Stop calling it ‘history’ — it’s a monument
Arkansas passed an ordinance of secession from the Union on May 6,
1861. The convention stated its primary reason for secession was the Union’s “hostility towards the institution of African slav- ery.” The state was late to the game. The Confederacy had already begun its formation in December, about a month after Lincoln was elected, a month still before he would take office. You can look it up at ArkansasCivilWar150. com. You can look it up on Wikipedia, though you should vet the articles. You can look it up in your Arkansas history textbook, at the Civil War museums across the country, or at one of the many plaques that mark Civil War sites across the state. History lives there. History lives in textbooks, on websites, on the History channel, in the oral tradition.
Monuments commemorate history and, let’s face it, they rarely tell the whole truth. Monuments romanticize history. That is not to say that textbooks do not; of course they do. But we are much more apt to learn something real, something about what really happened from reading than we are from viewing monuments that were erected to commemorate the parts of history of which a culture is proud.
And herein lies the problem with the Confederate soldier statue that stands at Confederate Memorial Park in downtown Hot Springs. Its message is that our culture is proud of the war it fought to preserve racial slavery. The statue sends that message on behalf of all Arkansans to every person who visits Confederate Memorial Park. As a white man, I cannot imagine the discrimination experienced by people of color in this country, but I can be sure it hurts. I can be sure because I am listening to the protesters who have taken to the streets in all
50 states and in countries around the world. Some of those protests have turned to riots, and whether or not we like that, one can be sure that as Dr. King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s time for us to listen. It’s time for Hot Springs to listen.
A petition circulating social media asks for the removal of the statue, but the statue stands on private property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. While many have supported the removal of the statue, others argue that removing the statue would be to remove history. This argument ignores two basic truths. One is the fact that the Civil War was fought, that Arkansas seceded from the Union, that soldiers died on both sides can never be removed. It lives on in all the places I’ve mentioned. Secondly, it ignores the fact that cultures move and remove monuments often.
This month, in fact, on June 8, the city of Prague moved a monument dedicated to Marshall Ivan Stepanovic Konev, a Soviet General who led troops to liberate the Czechs from Nazi occupation, to a historical museum. The Soviets erected the monument in 1980 while occupying Prague. Now they want to dedicate the area to something they are proud of: Czech liberators.
Germany, with its infamous Nazi past, has no commemorations to the Nazi regime. Instead, the many monuments to Nazism have moved to museums and met other similar fates. We should take a lesson from Germany about how to move forward from a checkered past. We cannot count the institution of slavery as somehow “less worse” than the Holocaust. Both were shameful events built upon racial hatred. And yet, with all those monuments removed, you can bet the world, Germany included, has not forgotten about its Nazi era. You can look this up at The Philadelphia Inquirer, at The Atlantic.com, because history lives in newspapers and their websites.
Monuments are not history. Monuments are speech, symbolic speech. And because they are speech, we must consider their effect on the audience. The UDC may own Confederate Memorial Park, but make no mistake, the audience who visits Hot Springs believes it is the city of Hot Springs, nay, the state of Arkansas, who says “we are proud of our history of racial oppression; we are not listening to you.”
According to a June 9 The Sentinel-Record article by Cassidy Kendall, that very site, Confederate Memorial Park, is infamously known to be the site on which two black men, Will Norman and Gilbert Harris, were lynched in 1913 and 1922, respectively. The UDC began collecting funds for the statue in 1907, a short 40 years after the end of the Civil War, but finally erected it in 1934. It is fair to say that in 1934, there was a great amount of anti-black sentiment in the South.
One criticism of the movement to remove Confederate monuments is simply the question, “Why now? Why should we care about this statue now?” My reply is that since the statue seemed to be built amid a wave of anti-black emotion, it seems fitting it should be removed amid a wave of anti-racist emotion.
Hot Springs City Manager Bill Burrough said in an interview with The Sentinel-Record that he supports the removal of the statue. Burrough said in an email Monday that local attorney Steve Westerfield informed him that the United Daughters of the Confederacy “at this time do not feel a meeting would be productive.”
The UDC should remove the statue and place it in a museum or alternate location, where it is not in the face of the people who see it as a symbol of oppression. The city of Hot Springs should erect a placard — not a monument, a placard — telling the stories of the lynchings of Will Norman and Gilbert Harris on the sidewalks surrounding Confederate Memorial Park. Removing the monument is not erasing history; removing the monument is just asking history to admit its mistakes.