Our first stop in this week’s survey of the nationwide retreat of confederate heritage is Charleston, South Carolina and this article. “The City of Charleston’s Commission on History voted in favor of sending the John C. Calhoun statue that previously stood in Marion Square to be featured as part of an exhibit in a California museum. ‘We need to take it from the dark place, the sunken place, but to put it in a place where it will be joined by others,’ says Michael Allen, one of the city’s committee members. The recommendation will now be taken up by the full Charleston City Council. Members will vote on a final decision next week. The statue has been in storage since it was removed from its pedestal in June 2020, with an understanding that it would be placed securely in a museum or educational center. Several educational institutions and museums, though, have refused the statue. A letter addressed to Mayor John Tecklenburg in June 2021, which comes from the director of a Los Angeles visual-arts center, suggested the statue would make ‘an excellent addition’ to a new exhibit titled ‘MONUMENTS’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. ‘We’d like to extend that same level of participation, cooperation and participation to the city of Charleston,’ says Hamza Walker with ‘LAXART.’ The center uses contemporary arts to present an understanding of key issues, and notes the actions of recent white supremacists, like Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine people at a historic church in Charleston, and James Alex Fields, Jr.’s actions in Charlottesville in 2017.”
This video, “How the Monuments Came Down,” “is a timely and searing look at the history of white supremacy and Black resistance in Richmond. The feature-length film—brought to life by history-makers, descendants, scholars, and activists—reveals how monuments to Confederate leaders stood for more than a century, and why they fell.”
This story out of Florida tells us, “Mary McLeod Bethune will soon be immortalized in the United States Capitol. A statue of the civil rights activist is set to represent the state of Florida in the National Statuary Hall Collection, replacing that of a Confederate general which had been part of the collection since 1922, according to Rep. Kathy Castor. The statue, which is currently part of a temporary exhibit in Daytona, will join the collection in early 2022. Bethune will be the first Black person to have a state-commissioned statue in the sanctuary hall. She will also be ‘one of only a few women’ to represent a state in the 100-statue collection. ‘Dr. Bethune embodies the very best of the Sunshine State – Floridians and all Americans can take great pride in being represented by the great educator and civil rights icon,’ Castor said in a statement. The 6,000-pound statue, which was funded by the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Statuary Project, was sculpted by Nilda Comas using a block of statuario marble carved from Michelangelo’s cave, according to the organization. Engraved on the pedestal is one of her famous quotes: ‘Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it may be a diamond in the rough.’ Bethune was born to formerly enslaved people in 1875. Throughout her career, she became an acclaimed educator and activist, serving as the president of the National Association of Colored Women and founding the National Council of Negro Women.”
The article tells us, “In 1904, she founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, which would later become Bethune-Cookman College. She was appointed to the National Youth Administration by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, and began serving as the agency’s Director of Negro Affairs within three years. Throughout her life, she would serve as an advisor to five U.S. presidents. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, she led the US delegation to Liberia for the inauguration of President William V.S. Tubman in 1949, and she served on President Truman’s Committee of Twelve for National Defense in 1951. She was also the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations.” Her statue will replace that of Edmund Kirby Smith.
Staying with Florida for now, we have this article. “A proposal to remove a Confederate monument from a Jacksonville park has been withdrawn after a heated debate that ended with the audience being ordered out of City Council chambers. Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry had requested $1.3 million to cover the costs of dismantling and removing the granite and bronze monument called ‘Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy’ from Springfield Park. When the debate got heated, council President Sam Newby ordered the audience removed from the room. The council voted 12-6 to withdraw the motion. Some 90 residents signed up for public comment over the issue. When they grew noisy in the council chambers, they were ordered out. ‘Common sense says we should remove monuments of racial hatred from public property,’ Northside Coalition President Ben Frazier said. He said protesters are prepared to launch nonviolent civil disobedience actions, demonstrations at city-owned buildings and area shopping malls, and possibly boycotts if the monument isn’t removed. Dozens of monument supporters wearing red shirts also attended the meeting. The groups briefly exchanged chants of ‘leave it up,’ and ‘take ’em down’ outside City Hall before the meeting. Supporters blamed ‘cancel culture’ for the push to remove the monument. ‘This bullying has got to stop,’ one woman told the council. ‘The lame excuse the statue is hindering the growth of the city is a joke.’ The mayor had wanted the council to take an up-or-down vote on the proposal, news outlets reported. Now questions remain about the next step.” As we can see, the racist structure is trying to fight back against removing these white supremacist symbols. It’s very amusing to see these racists claim they are being bullied when it was bullying that led to these white supremacist symbols being erected.
