Recent monument controversies, in particular, have focused on the character of the people whom they depict, such as memorials to Robert E. Lee. But these monuments reveal more about who built them and why they did so than the figure they propose to honor.
Consider, for example, the controversy stirred over a memorial erected not in the former Confederacy to celebrate a military leader, but rather in a small Union town that honored a black man. In October 1931, descendants of Confederate veterans gathered in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., to unveil their memorial to Heyward Shepherd, a black man who died during the abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid. In 1867, former Confederates began calling for a memorial to Shepherd as a victim of Brown’s misguided attempt to destroy the South and incite civil war. For decades, nothing happened. But when the local black college dedicated a tablet to Brown in 1918, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) renewed their efforts to reclaim the commemorative landscape.
Although they discovered that Shepherd was a free man accidentally killed in the raid, they chose to celebrate him as a loyal and faithful slave who had refused to participate in Brown’s abolitionist plot. With the rising prominence of civil rights groups like the NAACP speaking out against white supremacy, this narrative of Shepherd offered an alternative: a loyal black man who accepted his place in a segregated society.
The monument divided the African American community and exposed different political philosophies on how to confront the pervasive economic and social system of white supremacy. While some hoped that the monument might increase interracial harmony by stressing the fidelity of a black man, others expressed outrage with the UDC’s manipulation of history.
At the dedication, Pearl Tatten, the black music director and daughter of a Union soldier, unexpectedly rose and offered a different narrative. Rather than framing John Brown as a radical abolitionist who killed a faithful slave, she heralded Brown as the valiant defender of freedom who “struck the first blow” against the tyranny of slavery for which her father and other Union soldiers fought.
Condemning the memorial as the “Uncle Tom Slave Monument,” black leaders and the black press followed her lead and launched blistering attacks. But they did not settle for words alone. If whites insisted upon “giving the Confederate point of view” in memorializing a so-called faithful slave, African Americans would counter with their own. The following year, they dedicated another memorial to Brown — one that depicted him as a hero whose traits challenged acceptable black behavior in the Jim Crow South.