research

Videos
Books
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)
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Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, but not required. Antiracists do not have to altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self interest of middle- and upper-income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor Blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latina/os to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free of racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latina/o racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas: all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves. (pg. 503)
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (UNC Press, 1989)
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The Civil War stands at the center of Southern history, and the mythology of it became part of the origin myth of a distinctive people. Southern whites were divided by the war, but afterwards politicians, ministers, writers, and other cultural leaders used the memory of the Lost Cause to construct an elaborate cult of the dead, dedicated to romantic nationalism, or in this case the regional remnants of a failed nationalism. White supremacy became another mythic foundation for the regional identity that had dominated the South’s public culture until recently. (pg. 3)
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Ben Robertson told a stunned audience at the College of Charleston in 1935 that they should go and plant a tree every time they thought about the Civil War since then at least some good would come from the southern obsession with memory. (pg. 106)
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The South represents what could be called a culture of remembrance, meaning not only that the public face of southern life borrows heavily from themes from the past (historical monuments, public symbols, historical tourism) but also that the values of southern life are deeply influenced by the values of commemorations and ancestral meaning. Those values themselves are constantly undergoing reinterpretation, as they are “re-remembered” by contemporary Southerners. (pg. 104)
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The belief that southerners have always embraced a natural conception of time, one dependent more on the putatively gentle rhythms of sun and season than on the clipped, relentless, and precise ticking of clock or watch, is among the most tenacious myths surrounding southern culture… clock time and natural time are not mutually exclusive. Times rooted in and guided by nature can be rigorous, pushing work to be done within a naturally defined timeframe… If there was a peculiarly southern dimension to time consciousness, it is found in the antebellum period because slavery shaped the ways that bond people and slave owners understood and applied time. (pg. 36)
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu (Viking, 2018)
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History by David W. Blight (Harvard U Press, 2009)
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Belknap, 2005)
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horowitz (Vintage, 2010)
Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina by Thomas Brown (UNC Press, 2015)
Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois (Harvard U Press, 2005)
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

Films
An Outrage: A Documentary Film about Lynching in the American South
Follow me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians
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The old work songs have disappeared from southern prisons, yet a rich musical culture endures. Picking up where folklorist Alan Lomax left off, this documentary visits three Louisiana prisons to explore the role of music in the lives of incarcerated men and women. Filmmaker and ethnomusicologist Ben Harbert captures compelling gospel, rap, and R&B performances in a variety of settings, while his interviews with inmate-musicians—some newcomers, some long-timers, some set for release—provide a glimpse into the psychological aspects of an individual’s prison experience. Most of the people Harbert speaks with reveal vulnerability and regret, along with a keen appreciation for the restorative powers of music. “I’ve been incarcerated for almost fifteen years for armed robbery,” says Consuela Thomas. “Forty-seven year sentence...Even if there is no radio, I can sing. That’s what keeps me...” (from the website, accessed 3-7-19)
America Divided (S2, E4): Whose History?
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Jussie Smollett travels to Tennessee to witness the growing movement to bring down Confederate monuments and commemorate the deaths of thousands of African-Americans lynched during decades of racial terror.
Podcasts
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Uncivil brings you stories that were left out of the official history of the Civil War, ransacks America's past, and takes on the history you grew up with. We bring you untold stories about resistance, covert operations, corruption, mutiny, counterfeiting, antebellum drones, and so much more. And we connect these forgotten struggles to the political battlefield we’re living on right now. The story of the Civil War — the story of slavery, confederate monuments, racism — is the story of America. (from the website, accessed 2-18-19)
- [John Biewen:] And to come back to the big theme of the project: whiteness. There's a tendency to think that human beings looked around at some point in the distant past and said, well, let's see, there's some of us who look this way and then those people over there look that other way, and those people over there look that other way, so I'll just describe us as, you know, black, white, yellow, red. But this history on this continent shows something so different, which is that it was constructed with very specific purposes in mind, lines drawn around the definition. And it really alters how you see the meaning of black and white, doesn't it? [Chenjerai Kumanyika:] And I've got to say, there’s kind of like good news and bad news on that note, you know. The good news is, it really, when you think of this thing called whiteness, there's not anything genetic that you really share with folks that's different from what we all share with each other. So there's a message in here about our connectedness. But the bad news is that, in a way, the effort to get people to come together under the banner of whiteness has sort of always been about power and exploitation. So I don't know what that means about trying to salvage the idea of like good whiteness. You know, that's something that you've got to wrestle with. You know, when was whiteness good? It’s kind of like, when was America great? I mean, it seems like the whole project was related to exploitation. And so, if you identify that way, yeah. I don't envy you in terms of having to try to think about what that means. (from Seeing White, Part 3)

Articles / Op-eds
We Are the Original Southerners by Dr. Melinda Maynor Lowery (New York Times, 5-22-18)
I've studied the history of Confederate memorials. Here's what to do about them. (Vox, 8-18-17)
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"Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition. Most Confederate monuments were, in short, the result of private groups colonizing public space."
