We begin with this article updating us on the monuments removed from Charlottesville, VA. “It’s been a year since statues of Confederates Robert E. Lee and Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson stood in Charlottesville’s downtown parks, but the controversy over the removal and the statues’ fates have yet to be resolved. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center was granted ownership of the Lee statue by the city in December, but the ownership is now in court. Two other organizations who applied for ownership of the Lee statue, Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation and the Ratcliffe Foundation, on behalf of its subsidiary Ellenbrook Museum, are suing the city for giving the statue to JSAAHC. The two allege the city violated the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Virginia Public Procurement Act and state code when it awarded the Lee statue to JSAAHC in December. JSAAHC was initially named as a defendant when the suit was initially filed but has since been removed. The foundations are represented by attorneys Ralph Main, Jock Yellott and S. Braxton Puryear, who also represented Charlottesville area residents in a previous Monument Fund-backed lawsuit against the city over votes to remove the Lee and Jackson statues.”
The article also tells us, “Much of the lawsuit appears to be in response to JSAAHC’s intentions for the monument, titled the ‘Swords Into Plowshares’ project, which notably includes a plan to melt down the statue and recast Lee’s brass ingots into a new work of art that reflects the Charlottesville community’s values of racial inclusivity. The plaintiffs are claiming that melting the statue specifically would violate state statute. In court filings, the plaintiffs say ‘relocating a war monument to a foundry furnace for [alteration] and destruction is not on the list of what is permissible.’ Rich Schragger, a law professor at the University of Virginia and an expert on constitutional and local government law, said the lawsuit is ‘a little tricky.’ It comes down to how the court will interpret the state statute that allowed the city to take the statues down in the first place. The court will have to decide if the city’s bidding process for the statues followed state law or violated it. ‘If the court says that the city violated the law, then it can order the statue to be presumably returned to the city. The city still has, under the state law, the right to do what it wishes within limits within the statute,’ Schragger said. However, this doesn’t mean the plaintiffs would get the statue. ‘My understanding is the plaintiffs are demanding that the statute be given to them or preserved. I doubt that that’s a possible avenue of relief for them. The appropriate relief, if the plaintiff circuit rules that way, would be that the city redo the bidding process and the city just gets the property back,’ Schragger said. Schragger said the process could take a long time, potentially one to two years, while it’s possible it may be wrapped up sooner than that. JSAAHC has not been prohibited from melting the statue, however, said Andrea Douglas, director of JSAAHC.”
The article continues, “Douglas said they are waiting until litigation is over to do so. Douglas declined to share the location of the statue due to security concerns. She did say, however, that JSAAHC moved quickly to disassemble the statue after receiving the official deed of gift from the city in December and that it has been broken up into multiple pieces. ‘The lawsuit is yet another means of controlling and maintaining white supremacy, without question,’ Douglas said. Schragger said it’s possible a lawsuit of this kind could be a tactic on behalf of the plaintiffs to discourage other jurisdictions from removing their statues. ‘We’ve seen that these groups seem to be well-funded and motivated particularly in an instance where the outcome is still not a clear victory for them again,’ Schragger said. ‘I think part of this strategy is to raise the cost for cities and create both political and legal barriers for other cities who are contemplating removing their statues.’ Beyond the lawsuit, Douglas said JSAAHC has received hate mail and threats, and has been the target of coordinated malware attacks. She said they came from parties trying to prevent the center from fundraising for the Swords into Plowshares project. Malware attacks have been made on both the JSAAHC website and IndieGoGo campaign page, she said. ‘There’s no sort of very public threat that has been made, but our websites have been attacked. They’re trying to make it difficult for us to raise money around this project,’ Douglas said. ‘They’re using tactics that basically are contrary to the will of Charlottesville. This is cyberstalking or cyberterrorism.’ [Opponents to the project] see these things along racial lines. As a result, you’ve got to be ready, she said. These folks are not afraid to kill Black people.”
