There is No End to Remembering: Teaching About Memorials through Truth and Reconciliation

Mark Pearcy, Rider University ​ ​ ​

Abstract The debate over Confederate memorials and their role in public spaces has become a nationwide issue. While the issue is contentious, social studies teachers have a rare opportunity to engage students in a discussion over the process of memorialization, the nature of historical memory, and the narratives that we build around our national identity. This article describes using a “truth and reconciliation” process to determine the nature and potential fate of Confederate monuments and memorials in the United States.

Introduction

Over the first half of 2020, there has been a massive shift in public opinion regarding systemic racism and discrimination in the United States. Concurrently, an explosion of commentary, critique, and action about American public spaces—specifically, memorials and monuments commemorating the Confederate States of America has surfaced. After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, this movement to remove “perceived symbols of racism and oppression” across the country (Mervosh, Romero, & Tompkins, 2020) has resulted in the removal or destruction of over 40 monuments nationwide (“Recent Confederate Monument Removals,” 2020). These include statutes of Confederate figures like Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee (Ortiz, 2020, A17), as well as less notorious figures like John Sutter in California and the Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate in New Mexico (Mervosh, Romero, & Tompkins, 2020). In New York City, the Museum of Natural History announced that it would remove the “equestrian statue” of Theodore Roosevelt, dedicated in 1940 (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, n.d.), which depicts the former president on horseback, flanked by a Native American and a Black man, apparently an African (Pogrebin, 2020). Museum officials conceded that the portrayal of Roosevelt on horseback while flanked by two seemingly subservient figures is problematic under the best of conditions. The statue’s “hierarchical compositions” were the official reason given for its removal, but it would be hard to divorce that action from the current and ongoing national dialogue over racism, oppression, and what we choose to honor in our public spaces (Cotter, 2020).

For teachers, this dialogue represents an opportunity to engage students in a vibrant, critical debate over the process of memorialization and how we, as a society, embed a national narrative through monuments. This narrative should be the subject of continual reflection, as opposed to viewing memorials as “settled” history, beyond question or critique. The social studies classroom is uniquely situated for such a process—but teachers need effective pedagogical strategies to promote a positive learning experience for students, without the often toxic invective that has plagued our public discourse in recent years. This article describes a variety of methods for reimaging and repurposing Confederate monuments, primarily focusing on a “Truth and Reconciliation”

simulation process that empowers students to decide the conditions under which these markers should (or should not) be present in our public lives.

Confederate Memorials in the United States

It is jarring that Americans aren’t more bothered by the ubiquity of Confederate memorials and monuments in the United States. After all, the Confederacy wasn’t just a nation conceived as an institutional ​ ​ defense of slavery in America; it was also a government that waged war against the democratically elected government of the United States over four years, causing the most destructive war in American history which cost over six hundred thousand lives. The presence of these memorials indicates, on a national scale, that we have at least implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the Confederacy, politically and culturally. They are living confirmations of what Frederick Douglass described in 1871: “We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice” (Blight, 2018, p. 521).

The presence of these memorials is due, in large part, to the efforts of the United Daughters of the th Confederacy, an advocacy organization that, during the early part of the 20 ​ century, spearheaded an effort to ​ reshape the history of the Civil War. The UDC’s commitment to the “Lost Cause” view of the Confederacy meant defending the Ku Klux Klan as the heirs to, and defenders of “Old South” chivalry; romanticizing slavery as an essentially benevolent enterprise; and recasting the war itself as the South’s defense of its way of life from northern aggression (Blight, 2018; Staples, 2017). Between 1900 and 1920, over 400 monuments were built, primarily in the South, as part of this effort. A second wave of monument-building occurred between 1920 and 1940, as the UDC and its allies resisted Black Americans’ call for civil rights—a significant number of the monuments were erected on courthouse property, a not-so-subtle reminder to Black Americans of their second-class status in the “Jim Crow” South (Judt, 2019, para. 1; Woodley, 2019; Best, 2020; Cox, 2020). The UDC’s impact stretched from local municipalities to U.S. military bases, ten of which are named for Confederate officers (Thompson, 2015; Petraeus, 2020), and even reached the nation’s capital—the stained-glass windows of the National Cathedral, erected in 1963, included portrayals of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Confederate flag (Staples, 2017). The Southern Poverty Law Center, as of 2019, determined that there were almost 800 Confederate monuments in the U.S. (with more than 300 in just three states—Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina), as well as over 100 public K-12 schools named for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, or other Confederate icons (SPLC, 2019). Given the history of such monuments, alongside their ubiquity, it’s impossible to deny that they served as tools of White supremacy (Wallace-Wells, 2017).