What I learned from my fight to remove Confederate monuments (The Guardian, 3-28-18)
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“The monuments helped distort history, putting forth a myth of Southern chivalry, the gallant “Lost Cause”, to distract from the terror tactics that deprived African Americans of fundamental rights from the Reconstruction years through Jim Crow until the civil rights movement and the federal court decisions of the 1960s. Institutional inequities in the economic, education, criminal justice and housing systems exist to this very day. The misuse of history is inflamed by the anger burning through demonstrations today, anger fueled by white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have stolen the meaning of Southern heritage from many whites who abhor their ideology but still hold hard to a rose-colored nostalgia for the past.”
Are Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments? (Smithsonian Magazine, 5-7-18)
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“Yet putting monuments in context is anything but a simple, declarative act: power dynamics come into play. First, museums are physical spaces that convey authority. Statues remain powerful—and physically imposing—visual forms that will keep speaking even when they are in new settings. They can and certainly will shape social experiences in ways that curators may not be able to anticipate. A simple label is not enough. In displaying statues, museums will need to be prepared to contextualize them visually and dramatically, to represent the layers of their history—from the story of their creation to the story of them being taken down and collected.”
I detest our Confederate monuments, but they should remain (Washington Post, 8-18-17)
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“Destroying or removing monuments is the easy way out of our obligation to understand our past and improve our future. Monuments to our nation’s racism can be as much a tool to counter it as they can be a tool to foment it. The choice and obligation is ours.”
A historians plea for the removal of Confederate Statues (Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7-27-15)
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“… removing Confederate statues from Southern cities and towns forces Americans to confront the historical significance of racial slavery and the enduring legacy of Jim Crow segregation — actual sources of totalitarianism and demagoguery in America.”
Right and Left on Removal of Confederate Statues (New York Times, 8-18-17)
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“A generation ago, nobody would have thought Washington or Jefferson controversial. Now it appears that even Mount Rushmore isn’t safe, since among its quartet of greats, only Lincoln might be exempt from the iconoclasts.” (Jonathan Tobin)
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“The Confederate flag lionizes both racists and class traitors — indeed the two are inseparable.” According to Mr. Zimmer, the symbols of the Confederacy are not just about white supremacy, but also, inextricably, about class. Confederate flags and monuments, he writes, signify a “campaign by elites to hoodwink poor whites into throwing their lives away to protect ruling class wealth and privilege.”
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“The vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery.” (Ilya Somin)
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“The theme of liberty, not slavery, as the cause for which the South fought became a mantra in the writings of old Confederates and has been taken up by neo-Confederates in our own time.” (James McPherson)
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“Some try to justify continuing to honor Confederates because we honor many other historical figures who committed various moral wrongs. For example, many of the Founding Fathers also owned slaves, just like many leading Confederates did. But the Founders deserve commemoration because their complicity in slavery was outweighed by other, more positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution. By contrast, leading a war in defense of slavery was by far the most important historical legacy of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders. If not for secession and Civil War, few would remember them today.”
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“In some instances, of course, the question of whether the good a historical figure did in one area outweighs the evil he did in another is a legitimately close one.”
Thoughts on Confederate monuments in Georgia (The Red and Black, 6-6-18)
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“The clearest example of why this balancing must be done is the Augusta Confederate Monument. It reads “no nation rose so white and fair, none fell so pure of crime.” Is that truly how we Southerners want to remember the traitorous Confederate leaders who unsuccessfully attempted to break the United States apart?”
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“There were many men who honorably fought for the Confederacy to defend their homes. However, it is past time for Southerners to accept the fact that the Confederate generals and politicians leading the revolt were traitors, attempting to rip apart the nation and divide it in half over the issue of slavery.”
Historians Weigh in on the Confederate Statue Debate (The Great Courses Daily)
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“… there seem to be about 1,500 Confederate monuments of some sort, statues and memorials, throughout the country. The vast majority of them were erected between 1890 and 1930, and so that means that the real building project of them doesn’t begin until fully 25 years after the end of the war.”
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“You look at that period, 1890 to let’s say 1930, and the first thing that springs to mind of course is Jim Crow. There is a sense in which a lot of these monuments really are about white supremacy. They’re about making statements about who is in charge in the South.”Monument is, generally speaking, something that you put up as a statement about who is or who is supposed to be in charge, or what those in charge are supposed to be like. I think that captures monuments.