We learn, “Despite the lawsuit and backlash, Swords into Plowshares has raised just under $700,000 and JSAAHC is moving ahead on its public input process. The goal is to hear from and garner ideas from as many community members as possible for what to do with the statue. Douglas said the lawsuit has allowed more time to collect this input. Jalane Schmidt, director of UVa’s Memory Project which is partnering with JSAAHC on the project, said they’ve made an effort to reach out to a variety of ages and demographics through the process, including getting ideas from schoolchildren. ‘We’re getting feedback from young people because this whole process started with young people, and they’re the ones who are going to be inheriting these spaces,’ said Schmidt, referencing Zyahna Bryant, who was a high schooler when she started a petition to get the city to remove the statues. Douglas said they’ve heard a variety of ideas from both community members and artists interested in taking on the project, but a recurring theme is people want the new art to be interactive and contemplative. And it won’t necessarily be a statue or stand in the space where the Lee statue stood. ‘This is really about what is the most appropriate object that articulates what Charlottesville believes to be its desire,’ Douglas said. The Lee statue is not the only city statue under new ownership. City Council unanimously voted in December to send the statue of Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson to LAXART in Los Angeles.”
We next look at this article from the Nation’s Capital. “A statue of inspirational civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune has supplanted that of a Confederate general within the U.S. Capitol. The 11-foot-tall statue, unveiled in a ceremony Wednesday, was sculpted by Nilda Comas from an 11½-ton marble block hailing from Michelangelo’s cave in Tuscany, Italy. Her likeness holds a black rose made from Spanish black marble. Bethune’s statue replaces a nearly 100-year-old bronze sculpture of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, which was removed on Sept. 4, 2021, and placed in temporary storage at the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee. ‘Today, we are rewriting the history we want to share with our future generations,’ said Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., one of several speakers at the unveiling ceremony. ‘We are replacing a remnant of hatred and division with the symbol of hope and inspiration … in her rightful place among our nation’s giants of history.’ Born into a family of South Carolina slaves, Bethune opened her own school for Black girls in 1904 ‘with six students, one of which was her son Albert, with $1.50,’ said Lawrence M. Drake II, interim president of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That school would become Bethune-Cookman College in 1929 and today has ‘thousands of graduates around the world who are living examples of our motto: ‘Enter to learn, depart to serve,” Drake said.”
According to the article, “Bethune also championed women’s rights and the right to vote. Named to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unofficial ‘Black Cabinet,’ she fought for anti-lynching legislation and other initiatives including the banning of poll taxes. Roosevelt also named her director of the Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, making her the first African American woman to head a federal agency. In all, Bethune advised five presidents, and she was one of only eight women – and the only Black woman – among the U.S. delegation that created the United Nations charter. ‘Dr. Bethune did her part to form that more perfect union we that we love to talk about and to establish justice,’ said Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla.”
Next we look at this article from Virginia. “Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has appointed a historian to the state Board of Historic Resources who has defended the state’s Confederate monuments and condemned their destruction as a ‘dangerous’ rewriting of history. Ann Hunter McLean of Richmond, the former head of a Christian school, told an online publication that she believes Virginia’s heritage is ‘under attack’ as she begins serving on the board, which oversees state historic-site designations. Last year, as the last vestiges of Richmond’s Confederate monuments were being taken down in the wake of social justice protests, McLean lamented the loss. ‘This whole tragedy is that these statues were built to tell the true story of the American South to people 500 years from now,’ McLean said to a Richmond radio host on Dec. 23, 2021, after state archivists opened a time capsule found under the site where the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee once stood on Monument Avenue. ‘People want to destroy the evidence of that story,’ she continued, saying the Civil War was fought for the ‘sovereignty of each state and constitutional law.’ ” This woman is not a credible historian. She is an ignoramus who knows little about actual history. She has a Ph.D. in art history, but doesn’t seem to have learned anything at all about the Civil War or about the historical profession in general.