Steve Helber/AP
We next look at Virginia and this article about the time capsule found in the pedestal of the Robert E Lee monument the state removed. “Three water-damaged books, a silver coin and a cloth envelope were recovered from an 1887 time capsule found inside the pedestal of Richmond, Virginia’s, recently removed Robert E. Lee statue. The capsule, found last week inside a nearly 2,000-pound block of granite, was about the size of a shoebox. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam got to open the box Wednesday after conservators from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources spent five hours prying it open. ‘It’s an important day for the history of Richmond and Virginia,’ Northam said.”
Steve Helber/AP
The article tells us, “The books inside the box were an almanac from 1875, a copy of The Huguenot Lovers: A Tale of the Old Dominion by Collinson Pierrepont Edwards Burgwyn and a pamphlet. An 1887 newspaper article said the capsule would contain a picture of former President Abraham Lincoln ‘lying in his coffin’ as well as other Civil War memorabilia. Library of Virginia records said there would be 60 mostly Confederacy-related objects from 37 Richmond contributors. In reality, the capsule, which was sitting under the statue of Lee for over 130 years, had much fewer objects. However, Northam said the three books are still historically significant by providing a window into what Richmond people were thinking at the time. Besides there being far fewer objects, the capsules’ dimensions were smaller than expected. The capsule, which is about the size of a large shoebox, was also made of lead, not the copper that state officials believed it would be. The time capsule had sat under the massive bronze equestrian statue of Lee, which was erected in 1890, for more than 130 years. The monument was long seen as a symbol of racial injustice in the former capital of the Confederacy. It was taken down in September.”
Steve Helber/AP
The article also says, “The Lee statue was one of five Confederate tributes along Richmond’s Monument Avenue and the only one that belonged to the state. The four city-owned statues were taken down in 2020, but the Lee statue removal was blocked by two lawsuits until a ruling from the Supreme Court of Virginia in September cleared the way for it to be taken down. Northam, a Democrat, announced earlier this month that the enormous pedestal would be removed, a reversal from September when the governor said the pedestal would stay in place so its future could be determined by a community-driven effort to reimagine Monument Avenue. After Floyd’s killing in 2020, the Lee statue became a focal point of the racial justice movement in Richmond. Since then, the pedestal has been covered in graffiti, some of it profane and much of it denouncing the police. Some activists wanted to see it remain in place as a work of protest art.”
Steve Helber/AP
This article gives us more information on the same subject. “A red 1875 almanac, one tattered book, a thin maroon text, a pamphlet, a coin and an envelope were discovered by preservation experts on Wednesday in a time capsule believed to have been encased in a Confederate monument in Virginia in 1887. The 134-year-old treasure box was found in the pedestal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond. The statue of Lee atop a horse was removed in September, but the box — made of lead — wasn’t discovered until Friday, when crews began work to remove the stone base on which the statue once stood. By Tuesday, conservators had successfully chipped it out of the 2,000-pound granite block. Gov. Ralph Northam was on hand on Wednesday, watching as preservationists painstakingly worked for hours to unseal the small box and reveal the once-precious items inside. … As each object was removed from the box and exposed to 2021 air, experts worked to ‘stabilize’ the artifacts, Kate Ridgway, a conservator with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, explained. Historians, working from records from the Library of Virginia, estimate the time capsule was placed in the cornerstone on Oct. 27, 1887, by 37 Richmond residents, organizations and businesses, according to the governor’s office. But their predictions of its contents appear to be inaccurate. They believed as many as 60 objects had been placed inside. And, while the contents of the cloth envelope remain unknown, the box contained only a fraction of that number. They had thought the box itself would be copper but it turned out to be lead.”
