I remember dating a girl in high school who lived in Franklin, Tennessee, which, having been a big Civil War battleground, was full of confederate monuments. They loomed over the town square like ghosts from the past. At the time, when I was sixteen, I didn't think of them as celebrating white supremacy, I just thought the South had a hard time accepting that times had changed.
If you talked to people in those days, a good many of them were nostalgic for the Old South. I don't know if they still wanted slaves, but they certainly wanted a world in which people of different races knew their places. I guess that was white supremacy in a more genteel form. No burning crosses, at least not from most folks, but if you got them going after a few beers you could see the torchlight in their eyes.
I haven't thought about those monuments much until now, when we are all thinking about them. Whatever fantasies we have about the nobility of the Southern Cause, there was nothing noble about slavery, and that is really what the Civil War was about. Nor is there anything noble about the latent longing for segregation that Civil War monuments tacitly symbolize.
They have to go. However beautiful they may be as art, what they represent is ugly.
Mac, I so agree with you! Yes, as art, these statues can be moving and beautiful --- suggestive of honor and fierceness, even nobility. Yet what they represent is quite clearly a world in which people were enslaved by other people.
ReplyDeleteIt's so interesting how "white-washed" history can become. Some of my own ancestors were from Franklin, TN, and when you visit the land and a house they originally built, you can clearly see that they were slaveowners. The present owners brush lightly over this past, even to the point of suggesting (when you ask where the slaves lived) that the children of those slaves were "cared for" by the white family. Cared for!! Amazing and wilful blindness. I still sense in myself some weird connection to those families in Franklin, coming out of my mother's stories about her beloved grandfather, a banker there (who lost much of his wealth in a fire, and the rest in a banking scandal, where he took the sword, as the story goes . . . ). It's . . . intricate. I don't extricate myself wholly from that history --- I can't. But I do see, now, that the history has to be questioned and, yes, its monuments have to go.