The article also tells us, “McLean did not respond Friday to an email and a phone message requesting comment. She was quoted in the online publication Virginia Star as saying in an interview that she was uncertain whether her role on the board would involve decisions regarding monuments. ‘But I am not into destroying people’s fine art. I think there’s something cosmically wrong with doing that under any circumstances,’ she said, adding that she is particularly interested in overseeing the language on state historical markers. Approving and revising those markers is one of the primary functions of the historic resources board, which consists of seven people appointed by the governor. The board meets jointly with the State Review Board four times a year to consider nominations to the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. It also holds easements at historic sites around the state. Del. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), the head of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, said McLean’s appointment showed Youngkin’s ‘callous attitude toward Black history in Virginia and the lingering effects of institutional racism.’ Via text message, Bagby said Youngkin seems intent on ‘erasing our voices, images, and pain without flinching. He must believe that no one is paying attention to his appointments or he’s just that brazen to repeatedly thumb his nose at us.’ “
According to the article, “In the introduction to her 1998 doctoral dissertation, McLean wrote that the Confederate statues erected from the late 1800s through the 1920s ‘were created primarily as vehicles of moral uplift at a time of rapid urbanization and social change, when idealism typified the American portrayal of martial art.’ She goes on to acknowledge that the African American perspective on the statues ‘is one of several complexities inherent in the subject.’ She wrote that the Lee statue was ‘erected to inspire virtue in the public, and as a tribute to Lee around whom grew a heroic myth embraced by both North and South, [but] today reminds some in society of the open wound of racism.’ McLean also writes for Bacon’s Rebellion, a conservative commentary site, and serves on the board of the Jefferson Council, a group aimed at preserving Thomas Jefferson’s heritage at the University of Virginia. In a recent article for the Jefferson Independent, a student-run conservative website, McLean blasted ‘cultural Marxists’ for tearing down the legacies of Lee — a ‘Christian soldier’ — and Gen. Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, ‘a Sunday School teacher for a class of young black children.’ ” I would say this woman is no historian, her degree notwithstanding.
Staying in Virginia, we have this article. “In a wood-paneled gallery in the recently rechristened Virginia Museum of History and Culture—long known as the Virginia Historical Society—the walls are covered by four murals named after the seasons. We begin with a luminous ‘Spring,’ turn to a vigorous ‘Summer,’ then to ‘Autumn’ with hints of struggle, and finally to a grim ‘Winter.’ A French artist, Charles Hoffbauer, was commissioned in 1912 to make them a permanent fixture of the original neoclassical building, which opened in 1921. The difficulty—for visitors, as for the museum—is that these murals are called ‘The Four Seasons of the Confederacy’ and their purpose is to mourn the Confederacy’s defeat. In ‘Summer,’ we see Gen. Robert E. Lee on a white horse, flanked by an all-star Confederate lineup; in “Winter,” we see Confederate martyrdom. The building was devoted to the same sentiments. It was constructed by the Confederate Memorial Association as an archive and a shrine, paying tribute to the ‘Lost Cause’—the conviction that slavery had been falsely maligned, and that the South was wrested from pastoral gentility by Northern aggression. Complicating matters further, the ‘Battle Abbey’—as the original building was once colloquially called—was acquired by the Virginia Historical Society in 1946 and later became its headquarters. How would a society devoted to history come to terms with that past? And since monuments are now toppled for far less, how were the murals to be treated in the latest reconstruction, which the museum began in 2018 under its current CEO, Jamie Bosket? The project, completed this spring, cost more than $30 million, expanded exhibition space by 50%, and promised to transform its 250,000 square feet with a commitment to diversity in narrative and audience.”
The article goes on to say, “The society’s history makes the issues still more important. It is one of the nation’s oldest such institutions, established in 1831. Its first president was U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. Its first member was former President James Madison. Early American history cannot be understood without Virginia, which contributed Founding Fathers and four of the first five presidents to the new nation—men who shaped an American vision of human rights and freedoms, while also holding slaves. Very little about this history is abstract, and some is still raw. As a new (and effective) introductory film points out, more than half of the Civil War dead perished within 150 miles of Richmond. Tensions had to be far more intense here than in many other American cultural institutions that during the past two years hastened to ritualistically declaim mea culpas about racism and history. Here, matters are on a different plane. The mural gallery is now presented in context as a small exhibition, ‘The Lost Cause: Myths, Monuments, & Murals.’ It is remarkably successful in giving us a sense of history under revision—showing us precisely what distortions took place, while letting us see them intact. There is no attempt to avoid or cancel. There is no posturing or virtue signaling. The gallery provides details about the building, the murals, and shifting historical interpretations. We are shown excerpts from a 1919 pamphlet that urged Southern school districts to reject any book ‘that does not give the principles for which the South fought’ or that ‘glorifies Abraham Lincoln.’ We see a timeline showing when Confederate monuments were dedicated (with an eruption of activity during the Jim Crow decades early in the 20th century). And we see how many, in recent years, have been deposed.”
