Confederate statues have come under controversy lately. One point of view says that removing these symbols of racism might prevent further acts of violence. Another point of view indicates that contextualizing Confederate statues would educate people about America’s history. Either way, rather than listening to and trying to understand the other side of an argument, some people choose to be offended.
In the last couple of years Americans around the country have protested for the removal of Confederate statues. For some they are reminders of slavery and oppression. Some go so far as to label these statues as “acts of terrorism,” and those who don’t remove them as “fascists.” I began to wonder if the many Confederate statues in the South are really as offensive as they seem.
A few summers ago, my family visited Edisto Island, a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina, for the third time. When we visited in 2015, Confederate flags had disappeared from all public spaces as racism began to re-emerge in American dialogue. Talk of inclusion and race relationships made me curious about racism in the low country. I decided to investigate.
We had visited Charleston the first time in 2011, and as I mentioned in “Charleston’s Confederate Legacy,” my husband and I took refuge from a thunderstorm in the AME church where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered several churchgoers and the minister. He displayed a Confederate flag on his Facebook page and declared himself to be a white supremacist. When we went to Fort Sumter, all the flags except the American flag had been removed. People were generally quiet about the subject at that time, but as we left, we wondered how the Charlestonians would proceed if things escalated.
I spoke to a few people in Charleston. One person said, “we know our founders held slaves, but we always considered it a part of our history that we have risen above.” Charleston’s leadership has indicated that the city needs to do a better job of contextualizing their founders’ places in the city’s history. In an August 2017 article entitled, “Charleston Looks at Amending – Not Removing — its Confederate Monuments,” author Robert Behre quotes Mayor John Tecklenburg as saying, “The whole story of our history needs to be told. I intend to be complete and truthful about our history and…add to the story instead of taking away.”
We took a day trip to Savannah, Georgia, the only city to survive the Civil War without burning. (Some say Sherman found Savannah too beautiful to burn, so he gifted the city to Lincoln and lived there until the end of the war.) I was curious how the tour guides would handle the controversial parts of Savannah’s history.
Rather than downplaying the racism that dominated the South, the guides spoke of it much as those from Charleston did. They referred to slavery as a part of Savannah’s history that modern residents have moved beyond. They spoke fondly of Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, and of Flannery O’Connor and Jackie Robinson, who were born there. When we passed by statues, the guides indicated the role of the person within Savannah’s history. The guides mentioned a person’s status as slave or owner as only a part of the greater impact the person had on Savannah’s history.
Savannah’s tour guides didn’t hide past racism, but they didn’t highlight it, either. We saw many statues, but what struck me was the diversity of them. Monuments to Irish and Jewish regiments stood right alongside monuments to Black former slaves. These slaves accomplished amazing things after being freed. According to some, these monuments were there to teach people values. That’s why we found them in public spaces instead of in cemeteries. One statue erected in 1877 of a lone Confederate soldier has come under scrutiny in the last couple of years. A survey conducted by the visitor’s bureau last January indicated that 85 percent of Savannah’s residents voted to keep it. City government plans to add more context to the marker.
In an August 2017 History Channel article, “How the US Got So Many Confederate Monuments,” author Becky Little says, “700 Confederate monuments in the United States tell a national story. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these monuments are spread over 31 States plus the District of Columbia, far exceeding the 11 Confederate states that seceded at the outset of the Civil War. The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s.” I wonder about the motivations of those who erected them. Just what were they trying to teach?
Some people say historians erected these monuments to teach people the value of human life. Or, the statues could commemorate those whose lives were lost. Could this lesson be temporary, though? From an article entitled, “You Can’t Change History,” on Quartz: “Many of [the statues] were mass-produced in northern foundries and shoddily installed across the American South….The statues proliferated specifically because they were cheap. To sculpt a statue in marble would have been time consuming and prohibitively expensive for small towns in the early 1900s, but Northern Foundry [a maker of statues] could turn them out quickly and sell them at much lower costs. The company sold life-sized statues for just $450 and large for $750. Commissioning marble or granite statues would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Because these mass-produced statues were put up on the cheap, they may have been fairly easy to pull down.”
Perhaps those who erected these Confederate statues intended them to come down after they had lost relevance. For this reason, many of them have specific dates or battles but lack specific names. Somewhere along the way, the statues became permanent, and our viewpoint has shifted with the political climate.
The controversy surrounding the removal of statues will continue for some time. It all comes down to individual perception. We can view Confederate statues either as reminders of racism, or as historical markers. Either way, the choice is with the viewer. We can choose to take offense, or we can choose to view Confederate statues in a historical context. Which will you choose?
