That Which Comes Down With The Statues

Look away

I spent my summers as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. My brother and I were taken to The Pink Palace, a science museum with an animatronic triceratops, or to Graceland to see the shag carpet and Elvis' plane or to Mud Island, a park on the water that includes a museum and a huge topographical layout glorifying the river that gave life to the city. 

We lived in Memphis during a time of ascendant civic pride. We saw the Harlem Globetrotters play at the Pyramid, the then-new, eternally poorly conceived venue that was a reminder why most arenas fan out as they go up, not contract. Memphis in May, the month-long festival which was started in 1977, was hitting its stride. Elvis Week, in celebration of the King's August death, gained national recognition on its 20th anniversary in 1997, forcing the expansion of a second Elvis Week, in January, to celebrate his birth. The world-class zoo underwent huge upgrades in both facilities and attractions. Even Hollywood came to town to film the Tom Cruise vehicle The Firm, with its climactic scene on our very own Mud Island, with everyone in Shelby County trying to be an extra. Soul legends like William Bell and Al Green were on the radio and walking the streets, accessible as the local weatherman. It was enough for Memphians to puff their chests out a little and send some jeers at Atlanta, the perennial envy of other Southern cities, which was still using the tourism slogan "the world's next great city" from the late 1960s and some of us wryly wondered if it was ever going to happen. Then they got the Olympics and we shut our mouths a little.

Sometimes, though, we would go to Forrest Park, near the Health Center. In the way children do, I figured that every city had a Forrest Park, certainly St. Louis, another city where we spent a lot of time, had one, albeit spelled differently (this is the same child's logic that made me believe that the Principal Building, the distinctive figure of the Des Moines skyline, was where the office of the city's principal was located). However, few cities have a Forrest Park, and neither does Memphis anymore, it was renamed Health Sciences Park in 2013 and its prominent statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate General, was torn down in 2017.

Memphis' role in the war was brief. Being on the river, America's vastly superior naval force captured the city early and it spent most of the conflict as a non-factor, except for a late Confederate raid led by Forrest, who spent time in Memphis before the war as a businessman and alderman. His business was trading human beings. Like many of America's Confederate statues, the one of Forrest in Memphis was erected long after the war, in 1905, by commission from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group whose chapters and copycat organizations put up many of the reminders of America's original sin in an effort to honor their daddies and granddaddies who fought for the CSA. In practice, of course, the monuments are clearly about intimidating citizens of color and have nothing to do with history at all. The statehouse in Kentucky, which never left the Union, housed a statue of CSA president Jeff Davis until a few days ago (Davis was born in Kentucky, which I guess is the connection, though that makes one wonder why Illinois’ statehouse has no statue of Ted Kaczynski). And while statues of Forrest, who was not only a slaver and a traitor but a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, have gone down in most places in the last few years, he still has a bust in the Tennessee statehouse which would have been a terrible indignity if it were put there in 1878 but is even more so that it was erected in 1978. 

The fact of the matter is, Forrest and Bobby Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and all the rest of them are a part of our collected history so much so that presidents since the war (including Obama) have all saw fit to send wreaths to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington. More damnably, though, is that the fact that their statues were erected so far after the fact is part of our history too. We are told in this moment of racial reckoning that we are to educate ourselves, that we are to confront our history, and I'm not sure we can do that by putting these symbols out of sight (and therefore out of mind). Don't worry, I'm not going to chain myself to a statue of John Bell Hood anytime soon. Rip them all out for all I care. I don't know what it feels like to walk in their shadow knowing that if they had had their way, I would be denied my freedom. The reasons for discarding them are too varied and too sensible to argue too strongly but it rankles me that a city gets to wipe its hands clean when a statue tumbles and pretend like it had nothing to do with its erection in the first place. It does smack of whitewashing, not of the pride that some have in these traitors but of the shame these communities brought upon themselves by putting them up. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” wrote James Baldwin. “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I hope tearing down these statues is facing the issue, and we must make sure it does not become the mere removal of evidence, evidence of a crime this country is still committing. 

