“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” President Trump tweeted peevishly on Thursday. “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington? Jefferson? So foolish! Also … the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
Like he is about a lot of things, Trump is wrong about this. The monuments to Confederate leaders that started to come down in cities across the country after white supremacists used a Charlottesville statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as a rallying point to express their racist and anti-Semitic ideas about the state of the country are neither permanent features of our landscape nor honest and searching attempts to explore American history. No matter what secessionist emails from Trump’s personal lawyer suggest, it is possible to tell the difference between the men who fought for American independence and those who were traitors to their country, and we can do it without help from statues that emphasize the valor of the latter and downplay their betrayal. While it might be tempting to dismiss every element of these particular Trump tweets, there’s one misconception in particular that I want to focus on: that we can never “comparably” replace the beauty of statues that are coming down.
This moment, far from being some sort of national tragedy, is actually a tremendous opportunity to re-imagine our public spaces. Many Confederate monuments were erected as part of post-Civil War efforts to recast secession as a glorious Lost Cause. Taking them down, or moving them to museums and battlefields where they can be put in context, is just a start. It’s also time to think about what kind of monuments and public art might go up in their place, and who might be honored instead of figures such as Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens and Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the void these statues leave behind, we should erect a new, more honest and more genuinely glorious vision of what it means to be an American hero.
In some places, this important work is already underway. In 2015, I interviewed Joseph Riley, then the mayor of Charleston, S.C., about his decades-long efforts to change the way his city understood and presented its history to residents and visitors. In 1976, the city hung a portrait by Dorothy B. Wright of Denmark Vesey, a free black man who was hanged in 1822 for planning a slave revolt, in the Gaillard Auditorium, the city’s premiere performance space. And in 2014, Riley succeeded in getting a statue of Vesey, with his carpenter’s tools in his right hand and the Bible in his left, installed in the city’s Hampton Park. When I spoke to Riley, he told me that both the portrait and the statue were beautiful to him.
I agree with him on both an aesthetic and a political level. Seeing Vesey restored to a place of honor in his city through art that captures his dignity and determination affirms the nobility of his cause and cuts through depictions that portrayed him as “a brutal would-be killer of white people,” as Riley put it. Monuments can obscure history, as they have with the Confederacy, but they can restore the truth of the past, too. It’s not as if the United Daughters of the Confederacy are the only people with the savvy to design artistically and politically effective public art.
Riley isn’t alone. In recent days, the artist Kara Walker has suggested that she has ideas for how to repurpose the three-acre carving of Davis, Lee and Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia. The Democratic strategist Paul Begala pointed to the statue of Barbara Jordan, a leader in the civil rights movement who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, at the University of Texas at Austin campus, naming it “my kind of Southern statue.” This September, the city of Philadelphia is conducting a project called Monument Lab that involves staging temporary works around the city as a way of probing “what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?”
That’s a critically important question, not just for Philadelphia, but for all of us. As Confederate statues come down from their original places, we shouldn’t leave patches of dead grass and old plinths behind. We should fill the physical and moral spaces they leave in our parks, plazas and capital rotundas with images of true heroes, people who affirmed their country’s best values instead of betraying them.
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