As people have gathered across the country to oppose police violence, including the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, they have targeted statues, monuments, and buildings commemorating white supremacy. In Philadelphia, protestors defaced a statue of Frank Rizzo, the city’s segregationist mayor and police commissioner. In Birmingham, they toppled a likeness of Confederate veteran and Alabama banker Charles Linn and set fire to another of slaveowning president Thomas Jefferson.
In Richmond, they graffitied monuments of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and J.E.B. Stuart with slogans like “No More White Supremacy,” “End Police Brutality,” and “ACAB.” Down the street from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, flames burned inside the national headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the group responsible for erecting dozens of Confederate public shrines. In Nashville, a crowd pulled down a statue of newspaper editor Edward Carmack, a vocal critic of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells.
Across the United States, protestors are explicitly linking the nation’s history of white supremacy with contemporary police brutality. While some commentators condemn these acts as destructive, protestors understand that it is impossible to create a more equitable society as long as Confederates, segregationists, and other white supremacists are valorized in public spaces. Other opponents decry vandalism as an effort to “erase” history. Yet iconoclasm is as much an act of creation as destruction. With paint, rope, and fire as well as signs, chants, and memorials, anti-racist protestors are enacting a more participatory and more democratic historical commemoration.
Historical memory matters because it is both a gauge and modifier of power. Public monuments have always been sharply politicized and fiercely contested by common people because they grasp the stakes. Commemoration might derive primarily from social and material conditions, rather than the other way around, but memories are not mere perceptions. Rather, collective remembrance is bound to productive relations and political outcomes. Likewise, popular representations of the past are critical to consciousness-raising, organizing, and the capacity for solidarity. As we confront oppressive structures, our historical memory must aspire to be truly democratic.
In contrast, victory obelisks, allegorical martial figures, and statues to generals, politicians, and business elites do not measure up. Inspiring reverence and eliciting emotional, often uncritical reaction, so-called heroic figures cast in stone and bronze reinforce a monumental democracy that assumes great individuals should lead and the rest should follow. Vertical, towering, and celebratory, monuments reflect and reinforce prevailing arrangements of power. They fetishize hierarchy and individualism at the expense of the collective and assume that history is made by “great” men and, far more rarely, women.