Divided over statues
Why so many figures and names are under scrutiny
The statue of a young man, gun at his side, has sat outside the Harrison County Courthouse in Marshall, Texas, since 1905. Its main inscription reads “Confederate.”
That’s enough to warrant its removal, says Demetria McFarland, a fifth grade teacher who has started a petition to that end.
“That statue, in a public place, doesn’t represent my values as a Black woman, it represents slavery and the torture my ancestors went through,” says McFarland, founder of Marshall Against Violence. “Other cities are taking down these symbols of racial divide, so why not also here in our little east Texas town?”
Many are asking the same question. History is on review as the 21st century’s latest civil rights movement catches fire, smoldering embers fanned by the death in police hands of George Floyd on Memorial Day. From California to Washington, D.C., grassroots efforts such as McFarland’s are urging citizens and lawmakers to reject historical figures
whose backstories reveal views or deeds that insult millions of Americans.
In past weeks, Mississippi passed a bill to create a state flag without the Confederate battle emblem. In New Jersey, Princeton University took former President Woodrow Wilson’s name off a college, citing his racist views. In New Mexico, officials took down a statue of Diego de Vargas, a Spanish conquistador who brutalized Native Americans.
Countless other petitions and protests are calling for similar statue removals and name changes in an effort to at least spark a dialogue about who deserves honoring.
On Friday, President Donald Trump addressed the issue during an appearance at Mount Rushmore, where he condemned efforts to reevaluate the appropriateness of historical tributes and charged that children are being taught to “believe the men and women who built (this country) were not heroes but villains.” Activists and Native leaders have called for the removal of the South Dakota monument.
“There’s no question that all movements require conversation and dialogue to truly move ahead,” says Melina Abdullah, a founding member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. “But what doesn’t require conversation is knowing things shouldn’t be named after people who dehumanized other people.”
It is hard to know how far this latest drive to rename landmarks will get. Almost every historical figure could be worthy of deeper review.
Consider Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian seafarer who gave his name to America. Some historians contend Vespucci exaggerated his claims, partnered in his enterprise with a man made rich from the slave trade, and stole the limelight from his contemporary, Christopher Columbus – whose own statues have been targeted because of his murderous treatment of Indigenous people.
Renaming is a powerful way to announce that change has arrived. And for many people of color, the time has come to stop ignoring symbols of oppression, says Elena Ortiz, chair of the Santa Fe Freedom Council of The Red Nation, a New Mexico-based group focused on the liberation of indigenous peoples.
“The great reckoning is here,” says Ortiz, whose group successfully pushed to remove statues of Juan de Oñate, a 16th century Spanish conquistador who raped Pueblo women and stole from enslaved tribal communities. “It’s time to fan the flames.”
She says it is not appropriate to honor people such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and explorer Kit Carson.
“Jefferson was a slave holder, Jackson believed the only good Indian is a dead Indian and Carson was an Indian murderer,” she says. “When people ask do we need to rename Carson City, Nevada, the answer is yes.”
In Denver, school board member Tay Anderson has joined other activists pushing to rename schools named after people such as Jefferson and George Washington, “who may have been founding fathers but they didn’t stand up to racism and slavery, so they were complicit.”
In St. Louis, Moji Sidiqi, executive director of the Regional Muslim Action Network, has joined forces with an Israeli restaurant owner to start a petition to not only remove a statue of Louis IX of France, the city’s namesake, but also to rename the city itself.
“History tells us King Louis was a Christian zealot who was an Islamophobe and anti-Semite” in 13th century France, says Sidiqi. “We don’t want to see the statue broken or trashed, but it doesn’t need to be in a public place where Muslims and Jews and African Americans go to make memories with their families.”
For Sidiqi, the current push to rename things isn’t about erasing history but rather choosing what is worthy of celebration.
“Are we supposed to keep pretending our beautiful nation doesn’t have symbols of anti-inclusion and slavery everywhere?” she says. “We’re trying to take away symbols of hate and replace them with symbols of love and community.”