It continues, “The gallery also contains a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee that, in 1909, had been sent to the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol along with one of George Washington—two Virginians deemed worthy of ‘national commemoration.’ In 2020, the Virginia General Assembly voted to replace Lee’s statue with one of Barbara Johns, a black student who at age 16 led a protest against school segregation in a battle that was consolidated into the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. That decision might have been explored as well, but overall, the gallery is exemplary in its approach. Similar discipline is evident in the exhibition ‘The Story of Virginia,’ which while largely reinterpreted in 2015 recounts Virginia’s history with flaws and accomplishments in just proportion. One aspect of the reconstruction is less compelling: compensating for the limitations of the past by making diversity a historical standard. A new gallery of rotating artifacts, ‘Treasures of Virginia,’ contains ‘extraordinary items related to individuals or events that shaped the identity’ of Virginia and the nation. Here we find Virginia’s powerful Declaration of Rights (June 1776) as well as Robert E. Lee’s farewell address. But how is a flight jacket of a World War II tail gunner from Virginia comparable? What does it reveal? Similarly, a gallery that argues for treating history as an all-inclusive narrative embraces ephemera without showing how, say, a child’s stuffed dog from about 1955 reveals anything either about Virginia or about its owner, who is named but not identified.”
Staying in the Old Dominion, we have this article from Richmond. “Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, a longtime shrine of the South and home to thousands of Confederate graves, has quietly banned the flying of Confederate flags. Visitors first noticed the absence of the flags in summer 2020, when anti-racism protests rocking Richmond and much of the U.S. often targeted rebel symbols. Two people familiar with the cemetery said then they understood that Hollywood had taken down the flags, widely seen as symbols of racism, temporarily to remove potential vandalism targets. Two years later, Confederate flags that were once common at the historic private cemetery are still gone. It turns out the cemetery’s board of directors adopted a formal flag ban in 2020 – with no public announcement. ‘Hollywood does not have an established practice of publishing policies and broadly disseminating them when they are adopted by the board,’ said Hollywood spokesman Matt Jenkins, a Richmond lawyer and member of the cemetery’s board. ‘We are not a public body.’ Jenkins provided the Virginia Mercury a copy of the flag policy, dated July 2, 2020. It says in part that ‘against the current backdrop of intentional acts of vandalism and destruction of property, Hollywood’s board has removed from public view all flags of the Confederacy in the interest of protecting and preserving the entirety of the cemetery’s grounds.’ Jenkins declined to say if the ban is permanent. ‘It (the policy) says what it says. I’m not going to use the word ‘temporary’ or ‘permanent.” “
The article goes on to tell us the white supremacist organization known as Sons of Confederate Veterans is not happy about the banning of this racist symbol. “Word of the ban angered Andrew Bennett Morehead of Hanover County, who had put up and maintained Confederate flags at Hollywood in recent years. ‘This is absolutely news to me,’ said Morehead, the Richmond area brigade commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a heritage group with about 3,500 members in Virginia. ‘If Hollywood has an official stance – no Confederate flags of any type will be flown – I haven’t seen it on anything that I’ve gotten,’ Morehead added. He said he thought the 2020 ban was temporary. ‘Of all places, Hollywood Cemetery, which is a very historic … landmark, much like Monument Avenue was, is succumbing to the woke society,’ Morehead said. Morehead had been putting up at Hollywood several replicas of the Confederacy’s third, and final, national flag. That lesser-known flag is red and white with a square battle-flag image in its upper left corner. Figuring enough time had passed since the 2020 protests, Morehead in early May put up a large third-national flag on a pole by the grave of Davis, the Confederate President. A Confederate flag had flown on that pole for years before being taken down amid the protests. Morehead later found that the newly raised flag had been removed. He criticized the cemetery for failing to celebrate ‘the folks who are interred there that put them on the map.’ Tamara Jenkins, a spokeswoman for Richmond’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities, indicated Confederate flags are still allowed in city cemeteries. ‘There is no rule in place to regulate flags on individual graves,’ she said by email.”