What are memorials for?

Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the effort to remove these memorials has accelerated, and Americans are confronting the importance of these public markers in our civic life. Hite (2011) describes the concept of “historical (or ‘collective’) memory,” the ways in which “groups, collectivities, and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events” (para. 1). Historical memory is distinctively political—nations use the overt demonstration or display of monuments to “[develop] a national memory that exudes unity, continuity, stability, and purpose” (Hite, 2011, para. 4). In the U.S., museums, memorials, and monuments are all what Sodaro (2018) refers to as “mechanisms of political legitimation” which “[instill] in their visitors and societies democratic values by demonstrating the violence that results from the lack of these values” (p. 4). Of course, this doesn’t mean that the manner in which a monument is perceived by the general population can’t ever change; in fact, any attempt to consider the monuments immutable risks “losing their significance for the future” (Gessner, 2015, p. 7).

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The terms “monument” and “memorial” may seem interchangeable. Savage (2007) considers both the result of the practice of commemoration, the marking of “an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind” (p. 2). More prosaically, the Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes a “monument” as a “stone object that cannot be easily removed” (SPLC, 2019). Johnson (2001) distinguishes between the two terms by comparing and contrasting the Washington Monument in the U.S. capital with the Lincoln Memorial. The former he describes as “[aspiring] to the eternal and unchanging it stands for that which … made all things possible, it thus ought to be imposing and god-like”; while the Lincoln Memorial is a depiction of “the martyr who saved the union,” one which “inspires awe if the Washington is about birth and life, the Lincoln, … despite its palpable aura of death, signifies rebirth and the hope of new life, a second Founding” (Johnston, 2001, p. 4).

For teachers, lessons about monuments can create student engagement “[that is] not easily duplicated in the classroom” (Marcus & Levine, 2010, p. 131). Monuments are widespread, easily accessible, and generally free to visit—and such visits are innately interdisciplinary, as students interact with both a historical and artistic depiction of a given event, person, or idea (Uhrmacher & Tinkler, 2007, para. 2). In the current era of pandemic-related closures, visiting a monument may be out of the question for some teachers; but given the current speed with which memorials are being reconsidered or removed, monuments still present a rich teaching opportunity.

Teachers should be part of an important national conversation—what should be done with Confederate monuments? American monuments, in particular, can create a sense of passivity about potential removal or alteration—as Savage (1999) describes it, the very presence of a monument infers, for its viewers, a settled narrative of progress, closure, or reconciliation:

Public monuments instill a sense of historical closure. Memorials to heroes and events were not meant … to revive old struggles and debates but to put them to rest—to show how great men and their deeds had made the nation better and stronger. Commemoration was a process of condensing the moral lessons of history and fixing them in place for all time; this required that the object of commemoration be understood as a completed stage of history, safely nestled in a sealed-off past. (p. 1)

Teaching with memorials

Teachers can employ the following questions as a scaffold for student analysis of a given monument:

● Whose stories are being told? ● Whose stories are privileged (i.e., which social group’s power is justified by that story)? ● Whose are minimized? ● To what purpose? ● How does the memorialization process, for a given monument, reflect society’s view of itself?

