Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2018
We should preserve unoccupied pedestals as the ruins they are — broken tributes to a morally bankrupt cause.
Dr. Kytle and Dr. Roberts are scholars of Civil War memory and alumni of the University of North Carolina.
Image from article, with caption: Police stand guard after the confederate statue known as Silent Sam was toppled by protesters on campus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., Monday, Aug. 20, 2018.
On Monday evening, a small group of protesters used a rope to pull down “Silent Sam,” the embattled Confederate statue that since 1913 had sat in a prominent spot on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They were part of a crowd of about 250 people who had marched through the center campus to the monument, unfurling banners, one of which read: “The whole world is watching. Which side are you on?”
But what should happen to the dislodged statue and the empty base?
As scholars of Civil War memory and U.N.C. alumni, we hope that the monument will be placed in a museum, where it can be preserved and accurately interpreted as a white supremacist symbol. We also believe the statue’s stone base should remain standing as a ruin — an empty pedestal laden with meaning.
U.N.C. administrators long resisted calls to take down “Silent Sam,” noting that state law tied their hands. But mounting criticism made their inaction untenable. Confederate monuments, after all, glorify men who fought to break apart the United States and create a nation dedicated to the maintenance of slavery. Yet Confederate monuments obscure this history, thereby perpetuating the Lost Cause lie that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War. In short, they’re bad history.
Most of these statues were erected during the Jim Crow era, when white Southerners reasserted their racial dominance. The statues sanctioned the return of white supremacy and the violence at its core. Consider how a Confederate veteran bragged to the audience at the dedication of “Silent Sam” in 1913: “One hundred yards from where we stand,” he said, “I horsewhipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds.”
We once believed that Confederate statutes [sic] should be left up but also placed in historical context. In 2015, we argued that they’re artifacts that teach us important lessons about the segregated South, not the Civil War. We urged that Confederate monuments be supplemented with plaques that clarified their historical evasions, Jim Crow origins and white supremacist function.
Over time, however, we lost our enthusiasm for this approach because it prioritizes pedagogical concerns over the experiences of African-American residents.
The white supremacist intent of these monuments, in other words, is not a relic of the past. The Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year underscored this point in blood. That horrifying demonstration in defense of the town’s Robert E. Lee statue ended in the death of a counterprotester and the injury of many more. Now that these monuments have become totems for a resurgent white nationalist movement, the case for their removal is more urgent.
Still, removing a statue from the physical space that determined its significance and potency is its own kind of loss.
White Southerners erected these monuments in city parks and on courthouse lawns and university campus quads. The prominence of the memorials shows how white Southerners etched racism into the earth with impunity.
How do we preserve evidence of that? How do we preserve evidence that these monuments were inescapable? How do we show that generations of African-Americans were forced to encounter them day after day? The perniciousness of location matters. This is why one of the best proposals for dealing with problematic monuments — removing them and placing them in museums, where they can be properly interpreted — is an imperfect solution.
Instead of complete removal, cities, towns and colleges like U.N.C. should consider taking down their Confederate statues but leaving the pedestals in place.
Historians such as Megan Kate Nelson and Kevin Levin have advocated this approach, or versions of it. Removing a monument but leaving behind an empty pedestal — shorn all original images and inscriptions — eliminates the offending tribute while still preserving a record of what these communities did and where they did it.
And the visual would stop people in their tracks. “What happened?” they might ask. “What used to be here? Why was it taken down?” Think of this proposal as a better version of contextualization. Text explaining the history of the monument and the decision to bring it down might still be added, but the pedestal would provide a more compelling commentary than even a new plaque.
That’s what happened in New Orleans, which removed its Confederate statues in the spring of 2017. The sight of the soaring pedestal that once held up Robert E. Lee dominates the downtown skyline, demanding attention. Yet over the next few months, officials and residents will determine the fate of the empty base.
Another example of this at Duke University which announced last week that it will not return its Lee statue to the space in the university chapel where it stood until 2017. As Duke’s president observed, the void left behind makes “a powerful statement about the past, the present and our values.”
The University of North Carolina should emulate its archrival and make the ruin a permanent part of the campus. The most effective way to commemorate the rise and fall of white supremacist monument-building is to preserve unoccupied pedestals as the ruins that they are — broken tributes to a morally bankrupt cause.
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, professors of history at California State University, Fresno, are the authors of “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy.”
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