The movement also includes a growing call to rename mountains, parks and other destinations, says Jennifer Runyon, a research staffer at the Board on Geographic Names in Washington, D.C. “We’ve gotten a half a dozen proposals related to racial issues lately, requests to change names that may have ‘squaw’ or ‘negro’ or ‘digger,’ which is offensive to some Native Americans,” she says.
One example of such change, years in the making, is in California. Instead of Jeff Davis Peak near Lake Tahoe being a tribute to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, it will be called Da-ek Dow Go-et Mountain, Washoe for “saddle between two mountains.”
“We are open to all petitions,” Runyon says. “All we ask is that you have a good and relevant name ready that speaks to what people in the community care about.”
Some people, however, worry that by focusing intently on the removal of physical objects or name changes, true societal shifts may remain elusive.
“We strongly support the removal of statues that celebrate histories of genocide and aggression against Native people, but we have to ensure that this doesn’t gloss over the real history of this continent,” says Michael Roberts, president of the First Nations Development Institute, a Longmont, Colorado, organization focused on the economic empowerment of Native Americans.
“These activities are only a first step toward true healing, justice and reconciliation between Native people and the larger society,” he says.
Historian Douglas Brinkley says in the past, presidents have made efforts to “expand the national narrative” on matters of race and equality, citing President Barack Obama’s executive orders on New York City’s Stonewall National Monument, which celebrates the fight for LGBTQ rights, and the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio, spotlighting African Americans who served in the military.
“That was the right thing to do then, and the right thing to do now is de-Confederatize America,” says Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University in Houston. “People aren’t in the mood for compromising.”
Efforts to remove statues or rename places have drawn emotional reactions as some balk at what they see as the erasure of history.
In Orange County, south of Los Angeles, Democrats are pushing to rename John Wayne Airport because of racist statements made by the actor in a 1971 magazine interview. Wayne was quoted in Playboy as saying, “I believe in white supremacy.”
A Los Angeles Times editorial supporting the name change argues that it will help the county – a conservative stronghold in a largely Democratic state – confront its racist past. Wayne’s son, Ethan Wayne, 58, issued a statement strongly denying his father was a racist.
And in St. Louis, the local Roman Catholic Archdiocese issued a statement opposing efforts to change the name of the city. In siding with counterprotesters who also do not want the Louis IX statue removed or city renamed, the Archdiocese highlighted Louis’ charity toward the poor, adding that “we should not seek to erase history, but recognize and learn from it, while working to create new opportunities for our brothers and sisters.”
Scholars say the claim that taking away a statue or renaming a street erases history is questionable.
“We make a mistake saying memorials are about history,” says Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, which promotes the cross-cultural exchange of ideas. “We don’t memorialize all our history, we pick and choose to remember men and women who live by the values we share.”
Neiman said the debates over which statues, streets and schools should be renamed should remain local, allowing community members to decide what gets scrapped, what finds its way to a museum with context and what perhaps gets turned into an art project that changes the meaning of the offending symbol.
“It’s not about history,” she says. “It’s about values.”
That was the approach South African leaders took in trying to reconcile that country’s racist past. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by President Nelson Mandela in 1996, aimed to help Black and white South Africans come to grips with the country’s apartheid past while speeding up a transition to democracy.
While that process did not involve much statue and location renaming beyond the removal of tributes to the architect of apartheid, it did highlight the impact of having government officials be part of the reckoning, says Ronald Slye, a law professor at Seattle University who was an adviser to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“One of the lessons to be taken from the TRC is in order for real change to come about, the push for change needs to be part of a broader process in society and there needs to be clear political support for it,” Slye says.
Slye says the size of the U.S. and its divided political makeup mean it is more likely that local movements aimed at renaming landmarks will precede changes at a national level. But the point isn’t just to change a name, he says.
“In the end, it’s easy to change a name of a street or take down some monuments and say, ‘Now we’re fine,’ ” he says. “But it’s not the street that’s the problem; it’s broader.”