According to the article, “Historian Mary H. Mitchell captured Hollywood’s attraction to aficionados of the Confederacy in her 1985 book, ‘Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine.’ ‘Most of the war’s major battles were fought on Virginia soil, and (Richmond) assumed responsibility for an enormous number of the dead and wounded,’ Mitchell wrote. ‘Richmond became a symbol of what these men had fought for — a shrine to the Old South and the Lost Cause. … If Richmond was the temple of the Lost Cause, Hollywood was its inner sanctum.’ The Lost Cause was a distorted version of history, pushed by the Civil War’s losers, that falsely insisted the war wasn’t about slavery, that enslaved people had been happy and that Confederates were saintly, among other claims. Hollywood claims to be the home of 18,000 Confederate graves, but modern researchers say the number is probably several thousand smaller. Still, Hollywood and the city’s Oakwood Cemetery in the East End appear to be the top two cemeteries in the U.S. in their numbers of Confederate dead. It seems clear that Hollywood, like Richmond and much of the South, is struggling to reconcile its past and present. Hollywood’s struggle was evident as far back as 1999, when the foreword to a new edition of Mitchell’s book was written by the late Hunter Holmes McGuire Jr., the great grandson of a prominent Confederate surgeon and a surgeon in his own right. Hollywood, McGuire wrote, has a ‘unique drawing power for the growing number of people fascinated by the American Civil War. Some unreconstructed rebels come to mourn a ‘lost cause,’ but more and more people realize that what both sides gained in their crucible of sacrifice was a new and better nation.’ Similarly, Hollywood says on its website today that Confederates ‘went into battle for what seemed then a noble cause of protecting their homes from northern aggression. … Now we know that the cause was not a lost one. These men’s lives, along with those of their northern counterparts, were given to forge a single and better nation.’ ” That’s nonsense, but I suppose we can’t fault the cemetery too much for trying to walk a line between historical accuracy and not offending local whites donors.
We stay in the Old Dominion with this article from Fairfax. “The Fairfax City Council voted to rename 14 streets and highways honoring the Confederacy, part of an ongoing reckoning over race and equity in Virginia that in the city sparked heated debate about the identity of one neighborhood built around a Civil War theme. After two years of community meetings, the council voted Tuesday night to change the names of Lee Highway, Old Lee Highway and most of the streets in the Mosby Woods neighborhood. The mid-20th-century development is named after Confederate commander John S. Mosby, with streets such as Confederate Lane or Plantation Parkway. ‘This affirms the values of the city of Fairfax,’ David L. Meyer, the city’s mayor, said Wednesday of the nearly unanimous series of votes. ‘We simply do not want to bequeath to the next generation some of these divisive legacies from our history.’ The council, which began grappling with the issue after racial justice protests sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, also recently voted to remove the image of a Confederate soldier on the city seal. Council member Sang H. Yi, who recently announced a bid for mayor, opposed renaming all but two streets: Rebel Road in Mosby Woods and Stonewall Avenue, which is in a different neighborhood. Council member Joseph D. Harmon opposed eight of the name changes.”
The article tells us, “In Mosby Woods, the debate over the streets — where many residents in the quiet community hold fond memories of block parties or first crushes — was nuanced. Some opposed to the changes argued against wiping away a part of history that had become deeply ingrained in the local landscape, with Confederate monuments erected during the mid-20th century standing sentry while Fairfax City and its surrounding communities experienced steady demographic change. While Mosby Woods is still mostly White, Fairfax City has a growing Asian and Latino community. Others, living on streets with names whose ties to the Confederacy were more ambiguous — such as Traveler Street (named after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s horse) — were annoyed by the inconvenience of having to change the address on driver’s licenses and other legal documents. On Tuesday, the City Council directed the Fairfax staff to develop a program to compensate residents who incur costs related to the name changes. ‘I’m disappointed — that would be a mild way to put it,’ said Francis Dietz, who spearheaded an effort to keep his street, Ranger Road (named after Mosby’s troops), from being renamed. ‘They [the council] didn’t listen to their constituents,’ Dietz said. ‘Not the ones who live here.’ Neighbors who pushed for the name changes celebrated. Ryan Finley, who with his wife, Mako Honda, lives at the corner of Confederate Lane and Plantation Parkway, said he is relieved to know the street signs in front of their home will soon come down. ‘I’m hoping that once we get new street signs in here, people can put this behind them a little bit,’ Finley said. ‘There’s been a little more contention than what you’d like to see in the neighborhood.’ “
Next we look at this essay from the Washington Post. “In August 2017, I stood with about a dozen other people in the predawn streets of Baltimore, watching equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson swing from a crane as they were removed from their plinths. A few days earlier, I was covering the racist rally in Charlottesville when James Alex Fields slammed his car into an anti-fascist march, killing Heather Heyer, seriously wounding a dozen more and shocking Americans into addressing the history behind the thousands of Confederate monuments in the United States. I grew up in South Carolina, where I had been raised to revere Lee, Jackson and other white-supremacist enslavers. Among their number, I counted members of my own family. Standing out there, sleepless and shattered, I realized that my own name had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written. I’d been looking into my family’s history since the Mother Emmanuel church massacre in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, but after Charlottesville, I again began to contemplate what it meant that in 1860, to take a single year, various Baynards believed that they owned 781 people, while the Woodses — from whom I’m directly descended — claimed possession of 23 more. But enslavers tended to marry enslavers, so I have no idea how many thousands of people were held in bondage by those associated with my family. The question of what to do with Confederate monuments became, in my mind, mixed up with the question of what to do with my name. For me, the answer was easy with monuments to enslavers. Pull them all down. But the situation with my name and byline seemed more complicated.”