The first four questions are generally self-explanatory; the final question, about the “process of memorialization,” refers to the story of how a memorial came into existence. Students should consider, in how the nation accounts for public spaces, what Marcus and Levine (2010) pose as central questions for such an inquiry: “who are we as Americans? What aspects of our heritage are important to remember, celebrate, and memorialize?” (p. 131)

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Teachers need to help students understand the motives of those who built the monuments—what purpose were they meant to serve, and for which audience? For instance, below is a statue in Fredericksburg, Virginia, commemorating a soldier named Richard Rowland Kirkland, who was mythologized as the “Angel of Marye’s Heights.”

The Richard Rowland Kirkland Monument. National Park Service. ​ ​

th This monument was built in 1963—well after the wave of memorials in the early 20 ​ century, which were ​ largely dedicated to perpetuating the UDC’s “Lost Cause” mythology. The Confederate soldier Kirkland allegedly leaped over a stone wall to bring water to wounded Union enemies. There is no evidence this ever happened (Danchik, 2017), but the sponsor of the statue, U.S. Representative Robert W. Hemphill, argued that the memorial was necessary because it would serve to inspire the youth of America:

our youth of today badly need heroes to emulate—daily headlines are not conducive to inspire them … with the patriotism of George Washington, Patrick Henry, or Robert E. Lee. They read of corruption in places, politicians whose corrupt practices fill them with disgust, clergymen who have disavowed the old principles of their faith and by their irreverent conduct have given aid and comfort to the Communists who are hopeful that the anti-Christ doctrine which they so fervently espouse is making progress—is it any wonder that youth is confused?...this is the kind of commemoration of such acts of valor that will bring our nation together (U.S. Congress, 1963, p. A22).

Clearly, the intent of the Kirkland monument was not to represent a historically verified event, or even to necessarily promote a revisionist view of the Southern cause. Students can examine and consider a sponsor or designer’s motive or influence in determining that marker’s contemporary fate. What we should aim to do with these memorials involves “[telling] a story that moves beyond the lionization of these figures” (Siegal, 2020).

For instance, students can consider the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Tennessee state capitol building in Nashville. The Sons of Confederate Veterans raised funds and commissioned a member’s wife to

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create the sculpture (along with the Joseph Johnston Camp of Nashville). The bust was formally installed in 1978 (Ebert, 2017). Despite having limited impact in the actual course or outcome of the Civil War—one historian characterizes him as “a minor player in some major battles and a major player in minor battles” (Royster, 1993, p. 126) –Nathan Bedford Forrest became a favorite mythic figure in the postwar era, attaining a reputation as a brilliant soldier and Southern loyalist. He was, in addition, a notorious slave trader, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and was responsible for one of the most brutal acts of the war—the massacre of Black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864 (Carney, 2001, p. 601). In the civil rights era, Forrest was often held up by “Lost Cause” supporters for his “cut-throat daring” and rags-to-riches biography; Forrest had been born into poverty but attained massive wealth in adulthood, in part through slavetrading (Carney, 2001, p. 610).

At the installment of the Forrest bust in the state capitol in 1978, the statue’s sponsor, U.S. Sen. Douglas Henry, asserted that the work shouldn’t be insulting to anyone, even though the bust’s unveiling was met by outrage by members of Nashville’s Black community. “I don’t think it’s an insult to anyone who recognizes a man who had commendable qualities,” Henry said. “In his time and place, Forrest was a man of compassion and humanity. Although times and circumstances change, the point I would like to emphasize is that the essential qualities of a good character do not change” (Ebert, 2017). Two years after it was installed, the Tennessee chapter of the Ku Klux Klan held a press conference to talk about their preparations for the upcoming “race war,” directly in front of the bust (Allison, 2020).

