An overdue reckoning on Confederate icons

The first bill Sen. Steve Glazer, DOrinda, introduced in the State Capitol would have forced Fort Bragg, named for a Confederate general, to find another name. He took a lot of heat in that Mendocino County town for legislation that ultimately was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015.

“At the time they thought it was a crazy idea,” Glazer said Wednesday.

But the question of whether a town with no meaningful connection with Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general who enslaved 105 human beings on his Louisiana plantation before commanding the rebel army in Tennessee during the Civil War, is back in a big way with the national reckoning on race that followed the horrific killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Monuments to the Confederacy across the South are being defaced and toppled. Paintings and statues of southerners on the wrong side of this nation’s history are being targeted for removal from the U.S. Capitol. Ten Army bases bearing the names of rebel generals are being considered for rebranding.

The coastal town of 7,300 might seem an unlikely outpost in this intensifying national debate about shredding lingering tributes to the Confederacy. Yet on Monday, the Fort Bragg City Council is scheduled to hold what is expected to be a spirited public hearing that could lead to a November ballot measure.

“I’m happy that they’re reconsidering it,” Glazer said, adding that a community vote was “a better path forward” than a state diktat.

So what should be the guiding principle in this decision?

In my view, it’s all about context. What was the original rationale for a place name, artwork or monument commemorating a Confederate leader or the Lost Cause? Is there a mitigating context that makes it defensible against the likelihood that it would be offensive or even threatening to some people?

In Fort Bragg, it is the absence of local context that strengthens the case for renaming. The naming decision was made in 1857 by Horatio Gates Gibson, a lieutenant at the Presidio, in establishing a military post to enforce order on the nearby Mendocino Indian Reservation. Bragg had been Gibson’s former com

manding officer. Bragg proved to be a lousy rebel general, known for wantonly shooting his own soldiers and losing battles, and ultimately resigning his post halfway through the Civil War. A 2016 biography of Bragg was subtitled: “The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy.” Your town deserves better, Fort Bragg. The Confederate memorials across the South, by contrast, are not there by happenstance.

“I think a lot about when most of the memorials and monuments were created ... as part of a resurgence of white supremacy,” said Candice Harrison, director of African American Studies at the University of San Francisco.

Indeed, a study of Confederate statues and monuments by the Southern Poverty Law Center found two distinct periods of monument expansion that coincided with rising racial tensions: the early 1900s, as Jim Crow laws were being enacted to deprive African American rights; and the 1950s and 1960s, as the Civil Rights movement came to the fore.

They were, in effect, intimidating symbols of white control.

I recall being struck by the massive scale and the pervasiveness of statues along Monument Avenue in my first visit to Richmond, Va., capital of the Confederacy, in the 1980s. It wasn’t until August 2017, after the notorious white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that pressure to remove the monuments started getting serious. The monument to Confederacy President Jefferson Davis was toppled during a recent protest after the Floyd killing, and the governor has ordered the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue, which has been a target of antiracism graffiti and artwork while the issue is being held up in court.

Similar scenes of defacing and toppling confederate monuments have been popping up throughout the South in recent weeks, reminiscent of the targeting of icons to oppressive dictators after a revolution. The lawful road to removal is daunting: There are more than 700 such monuments in the former Confederacy, and at least seven states have passed laws making it tougher to get rid of them. Yet it’s long overdue.

USF’s Harrison had an interesting observation: Where are the monuments to the bravery of the honorable freedom fighters of the South during slavery? She recalled a trip to the Caribbean and seeing a memorial to an enslaved black female rebel, pregnant, breaking from chains. She has never seen anything comparable in the United States.

“I’m an educator through and through,” Harrison said. “I always think about what it actually would be like to walk around and not have to see all these confederate memorials, but to see memorials of black folks holding guns, breaking their own chains.”

As for the 10 Army bases named after Confederate generals, President Trump has said he would not even consider it, tweeting that American heroes have been trained and deployed on “these hallowed grounds” and history “will not be tampered with.” But history cannot be ignored. These Confederate generals went to battle with American heroes in defense of the indefensible — the enslavement of Americans.

One of the arguments against the movement to change names and remove monuments to figures of dishonor is: Where will it end? Does this necessarily lead to the attack on all things Washington and Jefferson because of their slaveholder past? No, again, context is everything. Their human failings are part of history, but so is their noble work as founding fathers of the republic.

Regrettably, Friday’s toppling of the Golden Gate Park statue of Ulysses S. Grant, an erstwhile slave owneer who led the Union Army in the Civil War and became the 18th U.S. president, was they type of mindless mob action that undermines the serious issue of reconsidering the message of public memorials.

Context was also one of the reasons our editorial board supported the preservation of the murals at San Francisco’s George Washington High portraying the first president with slaves. The 1,600squarefoot “Life of Washington” mural was progressive artist Victor Arnautoff ’s 1930s reminder of the racism that has pervaded American history. Unlike the Confederate memorials, it wasn’t about airbrushing history or pushing white supremacy. It was about confronting and condemning the reality of it. The murals deserve to stay.

Another argument against change, one that is now arising in Fort Bragg, is the cost of rebranding.

Sen. Glazer has a cheapandeasy solution.

“Get rid of one g,” he suggested, perhaps with tongue only partly in cheek.

Fort Brag. It has a ring to it.

John Diaz is The Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com