We further read, “Since before Reconstruction, Black Americans have thrown off ‘slave names,’ but I had never read or heard about White people addressing our enslaver names. But I knew I could no longer carry mine innocently, so I decided to try to grapple with what it represents. I quickly realized that, though I could no longer bear my name — which I share with my Trump-supporting father, who died last year — I could not change it either. To change it would only continue the coverup that kept me from recognizing its reality. And any name I chose would probably be just as fraught as my own. I avidly sought out stories of other people engaged in undoing their names. In her book ‘Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,’ the African American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman writes that she chose a Swahili name in an attempt to ‘undo the past and reinvent myself,’ without taking into account that ‘Swahili was a language steeped in mercantilism and slave trading and disseminated through commercial relations among Arab, African, and Portuguese merchants.’ In what seems almost like a warning against my best intentions, she writes, ‘The ugly history of elites and commoners and masters and slaves I had tried to expunge with the adoption of an authentic name was thus unwittingly enshrined.’ In his autobiography, Malcolm X explains his name. ‘For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my maternal forebears,’ he writes. The X served as a variable, standing in for the name that was stolen. And when White reporters asked about the X or what his ‘real name’ was, he had the opportunity to remind the reporters of that theft.”
He continues, “As an inheritor of that racist history, that was not an option for me. Seeking some way to acknowledge the past embedded in my name without continuing to honor it, I recalled the philosophical strategy of putting a word ‘under erasure.’ It was a technique popularized by the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who argued that certain words contain their own negation, which he signified by crossing them out. Such words, he suggested, are unavoidable tools for speaking and thinking, but they are also inadequate. As such, they had to be eliminated while also remaining legible. My own version of that would be: ‘Since the legacy of slavers cannot be borne, their names are crossed out. Since the legacy of slavers cannot be covered up, their names remain legible.’ But it is not a neutral action. I am trying to unbind the knots of power that still have effects in the present. As Derrida writes, when a name is ‘cancelled by a work of erasure,’ it is ‘obliterated rather than forgotten, toned down, devalued.’ And so I leave my name, but I cross it out, allowing the slash to act as crime scene tape, both marking off that history and acknowledging it. The strike through my name serves as a reminder of my civil, psychological and ethical obligation. I’m aware that such a gesture could be empty and even harmful, especially if followed too fervently. It could serve to make me feel better while adding extra work for someone else trying to figure out how to deal with the practical issues surrounding this idiosyncratic byline. This technique is not something I want to impose on others, nor could in every circumstance even if I wanted to. This publication, for instance, doesn’t allow a strike-through command in the byline field. But when I am in control and when it is my choice, as on the cover of my new book, I choose to cross it out as a reminder of the white supremacy we still need to undo.”
