POV: The Controversy over Confederate Civil War Monuments
We need to free our public spaces of racist constructions of history
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
As a historian and preservationist, I absolutely believe in the power of historic buildings, landscapes, and monuments to connect people to the past. Their palpable three-dimensional character engages and envelops, often drawing upon all of our human senses in ways that written narratives or historic images or told stories do not. Preserved places and material things bear authentic witness to history, a quality not as fully present in other forms of historical narration. Familiar landmarks help people feel situated in place, locality, and history. Historic places and monuments also have tremendous capacity for cultivating critical thinking about society and politics, for seeing the past in ways that can inform acts of citizenship devoted to shaping the future. These ideas stand at the core of my teaching and preservation advocacy.
I lived in Charlottesville Va., for over two decades, directing the historic preservation program at the University of Virginia. The early 20th-century Confederate monuments in that town interested me; at one point they actually provided the objects of my research and writing. This is what I learned. Paul Goodloe McIntire had commissioned the major civic monuments in Charlottesville. McIntire, the son of a local pharmacist, grew rich working at Chicago’s Board of Trade and New York’s Stock Exchange. Returning to Charlottesville, he became a one-man City Beautiful Movement; he built prominent statues of Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Shoshone guide Sacagawea, and Confederate officers Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. McIntire also gave the city two major public parks, one for whites and one for African Americans. He funded and built the public library and endowed art, business, and history departments at the University of Virginia.
McIntire’s Civil War monuments had an immediate and obvious context. In 1912, building on established Jim Crow laws, the city council of Charlottesville unanimously passed a segregation ordinance, making it illegal for whites to move onto blocks that were majority black or for African Americans to move onto majority white blocks. At the time, the entire row of residences facing the west side of Court House Square had become occupied by African Americans. City officials felt this constituted a blight on their civic landscape. They planned a public school there, which would permit them to condemn and demolish the black residences. School officials balked at a school adjacent to the court and jail. Then McIntire simply purchased and demolished every house on the block. He commissioned sculptor Charles Keck to design the distinguished Jackson equestrian statue for the site. The intent was plain. The project reasserted Court House Square as white civic space. It monumentalized the Civil War’s effort to maintain chattel slavery in a town that by the 1920s was made up of 28 percent African Americans. Born in 1860, McIntire hardly experienced the Civil War; however, his father owned eight slaves and McIntire endorsed segregation. He sympathized with one side in the Civil War, and he put the white Southern narrative into the saddle with his money and his monuments. For McIntire, heritage and the current politics of white supremacy went hand in hand.
Living in Charlottesville, I felt that the city could learn from McIntire’s Confederate memorials. In the face of efforts to remove the monuments, I argued that they should be left in place. I’ve felt that what we needed were counter-monuments. When the Occupy Movement settled into Lee Park and when the Black Lives Matter Movement protested there, they revealed the power of counterpoints. But their occupation and protests were only fleeting in time and space. I argued for permanent monuments to such Americans as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), Barack Obama, and lesser known people of color to provide a counter-narrative and corrective to the Confederate portrayal of history and the celebration of treason. They should occupy the public realm as powerfully and as politically as the monuments that McIntire built in Charlottesville.
In nearby Richmond, Va., a 15-foot high, half-ton bronze Slavery Reconciliation Statue was unveiled in 2007. Identical monuments in Liverpool, England, and in Benin, West Africa, highlighted three key locales in the 18th-century triangular trade in enslaved people. Sadly, the Richmond monument stands on a leftover plot in the shadow of an elevated section of Interstate 95, where it passes through downtown. That powerful statue should have been placed in front of every single Confederate monument, all five of them, that lines Richmond’s famous Monument Avenue—a 1.5-mile section of boulevard west of downtown.
This was my view. Then on August 22, Vice President Mike Pence declared on Fox and Friends, “I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments. What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history.” Nothing like the vice president seemingly endorsing my view to get me to rethink. What is the chance that Mike Pence would support public funds to monumentalize the African American figures above or to provide a counter-narrative? Next to nil. What are the chances that he would support my view that counter-monuments need physical proximity to, and physical primacy over, the Confederate monuments? Next to nil. Confederate monuments have dominated the Southern public realm for a century. Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan rallying to these monuments powerfully reminds us of their white supremacist origins.
Without meaningful counter-monuments, we now need to get about the business of freeing our public realm of racist constructions of history. In a recent statement on the issue, the American Historical Association declared, “To remove such monuments is neither to ‘change’ history nor ‘erase’ it. What changes with such removals is what American communities decide is worthy of civic honor.” The president and vice president have made clear that they stand with Paul Goodloe McIntire. I believe that local communities should freely remake their public realms to honor such values as equity, inclusion, and democracy.
Daniel Bluestone, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of history of art and architecture and Preservation Studies program director and author of Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation, can be reached at dblues@bu.edu.
“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact Rich Barlow at barlowr@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.