A two-story-tall statue of the antebellum white supremacist Senator John C. Calhoun looms over one of Charleston, South Carolina’s main thoroughfares — Calhoun Street. As is true throughout the South, the Confederacy is memorialized redundantly and everywhere.
Charleston’s emotional reaction to the massacre of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June immediately crystalized into a movement to remove one of the most prominent of those memorials. After half a century flying on the state house grounds in Columbia as a giant flip-off to the civil rights movement, the Confederate battle flag was taken down and stored in the “relics room” at a museum nearby. In doing so, South Carolina has set off the most honest reappraisal of the region’s history since Robert E. Lee rode off from Appomattox.
Now talk has moved on, and the questions are coming fast: Should we rename Calhoun Street? Take down the Calhoun statue? Should Ole Miss change its nickname – it’s a slave term of affection for his female owner? Should the statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and a traitor to the United States, be removed from the campus of the University of Texas in Austin? Should we sandblast those 90-foot carvings of Lee, Davis and General Stonewall Jackson off Stone Mountain?
Even amid the widespread calls for re-namings and statute removals, you can also hear the caution on this. Some worry that citizens of Main Street America might look too much like those Lenin-toppling mobs throughout Russia in the early 1990s.
Both sides make a strong point. Too much of the South’s Confederate triumphalism is memorialized in those monuments and street names. But promiscuously renaming boulevards and relocating statues may repeat the same historical flaw. The unacknowledged intent of the last century and a half of Confederate revisionism was to marginalize the issue of slavery as the real cause of the Civil War, and substitute either false arguments (tariffs) or euphemism (“states’ rights”).
The elimination of the totems of Confederate revisionism might make a lot of people more comfortable. But it relies on essentially the same idea: disappearing the horror, brutality and fact of slavery.
So here is my proposal: Let’s not do that.
We are actually in one of those rare moments in American culture where we have stumbled into an actual public debate about public history. Let’s think about these statues, street names and memorials. First, the statues. Obviously, some of them need to come down right away.