Look away

I would never lobby the city of Memphis to restore its Forrest statue (or its Davis statue, removed around the same time) but what if instead of removing it, it was accompanied by a plaque that read "Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the finest horsemen this country ever produced and he decided to dedicate his gifts to the killing of his countryman and the enslaving of his species. After being defeated on the battlefield, he spent the rest of his life terrorizing his neighbors in an unconstitutional crusade to keep people from voting and pursuing their American rights, dishonoring his nation." It may be too high-minded to expect words to change people's perspective when I know that real hurt is done to people who look upon these statues but seeing as you can't change our history, what can you do to recontextualize it that doesn't let the cities of the hook? 

Our history is to avoid the difficult truth. Northern states can smugly dismiss charges of racism because they didn't own slaves but every state (and every citizen) is a beneficiary from the institution that allowed us to pay off our Revolutionary War debts and build our powerful economy. We push our indigenous population into smaller communities further and further away so we don't have to look at the guilt. We move to the suburbs so we aren't disturbed by unrest. We applaud the cancelling of Gone With the Wind, recently pulled from many streaming services, while we make one of the top movies on Netflix The Help, a movie that can be praised for its fine performances (like Gone With the Wind) but is no less misleading about race relations. We can change Rhode Island’s name to avoid a word we don’t like (even if it doesn’t mean what we think it means in this case) and not confront that state’s lamentable history with the slave trade. It's human nature to do the thing that makes us feel good about ourselves while avoiding the larger issue and I can't help but feel that the tearing down of Confederate monuments mindlessly is another way of doing this, patting ourselves on the back for moving past a problem that we clearly haven't moved past. 

Again, if not a single Confederate monument survives 2020, that will be well enough by me. Military bases like Fort Hood and Fort Benning absolutely should change their names, it is embarrassing that our fighting forces are trained in facilities named after people who would destroy them. Every day the professional football team in Washington, D.C. does not change its name is an insult to all. But mob fever has a counter-productive tendency to go ludicrously too far, as in the case of the Massachusetts congress person who argued for removing the Mass. General Hospital entrance dedicated to General Joseph Hooker—a Union general—not for screwing up the battle of Chancellorsville, but because people were making fun of the name. Last week, protestors in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco vandalized a number of statues starting with St. Junipero Serra, a monk who was so good at assimilating California’s native populations that many of their cultures perished, Frances Scott Key, a slave owner and the writer of the Star-Spangled Banner, and President U.S. Grant, who won the war for the Union, yes, but may also have owned slaves either directly or indirectly (or, at least, one slave who he inherited and freed) and has a troubling (though ambiguous) history of anti-Semiticism. There are justifications for removing those statues, I suppose, but I don’t know what Miguel de Cervantes, whose visage was also vandalized, did to deserve it besides write perhaps the greatest novel of all time. The point is to make these changes thoughtfully, not as a relieving of guilt but as the start of a conversation. Putting history out of sight is not putting it behind us. We need reminders that people once hated their fellow man so much they were willing to die to keep them in chains. We need reminders that many felt (and still feel) that that is worth honoring. 

We also need new statues. May I suggest Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black woman to become an American doctor (and for a while the only black doctor in the country) who left the north after the Civil War to try to single handedly bring healthcare to four million newly freed slaves. How about A. Philip Randolph, a pioneering civil rights leader who practically built from scratch the infrastructure Martin Luther King Jr. would so effectively use a generation later. Certainly we need more statues of Mary Turner, a woman whose killing at the hands of a white mob in 1918 is so terrible that it should stand for all as the height of cruelty done to the oppressed. Memphis specifically needs a statue of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a courageous journalist whose newspaper Memphis Free Speech and Headlight did pioneering work on exposing the terror of lynching in the late 1800s (and the plaque near the statue must state that for her troubles Memphians burned her office to the ground and ran this titan of civil rights out of the city where she would never return).

I am reminded of one other milestone for Memphis in the time I was there, the opening of the National Civil Right Museum in 1991. The museum is located at 450 Mulberry Street and is built around the Lorraine Motel, the place where Dr. King was murdered. King's room is preserved just as it was, a chilling twin to Graceland, where Elvis' rooms (and bad taste) are also frozen in time. The campus of the museum stretches across the street to a building that was a boarding house in 1968 and you can visit the room where King's assassin fired the fatal shots. It's possible that someone with hatred in their hearts could stand in that room and feel empowered but I have never felt anything but ashamed, overwhelmed and more convicted to be a better person. There's not a more powerful place in the country. What a blessing it is to be able to visit it, be reminded and confront it. 

Look away, Dixieland.