Students can determine the answers to the first four questions of the scaffold above, in considering the presence of the Forrest bust in the state capitol building. The final question—How does the process of ​ memorialization, in this case, reflect society’s view of itself?—allows students to analyze what Tennesseans want ​ this monument to represent, and to whom, and for what purpose. Is Nathan Bedford Forrest to be considered “heroic?” If so, why? Teachers can also present students with then-Governor Lamar Alexander’s 1979 quotation when asked about potentially removing the bust: “There are a lot of things that we don’t like in our past but that’s not a good reason to remove the bust” (Ebert, 2017). What reasons, then, would suffice to remove the bust?

In July 2020, the Tennessee State Capitol Commission voted to remove the Forrest sculpture, and to relocate it to the Tennessee State Museum. Though the commission had originally intended only to vote on the one depiction, it also decided to remove two other busts—Adm. David Farragut, a Union Navy officer during the Civil War, and Adm. Albert Greaves, a figure from the Spanish-American War and World War I. All three busts will be featured in an exhibit, at the state museum, “honoring Tennessee military heroes” (Allison, 2020). Students can address the possibility that the state of Tennessee may be drawing an equivalence between these three figures. What is the best option—removal, relocation, or retention? Or something else?

Truth and Reconciliation

The process that teachers can use with students, to address these questions, is modeled after the truth and reconciliation approach used by nations in the wake of social change or upheaval. The first truth commission was formed in Uganda in 1974, and more than thirty other nations have utilized similar models; the most famous is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated human rights abuses and violations under the apartheid government from 1960-1994 (Asghar, et al., 2013). ommissions are tasked with the job of “[rewriting] a nation’s history to provide a history of events that honors and respects survivors and provides citizens an understanding of how violence took place and who was responsible for human rights violations” (Inwood, 2017). They are mechanisms of transitional justice, which include all judicial and non-judicial measures ​ ​ to redress the legacy of human rights abuses (Asghar, et al., 2013). Khazei and Brooks (2020) have argued for such a national commission in the U.S. to expose racist structures and their impacts, as well as creating solutions, because ultimately, “talk is not enough” (p. 1). After the killing of George Floyd, U.S. Rep Barbara Lee of California proposed a commission which would “examine the effects of slavery, institutional racism, and discrimination against people of color, and how our history impacts laws and policies today” (Lee, 2020).

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These commissions rely largely on open testimony from those who have been wronged and those who have wronged them—for instance, in South Africa, where state agents who sought forgiveness had to “give a full account of the crimes they committed and identify their victims’ names, educating the population about how … low their society had sunk while apartheid lasted” (Táíwò, 2020). Reconciliation on a national scale requires “acknowledging and atoning for the wrong done — asking for their victims’ forgiveness while resolving never to repeat the wrongs and working to restore their victims to full humanity as fellow citizens” (Táíwò, 2020). This process has been used in the U.S., as well, at a local level. In 2004 in Greensboro, North Carolina, for instance, to deal with a 1979 event known as the “Greensboro Massacre,” in which demonstrators marching for economic and racial justice were murdered by local members of the Ku Klux Klan (Hollyday, 2004, p. 20).

Monuments, of course, cannot speak or ask for forgiveness; but through careful critical analysis, students can uncover why they were built, for what purpose, and how they might be reimagined to provide redress for those who have been injured, marginalized, or erased by their construction. The aim of the process is to come to a “consensual agreement on which reconciliation process would work best for the specific situation” (Asghar, et al., 2013, p. 4).

The Process

In the truth and reconciliation process, students will play one of two roles:

● The advocate, who speaks for or against the available options for each monument ​ ​ ● The moderator, who controls the agenda and makes decisions based on the advocates’ arguments ​ ​ Teachers are facilitators in this simulation; they introduce the topic, control the flow of the process, and lead the debriefing that follows (Asghar, et al., 2013, p. 4). Prior to the simulation, students will conduct research on the monuments under discussion, aiming to answer the central questions of monument analysis, described in the bullet points above: Whose stories are being told; whose stories are privileged (i.e., which social group’s power is justified by that story); whose are minimized; to what purpose; and how does the process of memorialization, in this case, reflect society’s view of itself? The goal of the simulation is to develop a set of guidelines, which will determine the final status of a monument. There are four possible outcomes.

