Teaching About Memorials Through Truth and Reconciliation
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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). 1 Ohio Social Studies Review, Volume 57, Issue 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