civil War and about the disparities that continue to disadvantage people of color in this country.
Rather than remove the sculpture, let groups protest in front of it, just as they have the statue of Christopher Columbus in Schenley Park. Better, raise a companion statue to the black Pittsburgh abolitionist and journalist Martin Delany. America needs a better understanding of history and more expression, not less. If the sculpture stays where it is, Foster and Ned will keep speaking to us, and that would be a very good thing.