Reconciliation simulation outcomes

Removal The memorial is permanently removed from public view (either to storage or disassembly)

Retention The memorial remains where it is, in its current state

Relocation The memorial is moved to a different location (e.g., a non-public space or a museum)

Reformulation The memorial is changed, altered, or reconceptualized, to present a new or different perspective

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At each step of this simulation, students will have to make critical decisions about a monument’s origins, its designer’s intentions, aesthetic implications, and which outcome best reflects the community’s desires and values. Most importantly, students must try to settle on an outcome that promotes racial unity, healing, and reconciliation.

For many Confederate memorials, students may instinctively opt for the most permanent option—removal, especially in those cases, like the Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans (removed by Mayor Mitch Landrieu in 2017), where the monument had no special significance to its location or residents. After all, as Mayor Landrieu pointed out, Lee was not from New Orleans, had never visited the city, and—other than his outsized role in “Lost Cause” mythology—had nothing to do with the community, either in the past or the present (Landrieu, 2017). Students may choose to relocate a monument, as the government of Tennessee did with the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest; though this option does have its own problematic elements, as housing a monument can put a strain on existing museums or historical organizations, forcing them to choose between preexisting displays to make room for relocated memorials.

Other challenging examples exist, for the purposes of classroom inquiry. Students may be asked to consider the Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman’s Memorial, in Washington, D.C.

The Emancipation or Freedman’s Memorial, Washington, D.C. National Park Service

In 1876, designer Thomas Ball used photographs of an escaped slave, Archer Alexander, while depicting Abraham Lincoln bestowing the gift of freedom upon a Black figure who was breaking the chains of servility. Though the monument was commissioned and paid for by prominent African-Americans after the Civil War, and its intention was to celebrate the abolition of slavery, it has been criticized in the current era as depicting Black people as passive recipients of freedom, rather than active agents of their own emancipation (Kole, 2020). Historian Arica L. Coleman critiqued the historical accuracy of the monument, stating “It gives the impression that we were just sitting around waiting for Lincoln to free us. That is not true. From the beginning of the war Black … people were like, ‘I’m not sitting here waiting to be freed.’” (Brown, 2020).

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What should be done with this monument? Students are likely to support the memorial’s intent, and possibly even elements of its design—but does the monument err in depicting Lincoln as the figure that emancipated the slaves? This is an especially intriguing angle for students to consider, in light of the fact that abolitionists of the era (like Frederick Douglass) criticized the president relentlessly in his own time for dithering on the abolition issue (Bright, 2018). Shortly after the unveiling of the Freedman’s Memorial, Douglass wrote a letter to a local paper criticizing it: “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not couchant [submissive on the ground] on his knees like a 4-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man” (White & Sandage, 2020).

Another example can be found at the University of Kentucky, where a mural illustrating the state’s history has come under fire for allegedly whitewashing Kentucky’s racial record. The mural is located in the university’s Memorial Hall and is a wall-sized fresco, made by Ann Rice O’Hanlon in 1934. This project was created under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, a New Deal initiative that employed local artists to create works for public buildings. The mural employs a series of vignettes, with white settlers progressing from building cabins to attending theatres—but at several spots in the mural, Black people are featured, segregated away from white Kentuckians, entertaining them with music and tending to tobacco crops. A Native American figure is also depicted from behind a tree, holding a tomahawk, seemingly threatening a white woman. Black students complained to the university’s president in 2015, calling the work a painful reminder of slavery and racism. The university tried to reckon with the mural’s depictions of minorities again in 2018. The administration commissioned an artist named Karyn Oliver to create a response to O’Hanlon’s mural. Called “Witness,” the work “reproduces the likenesses of the Black and Native American people in the mural and positions them on a dome covered with gold leaf so they appear to be floating like celestial beings” (Jacobs, 2020). Oliver has stated that her piece is directly dependent on the presence of the mural, and that removing it would be tantamount to neutering her work.