According to the article, “The 1875 almanac, titled The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, is described by Britannica as ‘an annual handbook for astronomers, containing predicted positions in the sky of the principal celestial objects and other astronomical phenomena.’ ‘From 1877, under the direction of the astronomer Simon Newcomb, it became the best of the national ephemerides,’ the publication states. Another of the books appeared to be an edition of The Huguenot Lovers: A Tale of the Old Dominion by Collinson Pierrepont Edwards Burgwyn. In the preface of the novel, the author asks for ‘an indulgence for his effort at portraiture of the characteristic of devotedness in the negro.’ ‘If an excuse is needed for this, he trusts that it will be found in his desire to put upon record, so as to be remembered whenever this book is read, the act of one of that race who protected the dead body of his brother on the battle-field of Gettysburg.’ Several of the items suffered from water damage, which preservation experts explained had been expected. Part of that was from water condensation resulting from rapid temperature changes within the box after it was carved out of the stone, they said. The Department of Historic Resources will continue to preserve the artifacts.”
This is another article on the time capsule. “Taking down a famous piece of racist propaganda is always its own reward. But the recent removal of Richmond, Virginia’s Robert E. Lee statue seemed to include an additional, much-anticipated perk for history buffs, as a time capsule was believed to be embedded in its pedestal. Upon further investigation, though, it seems we may have been trolled by the same folks who thought it was a good idea to erect a six-story monument to the Confederacy 25 years after the end of the Civil War and despite Lee’s own objections. On December 17, workers dismantling the statue’s 40-foot stone plinth stumbled on an odd piece of rock that seemed like the right size to contain the capsule, which had reportedly been placed in the statue’s base in 1887. An 1887 newspaper article and records from the Library of Virginia suggested that the capsule contained 60 items, including a good deal of Confederate paraphernalia and a ‘picture of Lincoln lying in his coffin.’ As Richmond Magazine explained in 2017, that morbid and ethically questionable artifact would hold major historical significance: ‘While the appropriateness of placing a picture of a murdered U.S. president inside a monument dedicated to the glorification of Confederate Army leader Robert E. Lee is open to discussion, what makes the artifact so potentially extraordinary is that there is only one genuine photograph of Lincoln’s corpse — and it was supposed to have been destroyed, per the wishes of Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow. And while the other items listed in the cornerstone are described in detail, the description of the Lincoln picture is maddeningly vague, which only increases the speculation about what exactly it is.’ “
The article continues, “Conservators at the Virginia Department of Historic Resource excitedly set to work, and by Wednesday they were finally ready to open the box. But as the Washington Post reports, they’d already begun to suspect that something was amiss: ‘ The dimensions of this box, carefully removed Tuesday from a 1,500-pound slab of granite, are smaller than the one documented in the historical record. It is also made of lead, instead of the expected copper. And there’s no sign of a florid inscription that was supposedly carved into the box’s side.’ Conservationists spent about five hours poking and prying at the box’s lid as cameras, historians, and local officials looked on. They then allowed Governor Ralph Northam to finally open the capsule: Inside was found … zero dead president pics and an assortment of seemingly random items that didn’t match descriptions of the time capsule’s contents. Per the Post: ‘The objects inside included ‘American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac’ of 1875; a copy of ‘The Huguenot Lovers: A Tale of the Old Dominion,’ which records indicate was published in 1889; and an unlabeled maroon-colored book that was too wet to open. There was also a soggy envelope containing a photograph from a studio on Broad Street in Richmond, at least one pamphlet describing a waterworks project on the south side of Richmond dated 1888 and a Victorian-era British coin.’ “
According to the article, “Dale Brumfield, a local historian who has researched the time capsule, theorized that it might be a kind of “vanity project” put together by people involved in constructing the Lee statue. The Huguenot book is a romance written by the engineer who designed the circle around the statue, and the photo depicts the mustachioed man who designed its pedestal. Many questions remain. Was this a second, unauthorized time capsule? Why does it include a British coin? Were the contemporary reports on the contents of the official time capsule wrong? Was that box ever embedded in the pedestal? Was it secretly removed in the National Treasure crew’s least exciting heist ever? Historians have their work cut out for them, but we’ve already (re)learned one important lesson: Confederate sympathizers are not to be trusted.”
Student of the American Civil War 
[…] Mackey at Student of the American Civil War continues the story of NeoConfederate retreat in […]