Washington owned over 300, Jefferson over 600, and Grant worked on his wife’s family plantation and inherited one slave upon his father-in-law’s death. To give a fuller account of the range of experiences, voices, hues and ideologies that have made us what we are. The Pros And Cons Of Keeping Political Statues In Public Spaces Nobody thinks that when Iraqis removed statues of Saddam Hussein from around the country they wanted him to be forgotten. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., PhD, Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, notes that “enduringly charged symbols of the former Confederacy… [add] to our fears that, instead of embracing the promise of democracy in a diverse society, some want to return us to a far more restrictive time, when freedom was circumscribed by race.” [22], “We can’t get to learning from our history if we keep accepting that racism should be celebrated in American history,” according to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, PhD, Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard University [1]. Nellie Peyton, “As the Men of Stone Fall, Who Should Rise up and Take Their Place?,” news.trust.org, July 2, 2020, 33. This article was published on January 20, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org, a nonpartisan issue-information source. The Pros and Cons of Pulling Down Statues… - Medium [5], The Virginia statues still stood amid the protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, though they were tagged with graffiti then (and later removed on July 10, 2021). Sophia A. Nelson, “Opinion: Don't Take Down Confederate Monuments. MANISHA SINHA: It always astonished me as a Civil War historian to see statues commemorating Confederate generals and politicians who had literally committed treason against this country in order to uphold human bondage. So in both South Africa and Britain we have been saddled with these monuments to Rhodes. The standard traditionally applied is as follows: When deciding whom to commemorate — by statues, place names, monuments, holidays, currency, or coins — we select individuals who performed. Kehinde Wiley, Instagram.com, June 4, 2020, 34. John Daniel Davidson, “Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Right Where They Are,” thefederalist.com, Aug. 18, 2017, 37. In the US, violent protests in Charlottesville were sparked by a decision to remove from a park a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general in the American Civil War, because of the. But they don’t make history by themselves. They did not want to remember the civil war as an episode that brought devastation and humiliation. The American civil war ended in 1865. During the global Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, calls to take down the statues were met with citizens not only actively damaging or removing statues of Confederate figures, but targeting statues of slave-holding Founding Fathers in general, as well as historic monuments to Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. He donated significant amounts of money with the express desire that he be remembered for 4,000 years. A government advisory group, convened in 1999, decided that this fourth plinth should be a site for a rotating exhibition of contemporary sculpture. We’re only 120 years in, but his wish may well be granted. ASU Associate Professor of English Kathleen Lamp, a historian who specializes in the rhetoric of public art, including memorials and monuments, said such controversy is as old as time. Taney's bust was replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall. What does that say to black citizens of the state, or other citizens, or to younger generations?” [4], Of about 5,193 public statues of people in the United States, only 394 are of women, and far fewer are of black Americans or other people of color. But the brutality it takes to acquire it is all too often an orphan. Colleen Walsh, “Must We Allow Symbols of Racism on Public Land?,” harvard.edu, June 19, 2020, 44. As a student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, Arizona State University English Professor Natalie Diaz remembers seeing the Robert E. Lee monument every time her basketball team traveled to play the University of Richmond Spiders. So what do you think of moving into a broader swath of statues coming down and - or being targeted? They did, though, own slaves. Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox. Here are the proper bibliographic citations for this page according to four style manuals (in alphabetical order): [Editor's Note: The APA citation style requires double spacing within entries. For many years people have been arguing whether certain controversial monuments, such as statues, should be destroyed or removed. Richard Allen Greene, “King Leopold II Statues Are Being Removed in Belgium. Follow the long read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. Arguments For And Against Removing Confederate Statues - Ranker Given that the statues represented men on the losing side of the civil war, they certainly didn’t represent a consensus in the country as a whole. 23 December 2015 Jonathan Hutchinson/Flickr Rhodes's statue stands on the building named after him at Oriel College, Oxford By Finlo Rohrer BBC News. We should recognise that a range of features can ground a duty to remove a public statue. Clearly these statues – of Confederate soldiers in the South, or of Rhodes in South Africa and Oxford – do not represent a consensus now. Rhodes’ design. I once interviewed the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who confessed that his greatest fear was “that we are all suffering from amnesia”. This, however, was simply the most insistent attempt to find a human occupant for the plinth. The police killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests and reignited efforts across the U.S. to remove Confederate and other statues viewed as symbols of slavery and racism. Because, in short, they had no choice.”