In addressing this memorial, sorting through the options will require students to employ thoughtfulness and creativity. The removal of the O’Hanlon mural—which itself is hardly on a par with Confederate statues, though it could certainly be traumatizing to a student today—would in effect negate the impact of the Oliver painting (at least, in the artist’s own view). Students may opt to try and “reformulate” the original work of art; but the university tried this with Oliver’s installation, and Black students at the University still objected. What further contextualization might be effective in mitigating the offensive elements of the O’Hanlon mural without its outright removal? Or should it be removed at all?

Social studies students may also be asked to consider how reconciliation can produce its own process of memorialization. A good example can be found in Duluth, Minnesota, where in June 1920, three Black circus workers were falsely accused of sexual assault and lynched by a white mob (Doss, 2014, p. 40). In recent years, the Duluth community began a long-delayed process of reckoning with the city’s role in these men’s death, beginning with the founding of an organization called Fostering Racial Justice through Healing and Reconciliation, the mission of which was to “to infuse the 1920 deaths into the consciousness of the community,” in order to “promote healing and reconciliation” (Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, 2018; Fedo, 2018, p. 4). The process of reconciliation, and the open dialogue over injury, blame, and guilt that accompanies it, ultimately led Duluth residents to create their own monument to the three murdered men, Elmer Jackson, Elias Clayton, and Isaac McGhie. The memorial’s developers and designers worked to “to infuse the 1920 deaths into the consciousness of the community,” (Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, 2018), to make prominent use of a quotation from Edmund Burke: “an event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent” (Fedo, 2018, p. 3). The express purpose of reconciliation—to reach “consensual agreement on which reconciliation process would work best for the specific situation” (Asghar, et al., 2013, p. 4)—led the citizens of Duluth to a specific act of memorialization.

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Through a truth and reconciliation process, students can, even hypothetically, advance the cause of “restorative justice,” which is distinct from our society’s historical emphasis on adversarial or retributive justice. The process, as described by the 2004 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, seeks to “heal relations between opposing sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and allowing for acknowledgement, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness and healing” (Asghar, et al., 2013, p. 11).

Perhaps the real value in a truth and reconciliation approach is in its potential to defuse what is often the primary stumbling block in such discussions, namely, defensiveness among White Americans who have either tied their own personal identity to such symbols, through community tradition or their personal heritage, or who feel unfairly blamed for the presence of these monuments in public spaces. Searles and Kalmoe (2020) conducted a survey in which they explored the attitudes of White southerners toward Confederate monuments and memorials. They wanted to see which argument for removal would resonate the most: a conventional argument against the monuments, focusing on how Black citizens saw them as symbolic of past injustices; or a similar message which included an overt comparison of Confederate and Nazi symbols, representing them as analogous. The authors found that White southerners (particularly women) were receptive to the first message but not the second, echoing similar studies’ findings (Hutchings, Walton, & Benjamin, 2010). Put another way, minds can be changed on this issue, but through historical empathy, creativity, and a diversity of possible solutions.

“Erasing” history?

Though the removal of monuments in 2020 has been a massive, nationwide affair, there are critics who argue that such actions are tantamount to an “erasure” of history. Defenders of (or, minimally, apologists for) Confederate monuments assert that, without such markers, we risk losing our sense of both national identity and historical memory. As one state official argued, “I don’t agree with all that history, of course, but it is what it is—it’s history” (Mervosh, Romero, & Tompkins, 2020). In reference to removing the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Tennessee capitol building, an advocate of relocating the work was a decision that "will not delete or erase history" (Allison, 2020). One historian worried about an effort to “sanitize our history,” in which case Americans might “run the risk of forgetting how we’ve progressed and changed over time Those who come … after us must understand that America was conceived in white supremacy and continues to suffer the consequences” (Morris, 2020). Others assert that keeping Confederate memorials intact doesn’t necessarily honor those who fought for or believed in the Southern cause; instead, they can serve as a reminder of their motives and how misplaced they are in today’s world (Smith, 2017; Timmerman, 2020).

