Lies Across America:  What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Three events, each a tragedy of race relations, prompted rapid change in our public history. On June 27, 2015, a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at a famed black church in Charleston, SC On August 12, 2017, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, degenerated into a riot, including the murder of Heather Heyer. Then on May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, an African American, strangling him to death on camera. Each prompted the public and local officials to rethink Confederate monuments and other historical sites that celebrated white supremacy. Lies Across America tells of the impact of the first two; this box tells of changes since that book came out, in August of 2019.

• Page 10 has a photo and discussion of Andrew Jackson in NOLA. That monument plays a useful role in Jackson Square. However, the same statue opposite the White House came under duress in June, 2020. Its days may be numbered, although there is considerable police presence at that location.
• 37, the hieratic scale of Teddy Roosevelt above the Native American and African prompted the removal of all three from the American Museum of Natural History in NYC in the summer of 2020. Perhaps they might wind up inside the museum, where they could illustrate the point that the museum has always displayed people in problematic ways reflecting the eugenic theory that whites are superior to other races.
• 49, both statues, the 1889 pensive Alexandria Confederate monument and “Lee” in Richmond, came down, summer 2020. So did all the Confederate monuments on Monument Ave. in Richmond. The 1889 statue is slated for a nearby Confederate cemetery, I believe. Good historical markers are urgently needed in both locales to tell what was here, when it went up, why, when it came down, and why.
• 51, I believe the plaque was removed even before George Floyd’s death in 2020 prompted examination of Confederate sites across America.
• Item #3, Columbus has been removed from the California state capitol. He has also been toppled in Baltimore and thrown into Baltimore harbor. Governments removed Columbus in Bridgeport, CT; Philadelphia; Columbus, OH; and several other cities.
• #19, Oñate statue was removed by authorities early in the 2020 summer, to forestall further removal of his foot or other reactions.
• #25, a few “Spanish-American War” monuments that really commemorate our war against the Philippines were vandalized in 2020, but none were removed, to my knowledge.
• #34, In early summer, 2020, the statue of Orville Hubbard was given to his family to be displayed at his grave if they so desired.
• #45, “The Good Darky,” got moved to the other end of the drive at L.S.U.’s museum, but astonishingly, the museum still supplies no context. They seem content simply to display this obsequious ex-slave without noting that he is a symbol of black acquiescence to the Nadir of race relations.
• #52, Nathan Bedford Forrest continues to lose ground, literally. His monument in Memphis is gone; “his” park has been renamed Health Sciences Park. As of July, 2020, his bust is probably coming down from inside the Capitol in Nashville. His status and statues are tenuous in some other locations in Tennessee. Georgia, and Alabama.
• #56, “To the Loyal Slaves.” All four monuments to the Confederacy in Confederate Park in Ft. Mill, SC, drew attention from BLM protesters in June, 2020. However, the protests were small, and South Carolina’s Heritage Act, which requires a supermajority of the legislature to change war memorials, may prevent any removal or contextualization.
• #60, Alexandria Confederate Monument, see entry for p. 49, supra.
• #64, A Segway tour company offers a two-hour Segway tour of Lincoln’s walk! That hardly equals a walk indicated with interesting signage on the landscape, but it’s a start.
• #69, NPS has added much more material on slavery to its on-line treatment of Hampton. Staff are also reaching out to nearby descendants of enslaved workers. While it does not yet approach the rich interpretation of Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, the plantation has at last found “history to tell.” Hopefully during the extended sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, Hampton will tell of the political, economic, and social lives of its workers in the 1870s. To be sure, Maryland did not go through Reconstruction as a political process, but like the rest of the North, it was touched and then “un-touched” by the ideological currents unleashed in those years.