. But that’s incredibly problematic. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. [47] Do we exclude the achievements of these figures from public display because they displayed controversial behavior? Having been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game for the kind of moral panics that might make headlines in rightwing tabloids. Robert Draper, “Toppling Statues Is a First Step toward Ending Confederate Myths,” nationalgeographic.com, July 2, 2020, 24. Where do we draw a line? A common type of monuments in this situation are the Confederacy monuments. This is why they put them up in the first place; to affirm the centrality of white supremacy to Southern culture.” [1], Because the statues were intended to promote white supremacy, Richard Rose, President of Atlanta’s NAACP, argues, “You can’t contextualize racism or compromise on racism.” He states that the contextualization plaques added to Atlanta’s Confederate statues “establish that racism is valid.” [24], The statues still appeal to white supremacists, as demonstrated by the 2017 rally to defend the Lee and Jackson statues in Virginia and in Dylan Roof’s 2015 pre-massacre tour of plantations and a Confederate museum. To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, discussion questions, and ways to take action on the issue of whether historic statues should be taken down in the United States, go to ProCon.org. Never mind that it was supposed to be an equestrian statue and that the Queen Mother will not be remembered for riding horses. It is a living discipline, subject to excavation, evolution and maturation. There are, for example, lots of reasons to He freed that slave. 1. Download Full Image, New ASU video series makes relevant topics accessible, bite-sized for all, ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences celebrates faculty excellence with 2023 teaching awards, ASU Gammage hosts annual High School Musical Theatre Awards, Camp ASPIRE returns to empower students with essential life skills, ASU Women and Philanthropy funds 5 projects to 'build better futures', ASU study reveals 'work-life balance' for baboons, Pulitzer Prize-winning “Postcolonial Love Poem.”, Sun Devil Soccer's late comeback bid comes up short at Oregon State, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, School of International Letters and Cultures, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Let us not put up the people we ostensibly cherish so that they can be forgotten and ignored. Aishvarya Kavi, “Activists Push for Removal of Statue of Freed Slave Kneeling Before Lincoln,” nytimes.com, June 27, 2020, 20. Very few statues went up in the decades immediately after the war. But the only time I was ever caught in the tabloids’ crosshairs was not because of my denunciations of capitalism or racism, but because of a statue – or to be more precise, the absence of one. Nor is anyone seeking historical closure via the removal of a statue. Why every single statue should come down - The Guardian 3. Solved why should sratues be removed and be placed in - Chegg A defaced statue of Leopold II in Arlon, Belgium last year. So for instance, a lot of the sort of backlash against taking down Confederate statues was precisely this. )” Inside, an editorial asked whether our committee “would really respond to the national mood and agree a memorial in Trafalgar Square”. Activists are campaigning for a statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from an Oxford college. “And I also grew up hearing stories from my family or reading in archives the terrible things those men did to my people.”. No-one would suggest the retention of a statue of Hitler, Dresser notes. I think works like these serve the important function of public memorialisation, and many have the added benefit of being beautiful. When those values are not shared a debate needs to be started.". So for instance, I just read today that the Museum of Natural History wants to take down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt that has an African American man and a Native American man standing alongside him while he's astride on a horse. Squares with statues of ostensibly virtuous civil leaders at the center often came out of the City Beautiful movement. The SPLC reported at least 160 monuments were removed in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, more than the prior four years combined At last count, about 704 Confederate monuments remained on public land. Starting with the Reconstruction, we see them being used as a way to control public spaces and maintain white supremacy alongside other things like lynching, controlling school curriculums, etc. Are you. For example, a statue of black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass was damaged over the July 4, 2020 weekend in Rochester, New York. The South lost. Nobody is seriously challenging the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, because nobody seriously challenges the notion of women’s suffrage. [44] Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the white suffragists purposefully excluded black women. As such they represent the value system of the establishment at any given time that is then projected into the forever. [email protected], © 2023 