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“Memorials are simply remembrances that something happened to these people in this place. They’re not really statements about power. The problem is that the line between memorials and monuments isn’t really all that clear and distinct. The Lee monument in Charlottesville, that went up in 1924, so that’s what has some people saying, “This is the apex of white supremacy in the South, and therefore it’s teaching people about white supremacy.”
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“We see this internationally. In South Africa, they’ve taken down many, many of the memorials to the white colonizers that were the forerunners of the apartheid regime. There’s a time in which, as each era evolves, where people look differently at things because of our changed understanding of history and our deepening understanding of history.”
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”I think there’s a lot more work to be done not just with monuments but just with spreading a more up-to-date and more inclusive understanding of American history so that when we say the word Southerner, we don’t just think white Southerners, because African-Americans make up a big portion of the Southern population, and their story needs to be told just like anybody else’s.”
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“We’re full of moments when unspeakable things were done. We have to remember those, because it’s only by remembering them that we actually gain the impetus to do the things that really are virtuous and right and noble. Sometimes we need what has happened in terms of evil to be there to remind us about how absolutely important it is to do the good, and how little we can expect the good to happen automatically.”
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"The whole question about monuments, about memorials, about remembrance, these things are not mere historical footnotes. They are not separate subjects which can be put in a box and separated from the larger questions we’re asking about our public life. The truth of the matter is that what we know about ourselves from the past informs what we are in the present, and a people who are cut off from their past are a people who have been culturally disfranchised fully as much as those who had the vote taken away.”
Missing statues expose truths about Confederate monuments (Houston Chronicle, 8-30-18)
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“Thanks to more recent reassessments - several biographies, as well as Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Killer Angels" and "Gettysburg," the movie based on that novel - Longstreet's reputation has undergone a slow rehabilitation. Yet no book or movie can fully overturn the verdict of over a century of Lost Cause propaganda. Longstreet's postwar politics have forever barred him from the Confederate pantheon. This is not to suggest that James Longstreet deserves additional bronze tributes. There are worthier subjects for memorialization from the Civil War era, especially considering that his defense of black suffrage was a strategic, rather than a humanitarian, position. But Longstreet's story does give the lie to the central neo-Confederate defense of rebel statuary - that these monuments are tributes to military heroism, rather than totems of white supremacy. Why else would one of the Confederacy's greatest military figures be hidden in the woods?”
The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy (Washington Post, 8-16-17)
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“Almost none of the monuments were put up right after the Civil War. Some were erected during the civil rights era of the early 1960s, which coincided with the war’s centennial, but the vast majority of monuments date to between 1895 and World War I. They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution, and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.”
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“Today’s defenders of Confederate monuments are either unaware of the historical context or do not care. Like generations of whites before them, they are more invested in the mythology that has attached itself to these sentinels of white supremacy, because it serves their cause.”
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“Confederate monuments remind audiences of a painful past but can also give voice to contemporary social concerns and needs if they are allowed to speak.”
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“Static 19th and 20th century visions set in stone might seem objectionable, but it’s probably equally offensive to try to sanitize the past without a plan to feed the human desire for knowing what’s come before in order to understand what might lie ahead.”
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“This statue, like the thousands found throughout the South and beyond, had a clear message: to celebrate and promote the ideals of the Lost Cause. The triumphant narrative of Confederate valor and sacrifice was meant to bolster white supremacy and silence African-American voices as much as their agency, particularly in the context of the Jim Crow South. This campaign of obfuscation has been remarkably successful, leaving many white Americans unwilling or disinterested in grappling with the war’s painful legacy. The removal of Confederate monuments—and the vigorous debate it has inspired—helps, I believe, to finally reach some sort of reckoning with that past in order to embrace a more pluralistic American society.”
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“A better solution to tearing down Confederate monuments is the example of the Arthur Ashe monument on Monument Avenue in Richmond. Ashe’s monument reminds visitors and residents that Richmond’s history is complicated and more than just the memory of the Confederacy and its leaders. Rather than tear down monuments, build new ones, where appropriate, that tell the story of those who struggled bravely for freedom and equality.”
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”… a generous proportion of the country now, and always, eschews extremism, and embraces tolerance of others’ cultures and inheritances and beliefs. Such folk will be society’s salvation.”
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“What does this have to do with the Southern monuments honoring the political and military leaders of the Confederacy? … They turned their backs on their nation, their oaths, and the sacrifices of their ancestors in the War for Independence. They did so not out of a sense of mistreatment or for money as did Arnold. They attempted to destroy their nation to defend chattel slavery and from a sense that as white men they were innately superior to all other races. They fought for white racial supremacy. That is why monuments glorifying them and their cause should be removed. Leave monuments marking their participation on the battlefields of the war, but tear down those that only commemorate the intolerance, violence, and hate that inspired their attempt to destroy the American nation.”