There is no significant evidence or research supporting the claim that removing monuments causes a mass deterioration of historical memory. Indeed, characterizing the removal of a Confederate monument as “erasing” history, rather than “making” history (by correcting a warped historical narrative) requires more than a little philosophical sleight-of-hand (Perry, 2017). But the argument against a strictly binary solution to Confederate memorials—either retention or removal, no other options considered—is worth addressing. What we may need—and what teachers can provide—is an opportunity to reimagine what a particular memorial can be, or can become.

Julian Hayter, a history professor at the University of Richmond, argues that the current era is showcasing a sort of democratization of public historical memory—“ there are a lot of people now who are invested in … telling the story that historians have been laying down for decades” (Mervosh, Romero, & Tompkins, 2020). The telling of that story allows us to consider whether or not monuments can be remade into something valuable for our current society (Siegal, 2020).

This can be difficult for students, who may default to the most direct and expedient option—just get rid of it. But teachers can help students engage in creative, dynamic solutions for reimagining a monument that allows a community to show how it has changed over time, along with its shared values and beliefs. Consider, for

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example, this image of the Robert E. Lee statue, on Monument Avenue in downtown Richmond, Virginia. The statue was covered with graffiti by protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in the spring and summer of 2020.

Legal efforts to remove the Lee statue have bogged down, but in the meantime, protestors have repurposed the monument in creative ways. Two Richmond-based artists, Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui used a projector and a laptop with mapping software to project an image of George Floyd and the banners “Black Lives Matter” and “BLM” on the statue itself (Moreno, 2020; Weinstein, 2020). Several images available on the internet capture the repurposed monument, which are useful for presentation or student analysis. Since then, other images have been projected on the statue, including Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Trayvon Martin, a Florida teenager who was shot to death by a White man in 2012. This series of projections shows how memorials can be recontextualized or reimagined, rather than being uprooted. Writing in the Washington Post, Melody Barnes (2020) a longtime resident of Richmond, wrote recently how these tributes ​ create a meaningful option away from criticism of “erasing history”:

The last thing I want is history erased. Our history must be studied, absorbed and addressed if reconciliation and progress are in our future. That’s a far cry from a public celebration of a mythical past that imagines White Americans as the protagonists of the entire American story (Barnes, 2020).

Teachers can help students reimagine Confederate monuments by considering how artists can alter or reconfigure them. For instance, over the last several decades, a Polish artist named Krzysztof Wodiczko has been projecting videos onto statuary around the world, representing the perspectives of marginalized populations like veterans, survivors of the Hiroshima atomic blast, mothers of murdered children, and abused female workers. In 1998, for instance, Wodiczko took the videotaped narratives of bereaved mothers from Charlestown, Massachusetts, who had lost children to violent crime, and projected them for three consecutive nights on the Bunker Hill monument (Shulman, 1998, p. 14). Wodiczko claims that “monuments can be useful for the living sometimes it’s safer and easier for people to tell the truth in public” (Sheets, 2020, p. C15). In January … 2020, Wodiczko unveiled a project called Monument, in which he used video images of the faces and hands of 12 ​ ​ resettled refugees from war-torn nations like Syria, Guatemala, and Mozambique. These images were projected onto a statue of Admiral David Farragut, built in 1881 to commemorate the Civil War hero—the animated faces and recorded audio narratives tell the refugees’ personal stories of how they came to the United States (Sheets, 2020, C15). Wodiczko’s goal in creating installations like this is to “activate architecture, monuments and public space, calling into question our assumptions of their role in society and creating forums for challenging discussions [which] build upon controversies regarding the role of monuments and whose histories they can … and should commemorate” (“Krzysztof Wodiczko Opening January 2020,” 2020). In 2019, Wodiczko unveiled a project called A House Divided, in which he used the videotaped narratives of residents of Staten Island, New ​ ​ York, expressing deeply-held political convictions. These images were then projected onto two large statues of Abraham Lincoln, arranged to face each other “as if in conversation,” allowing a “frank exchange” about “the divergent political views among members of a singular community and, in some cases, from within the same family” (“Krzysztof Wodiczko: A House Divided ,” 2019). … This willingness to subvert a monument’s original purpose, and even its design, is a feature of what contemporary artists like Hew Locke and B.D. White call “playful vandalism” (Wood, 2006; Hoffman, 2017; “An Interview with B.D. White,” 2020). This involves intentional alteration or defacement of a public marker, but with the goal of “contributing something that is additive” (Healis, 2019). For instance, Locke’s project, “Natives and Colonials,” involves painting photographs of statues, to both add an aesthetic element that is often missing from traditional statuary, and to intentionally reconsider what role that monuments may play in a public space. Locke points out that most traditional statues and monuments are patterned after what is thought to be a classic “Greek” style, in white or unburnished marble; this is so, Locke explains, only because the paint used by the original sculptors faded over time. We have been left with a narrow definition of what a “monument” should look

