This is the first post in the Justice and Liberty Blog. You’ll find an explanation of the blog and a bit of the blogger’s background at “About Justice and Liberty.”
I have a deep respect for history. My respect for history demands that we remove statues of Confederate leaders from places of honor and remove the names of Confederate generals from military facilities.
History knows that Black people were property in this country for over 200 years. They were bought and sold, beaten and raped, worked to the point of endurance and beyond. History knows the family separation policy of slavery: slaveholders routinely broke up families by selling a father, a mother, children to distant buyers. History knows that a Black person had no rights – including no right to life itself – beyond what the owner was willing to grant. The leaders of the Confederacy believed that all of this was right and proper – they said so repeatedly and unequivocally. Indeed they believed that God had ordained their system; for them, their right to subjugate Black people was what we call today a sincerely held religious belief.
To preserve and expand slavery, the Confederate leaders made war against this country. History knows the sacrifices made to preserve the Union, the ambivalence shown by President Lincoln about abolishing slavery, and the end result — that slavery was abolished and that the nation promised the former slaves “a new birth of freedom.”
After the War, Congress and the States added the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Amendment 13 abolishes slavery. Amendment 15 says that no citizen can be denied the right to vote by the Federal government or any State because of race, color, or having been a slave. Amendment 14 says that States may not take life, liberty or property without due process of law, and may not deny to any person equal protection of the laws. Their adoption was among the great achievements of justice in American history.
The reaction from those who opposed granting any rights to Black people, to adopting the “Reconstruction Amendments” and to enabling former slaves to exercise their rights, was furious. There was a massive effort to “erase” the Reconstruction Amendments from history, to “cancel” them and the rights they granted, and to preserve the power of white people to dominate Black people, individually and collectively.
This effort included the so-called Jim Crow laws, which denied rights and cemented Black people’s status as second (at best) class citizens. It included the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings, which were tolerated when they were not encouraged by many States, in defiance of the 14th Amendment. And it included a decades-long cultural drive to redefine the Confederacy, to erase from history slavery and the South’s choice of secession and war to preserve slavery, and to erase the cultural and political will that drove the enactment and ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments.
.Putting someone on a pedestal, as a figure of speech, means to idealize someone, to treat him or her as without faults. Leading advocates of the total subjugation of Black people were literally put on pedestals across the South and beyond. Erecting the statues that we debate today and naming forts for Confederate officers were at the core of the cultural drive to legitimize white supremacy.
So it’s a bit rich to criticize the effort to remove statues and rename forts as an effort to erase history. Keeping the Confederate monuments as and where they are, keeping names of Confederate generals on forts of the army against which they fought, is not preservation. It is an effort to whitewash history, to hide shameful parts of our past under a glorious veneer.
In the case of Fort Benning, that veneer covers General Benning’s speech at the 1861 secession convention, when he said: “Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for … black governors, black legislatures, black juries?”
We should certainly remember the Confederacy. We should remember Jim Crow. We should remember the denial of the right to vote, the lynchings, segregation. We should remember that “separate but equal” was a farcical lie; that segregation was not simply a system of making people live separately; it was a system of subjugation.
How should this central and difficult part of the American story be preserved in the people’s memory? Germany has faced a similar question since the end of World War II. It has been important to Germans to preserve and to learn from the history of the Nazi era. But if you go there today you will not see statues of Hitler, Goebbels, or Himmler in parks or near government buildings. You will not see Nazi flags or banners. You will not see any Nazi leader commemorated in a place of honor.
You will be able to go to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau and see memorials to the victims of these concentration, labor and extermination camps. You will be able to go to the site of Himmler’s Gestapo and SS headquarters and see the Topography of Terror Museum and Documentation Center. You will be able to find the history of the Third Reich and its horrors all over Germany, but you will not see its leaders or its ideology glorified.
What can we learn from the Germans; how should we preserve American history?
We could place the statues on plantation-museums that show what life was like for slaves and how fiercely the South fought to preserve slavery. We could place them in museums of the Jim Crow era, alongside the speeches and writings of these men, and of those who placed the statues in public squares.
We could connect this history to the present, to today’s white supremacists and their sympathizers. To the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and others. The desire for mastery over Black people (often along with Jewish people and others) runs deep in our society. The desire that Black people should “know their place,” should not get ahead in the world, should be corralled and controlled like dangerous beasts is alive and emboldened.
So let us not erase history or these monuments. Let us not erase the history of the Reconstruction Amendments or other efforts of many Americans to bend the arc of history toward justice. Far from it. Let us preserve and teach an honest history.
Let us find the will, and the way, to safeguard our history, to regret and learn from its shameful episodes, and to celebrate and emulate the laudable. In this way, we will truly honor history.
© 2020 David B. Jaffe
Well done, David.
Your phrase, “show…how fiercely the South fought to preserve slavery” is a powerful one and one that depresses me for the following reason: Over the years, different high school students have been hired to work the front desk at the yoga studio where I sometimes teach. Sooner or later, each has brought an American History textbook to study between classes. I’ve asked each one what they are told about the cause of the Civil War. The answer is either, “it’s unclear” or “states’ rights”. I send them to the Mississippi Articles of Secession and invariably they are stunned. Millions upon millions of kids have been taught the cover up as truth. Let’s bring down the statues; let’s also revamp the textbooks.
David….looking forward to reading your blog and agree it is necessary to sometimes be radically sensible…the world is certainly lacking sorely in that regard..if common sense was more common the world might be in better shape…happy writing.