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“What unites all of the participants in the debate about Confederate memorials? The belief that “retain” or “remove” are only two options. But what about a third option? I would like to propose that Confederate memorials should neither be retained nor removed: They should be destroyed, and their broken pieces left in situ.”
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“In an era of great division, most factions in the Confederate monuments debate actually agree that history should not be erased. The question is in how it should be remembered. In my opinion, if citizens come together and agree to remove the monuments, they should do so. But don’t hide them away in warehouses. Place them at museums or battlefield parks where historians and interpreters can help visitors learn about the motives behind the Lost Cause. That movement erected these statues to, yes, honor concepts of sacrifice for liberty and family, but these monuments were also designed to entrench a ruthless tradition of white supremacy.”
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“Contributing to this overall lie on the landscape was that the UDC placed markers and plaques on these monuments extolling the heroism, nobility, courage, dedication, patriotism, sacrifice, valor, fortitude, and duty of Confederate soldiers and icons. On none of these monuments is there mention of the true legacy of slavery in the South and the Confederacy: racism, white supremacy, rape, brutality, discrimination, treason and the deaths of 750,000 Americans.”
Why Confederate Monuments Must Fall (New York Times, 8-15-17)
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“Confederate monuments have always been symbols of white supremacy. The heyday of monument building, between 1890 and 1920, was also a time of extreme racial violence, as Southern whites pushed back against what little progress had been made by African-Americans in the decades after the Civil War. As monuments went up, so did the bodies of black men, women and children during a long rash of lynching.”
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“When Confederate veteran and Ku Klux Klan supporter Julian Carr spoke at the dedication of the “Silent Sam” monument on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1913, he said, “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her clothing hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, and rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed this pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.”
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“There is no moral ambiguity or nobility when it comes to the reason for the erection of monuments to the Confederacy. They were erected — when former slave owners regained control of the southern United States — to underscore the fact that they were reclaiming their right to exercise mean, racist and brutal control over those who they once considered to be their “property.””
What We Talk About When We Talk About Confederate Monuments (Origins, vol. 11, issue 5, 2-18)
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“Confederate monument building was the culmination of a deliberate campaign to write the history of the Civil War from the Southern point of view. That memory industry began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s defeat.”
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“More than 90 percent of Confederate monuments were erected after 1895, and much of this effort took place during the first two decades of the 20th century. By then, the “Lost Cause” myth, which described the Confederate cause in a positive and heroic light, had been firmly established in the national consciousness. Not coincidentally, the Supreme Court upheld segregation laws in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and disfranchisement laws in its 1898 Williams v. Mississippi decision.”
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“The nation remains divided because of the stories we tell ourselves. As long as we as a nation refuse to acknowledge the hateful symbolism and political aspirations of these monuments, we will live with the repercussions.”
The fight over Virginia’s Confederate monuments (New Yorker, 12-4-17)
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“The monuments were put up because the former Confederacy, the Southern states, was allowed full control not only over its story—its memorialization—but its politics,” David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale, told me. “It won that by defeating Reconstruction, with violence and with politics. It’s their celebration of their story and their revival and their victory.” He added, “Most of them don’t say, ‘It’s a monument to white supremacy,’ but it is.”
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“History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.”
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“And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.”
What to do with Monuments whose history we’ve forgotten (New Yorker, 11-26-17)
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“There is an element of idol worship in the impulse to erect monuments to people; nobody has ever actually been as perfect as the creation of a memorial implies. And taking down monuments, something that has been going on all over the world for millennia, is, literally, iconoclasm: people destroy or deface old idols, often with the intention of creating new ones. It would be good to develop a category of people whom we celebrate while also viewing them as they are, or were—namely, as complicated and imperfect—and to find ways to amend (rather than topple) monuments to people like Schurz. There must be some way to indicate that Schurz’s monument expresses contemporary sentiments that now seem badly out of date—to use it as an instructive artifact of the mentality of the early twentieth century. Our own mentality will surely seem just as dated in a hundred years, in ways that we cannot anticipate today.”
Memphis finds Confederate monument law loophole, removes statue (AP, 12-21-17)
Academics and Artists Weigh in on Controversial City Monuments (New York Times, 12-2-17)
What Should Monuments Look Like Now? 25 Artworks Reveal Some Ideas (New York Times, 11-28-18)
Report: 110 Confederate Monuments Removed in US Since 2015 (AP, 6-28-18)
Confederate Memorials turn up faster than they can be removed a year after Charlottesville (USA Today, 8-6-18)
What Trump gets wrong about Confederate statues, in one chart (Vox, 8-15-17)
Robert E Lee Opposed Confederate Monuments (PBS News Hour, 8-15-2017)