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like, and Locke’s intention is to reinvent, in public spaces, what “purity” and “elegance” should mean in memorializing our history (Wood, 2006). Locke’s method of painting photographs is one that can be easily replicated in the classroom; and while the truth and reconciliation process can help us critically evaluate what a historical remembrance should involve, the idea of “playful vandalism” and reimagining a memorial can help students create new meaning from old monuments.

Conclusion: “We’re fighting ghosts”

The fate of Confederate memorials is not a new debate in the U.S., and its lingering state points to how difficult the issue has been. U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, the former Virginia governor, describes it as an ongoing, painful argument: “we’re fighting ghosts. There’s a lot of blood in the soil. There has been no resolution; we are still restless and torn” (Morris, 2020). A truth and reconciliation approach to analyzing monuments can offer a path, for teachers and students, to seek resolutions which can prove durable. In this new era of protest, activism, and sweeping change, this can allow us to engage in contentious discussions we, as a community, have long avoided. As the artist Nick Cave pointed out, “if you want to march about it, you have to talk about it” (O’Grady, 2020).

The provocative nature of this issue may cause social studies teachers across the country to hesitate before taking it on, despite its timeliness. But social studies classrooms are unique venues, in which public policy can be debated and analyzed in real time—and for many Americans, that venue represents the last sustained and directed exposure to social studies-based inquiry in their lives. It would be a disservice to our discipline, and more importantly, to our students, to steer away from issues that may prove divisive; in fact, it is effectively professional malpractice. “A ship in harbor is safe,” John Shedd famously said, “but that’s not what ships are built for” (Shedd, 1928, p. 63).

In the end, Americans may be less divided on this issue than may presently seem. The U.S. Army Memorial Program (2018), which is the official military guide for the memorial process, states that “memorializations will honor deceased heroes and other deceased distinguished individuals of all races in our society, and will present them as inspirations to their fellow Soldiers, employees, and other citizens” (p. 4). If a monument doesn’t inspire other citizens—if, instead, it makes them feel as if their nation rejects their presence, or minimizes their humanity—the answer about such a marker’s fate seems self-evident. Our urge to come to terms with our history shouldn’t be seen as a deficiency, or as a national flaw in our character; indeed, it is a shared American virtue.

th On the 75 a​ nniversary of the end of World War II, leaders from the once-warring nations gathered in ​ Berlin to commemorate the event. In the midst of multiple promises to “never forget” the violence, destruction, and death, the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, made a statement in which he uncovered the theme that powers a nation’s ability to reconceptualize its own historical memory. “There is no end to remembering,” he said—“There is no redemption from our history” (Tharoor, 2020). For our own memorials, teachers can help students see them as an ongoing debate in and about our public spaces—a process which can, hopefully, bring redemption.

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