Monuments and statues are falling — what comes next?
I almost think the pedestals just need to be left there [empty]. I think it’s quite beautiful.
Reverend Rob W Lee, descendant of Confederate General Robert E Lee
The dusty town of Tierra Amarilla perches in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Here, five decades ago, this poor northern New Mexico community experienced one of the most violent clashes in civil-rights history when armed Mexican-American ranchers raided a courthouse in a dispute over land grants. It shocked the nation and helped trigger the Chicano Movement. Today, there’s almost nothing in town to honour this historic moment, except for graffiti art on an abandoned petrol station and a sentence on a marker. There’s also almost no public art about the event anywhere. As monuments and statues fall across the United States, activists and towns are left wondering what to do with spaces that once honoured historic figures tied to Confederate generals and Spanish conquistadors. They also are debating how to remember civil-rights figures and events in areas where they have been forgotten. The opportunity to reimagine spaces has created a debate: what should the US now honour and why? Should anything go on those empty podiums at all? Some advocates say monuments to the late US Representative Barbara Jordan or Mexican-American civil-rights leader Dolores Huerta should replace the fallen statues. Others say World War II Marine Sergeant Miguel Trujillo snr, a member of the Isleta Pueblo who sued to get Native Americans the right to vote in New Mexico, or former slaveturned-abolitionist Olaudah Equiano should have monuments in their honour. “I almost think the pedestals just need to be left there [empty],” said Reverend Rob W Lee, a senior pastor of Unifour Church in Newton, North Carolina, and a descendant of Confederate General Robert E Lee. Lee sees the toppling of Confederate statues with Black Lives Matter graffiti as a move to reclaim black lives from white supremacy: “I think it’s quite beautiful.” Brett Chapman, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, attorney and descendant of Standing Bear, a Ponca chief and civil-rights leader, said he’d like to see the fallen statues replaced by uncelebrated social-justice advocates. “There are so many people we can honour that will show how we’ve overcome oppression,” Chapman said. Last week, protesters in Baltimore pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbour. That followed other episodes of Confederate and Spanish colonial statues being toppled last month by demonstrators or after officials ordered their removal. It’s also led to statues of Presidents George Washington and Ulysses S Grant being vandalised. That has given some supporters of anti-racism protests pause. Cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams, the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, said he understood the need to remove Confederate monuments but was uncomfortable with the vandalism of statues honouring the Founding Fathers and American Union Civil War figures. “Mobs in the street tearing down Ulysses S Grant statues is a really chilling sight,” Williams said. “We should understand the context. But erasing these men from the public sphere seems like a bad road to go down, to me.” AP