The essay tells us, “The backlash to anti-racist education shows that there is power simply in naming Whiteness. But drawing attention to the workings of Whiteness is, of course, inadequate to address the horrors hidden in our names — and of other names erased. In 1871, my great-grandfather I.M. Woods was involved in the assassination of Peter J. Lemon, a Black county commissioner in South Carolina, as part of a wave of Klan terrorism attempting to topple the Reconstruction regime, which happened in 1876 when a vicious campaign of murder, fraud and repression ended in the storming and occupation of the state Capitol. Lemon was a remarkable man, born into bondage in Clarendon County in 1842. When the Civil War began, he managed to escape and went to fight with the 5th Massachusetts cavalry, for the Union side. He returned to Clarendon County and was elected as a county commissioner in 1868, despite an election fraught with racist violence and voter fraud. He helped lead a Black militia, formed to fight back against the brutal attacks of the Ku Klux Klan. Hundreds if not thousands of people, Black and White, who supported the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction were tortured and killed. On April 19, 1871, Congress passed the Third Enforcement Act, also called the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was intended to protect the newly established rights of the formerly enslaved and end the campaign of terror in South Carolina and other states. On that same day, according to congressional testimony and a coroner’s report, Lemon was lured to the Clarendon County town of Manning on county business and ambushed and shot by a party of six to eight White men, one of whom I believe was my great-grandfather. The coverup was effective enough that no one was ever held accountable. The name of Peter Lemon was largely erased, rarely mentioned in print again, other than in threat: In 1887, 16 years after Lemon’s assassination, the Manning Times printed a letter to the superintendent of the town, which had hired a Black man as a police officer. ‘You are spotted,’ the letter read. ‘And it would be to my surprise if you don’t reconsider this matter you will be done like Peter Lemon the Radical you can guess what became of him.’ “
In concluding, the essay says, “My great-grandfather, on the other hand, was praised by other White people as a man who could be counted on when times got tough. He was a stalwart of the Democratic Party, which at that time was the party of ‘white man’s supremacy,’ and was elected to the South Carolina State Legislature, which passed the apartheid Jim Crow laws that governed the state for another 70 years. Having learned all of this, I figured that crossing out my own name would be meaningful only if I could restore the name of Peter Lemon to the public record. I began sharing my research with a local activist and historian named George Frierson. Last April, on the 150th anniversary of the crime, we discovered the place where Lemon had been shot. Last month, we made a joint presentation to the Clarendon County Council, putting Lemon’s name back into the public record, urging them to name their administrative building after Lemon and denouncing my family’s role in his murder. Next, I hope to fund the installation of a new gravestone in the cemetery where the historical records show that Lemon was buried. These actions, too, are insufficient. But I need to acknowledge the harm those previously bearing my names have caused. Every such action will always be flawed, but nevertheless necessary, just as my name can neither be changed nor borne. Only when we are aware of the cost of our history can we begin to reckon with what is owed. For me, this is a first, small step toward reparations.”
Finally we have this article from Georgia, telling us, “The Confederate Army was long ago vanquished on the battlefield by Union military forces. But on Capitol Hill, their leaders continue to hold on to prominent places of honor. Under a federal law signed by President Lincoln during the Civil War, each state gets to place two statues of home-state heroes in the U.S. Capitol. Those statues give great insight into how states view their own history. Utah has a statue of the ‘father of television.’ Florida has a statue of the inventor of the ice machine. Hawaii honors the religious leader of a leper colony. New Mexico salutes a 17th-century Pueblo figure. Tennessee honors Andrew Jackson. Various states from New England have statues to mark the Founding Fathers. But for a number of southern states, it’s still about the Confederacy, with statues that have been in the Capitol since the 1920′s. One of those Confederates was replaced this week, when the state of Florida moved on from Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith — whose likeness stood in the Capitol for 99 years — and replaced him with a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of slaves, who became an educator and civil rights activist. ‘All of us are in awe of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s extraordinary story,’ said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, noting that Bethune is the first Black American to be honored by any state in the Capitol statue collection. ‘How poetic that Dr. Bethune replaces a little-known Confederate general, trading a traitor for a civil rights hero in the Capitol of the United States,’ Pelosi added.”
The article also tells us, “Bethune’s statue was placed just across Statuary Hall from the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and steps away from a statue of Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia, who said in his infamous Cornerstone Speech that ‘the negro is not equal to the white man.’ Georgia sent the statue of Stephens to the U.S. Capitol in 1927. It was a different time. The Georgia Legislature could replace Stephens with someone of note from Georgia’s history at any time. But year after year, the Stephens statue stays in place, sending the distinct message — intentional or not — that Georgia leaders don’t mind honoring someone who so publicly represented the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy. Six southern states still have Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol: Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, and Georgia. Not on that list is Virginia — which hauled out the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in late 2020. At some point, the other Confederates will likely get wheeled out. Surely those southern states have someone more distinguished to honor in the U.S. Capitol.”
Student of the American Civil War 