The Statues Themselves Erase History

July 10, 2021 7:29 PM

Back in 2019, Molly Conger woke up early to provide a detailed twitter thread on the history of monuments in Charlottesville. It provides a fascinating bit of context as the Confederate statues of Lee and Jackson are finally removed from the city's public spaces.

The thread recounts a local tour led by Dr. Jalane Schmidt and Dr. Andrea Douglas. The statues, unsurprisingly, went up to assert white leadership in a town that was once majority black and their connection to other racial issues:

dr schmidt says after john henry james’ lynching, it was reported that “the community of charlottesville heartily approves” the murder. we know that’s not true - the community has half back at the time. “it says a lot about who was considered people.”

Coverage on todays removal of the statues WaPo or Yahoo

Many previouslies on Charlottesville, history, memory and statues.

posted by mark k (11 comments total)

Threadreader
posted by BobtheThief at 3:26 AM on July 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

TedXCharlottesville talk by Dr. Andrea Douglas .
posted by amanda at 7:24 AM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

This was a great little eye-opener on these statues. The context is super interesting and makes the statues and placement even more reprehensible.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 8:06 AM on July 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

Interesting story and speaks to how little "history" is attached to these "monuments."

(Apparently the author's Shift key is broken. That really makes the thread painful to read.)
posted by SPrintF at 8:59 AM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Today I learned that a statue of Johnny Appleseed at an Ohio high school was renamed because city officials felt he was too eccentric to be a good role model for students. If a statue of Johnny Appleseed is too controversial, then why are we even discussing whether or not to keep statues of racist traitors?
posted by TedW at 1:12 PM on July 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

Just your regularly scheduled reminder that Robert E. Lee himself opposed Confederate war monuments:

“I think it wiser,” the retired military leader wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

“All I think that can now be done,” he wrote in 1866, “is … to protect the graves [and] mark the last resting places of those who have fallen…”

I would go slightly further and argue that the battlefield monuments erected by veterans' groups in the years immediately following the war, and which frequently are inscribed with the names of fallen soldiers, are a sort of xenotaph and deserve preservation (not that there has really been any effort to take them down that I'm aware of), but anything erected by third parties in places unrelated to the war—and especially those erected during the Jim Crow era—should be moved to some sort of park, like many post-Soviet countries did with their various Stalinalia.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:38 PM on July 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Still waiting for the sale of lottery tickets,
for the chance to fire an artillery shell at the Davis/Lee/Jackson carving on the side of Stone Mountain, GA.
[I think using a Sherman tank, on Juneteenth, would be appropriate.]
posted by bartleby at 7:12 PM on July 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

Maybe they can use that space to put up a statue of a winner, rather than a disgraced US Army colonel who was responsible for a lot of US military deaths.
posted by rmd1023 at 8:47 AM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Molly Conger is a terrific follow on Twitter. Not only is she a clear-headed and knowledgeable authority on white supremacists and right wing extremists, but she's funny, and her dachshunds are adorable.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:01 AM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

DirtyOldTown, heartily seconded! I follow her and also support her Patreon in a small way. I lived in C’Ville for two short summers and Molly represents the best of what I remember: caring, funny, engaged, and absolutely not here for your shit.
posted by epj at 1:09 PM on July 12, 2021

Apparently the statues were easier to move than anticipated, so the statue removal contractors asked the city if they had any other statues they needed moved. And so a racist monument to a different era also got moved - a statue of Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. It was moved to the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center, which will put it in context. And not on a pedestal.
posted by gingerbeer at 7:06 PM on July 16, 2021 [4 favorites]