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 4. When we’re talking about the Lee statue, it’s a really good example of what can happen when there is disagreement in the community about what its values are. Then you’re asking museums to do a lot of work they don’t want to do and maybe shouldn’t be doing. These are the people who made it happen. Let’s cover their anniversaries in the media and set them in tests. Should Washington and Jefferson monuments come down? - BBC News 325 N. LaSalle Street, Suite 200 Haunting images of deadly India train crash in 2002, Jason Derulo makes 'unsexy' investment in car wash. How is my country doing tackling climate change? His policies were also deadly for thousands of Native Americans. There's been a lot of debate around the issue of removing these statues recently. But rioting and vandalism are the wrong way to go about it. But closer to home, they didn’t even represent the general will of Richmond at the time. Jackson was a slave owner. The plaques can not only detail the history of slavery and the Civil War, but also the white segregationist history that promoted the building of such statues to promote the revisionist Lost Cause history. The states declared they had not been fighting to preserve slavery and, instead, “fashioned a set of ideas and arguments that they were fighting to hold back the massive industrialization of America, they were trying to preserve rural agrarian civilization,” according to David W. Blight, PhD, American History Professor at Yale University. To put up a statue you must own the land on which it stands and have the authority and means to do so. Rhodes believed the English were a "master race" and he was instrumental in the seizure of swathes of African land. Imperialist, businessman and politician who played a dominant role in southern Africa in the late 19th Century, driving the annexation of vast swathes of land, Born the son of a vicar in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, in 1853, first went to Africa at the age of 17; grew cotton with his brother in Natal, but moved into diamond mining, founding De Beers, which until recently controlled the global trade, Rhodes's bequest continues to finance scholarships bearing his name, allowing overseas students to come to Oxford University; most famous of these was probably Bill Clinton, Controversial even in his own time, Rhodes backed the disastrous Jameson Raid of 1895, in which a small British force tried to overthrow the gold-rich Transvaal Republic, helping prompt the Second Boer War, in which tens of thousands died. And you can’t buy that kind of love, no matter how much bronze you lather it in. So let us not burden future generations with the weight of our faulty memory and the lies of our partial mythology. As such, it represented a sanitised, partial and selective version of history, based less in fact than toxic nostalgia and melancholia. Valerie Strauss, “Christopher Columbus: 3 Things You Think He Did That He Didn’t,” washingtonpost.com, Oct. 14, 2013, 22. A poll in June. Taking them down is to censor, whitewash, and potentially forget that history. Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, “Martin Luther King Jr., Women, and the Possibility of Growth,” chicagoreporter.com, Jan. 18, 2019, 48. Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people. Monuments to controversial historical figures should remain Removing Confederate Monuments - 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory ... The substantial African American population of the city would hardly have been pleased to see them up there. While the statues of Rhodes may be disappearing from South Africa, the giant Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria has remained and - despite its background of Afrikaner nationalism being associated with the later rise of apartheid - been tolerated as a slice of history and an opportunity to discuss the wrongs as well as the rights of bygone eras. The history of the United States is multi-layered, complicated, and ever-evolving. Here's Why.,” nbcnews.com, June 1, 2017, 51. The ones who want to keep them up are generally the ones who would prefer we didn’t study what these people actually did. Yes, remove Columbus, Leopold II, Colston and Rhodes. Ted Mann, “Lincoln Statue With Kneeling Black Man Becomes Target of Protests,” wsj.com, June 25, 2020, 14. When is it right to remove a statue? Tue 1 Jun 2021 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 23 Jul 2021 07.00 EDT H aving been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The US is undergoing a cultural battle over symbols of the Confederate era that has seen a statue of Jefferson Davis removed from the University of Texas-Austin. Annie Grayer and Clare Foran, "Statue Honoring Mary McLeod Bethune Unveiled in Statuary Hall in US Capitol,". They’re models of civic behavior that we should all strive to. Whatever values they represent are the preserve of the establishment. My answer is "no," a firm "no." From a historical point of view. “Is nothing sacred?” they cry. We are much more beautiful.”. A statue of Cecil Rhodes being removed from the University of Cape Town campus, South Africa, 2015. ne of the greatest distractions when it comes to removing statues is the argument that to remove a statue is to erase history; that to change something about a statue is to tamper with history. And so what is known as the Great Man theory of history distorts how, why and by whom history is forged. When I interviewed Colvin 20 years ago, she was just getting by as a nurses’ aide and living in the Bronx, all but forgotten.
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