Commentary: The union declares victory in the Civil War.
That might be a headline not for 1865, but for 2020.
One hundred and fifty-five years after Jefferson Davis was captured, a statue commemorating him was knocked down in Virginia Wednesday night.
Monuments all over the south started coming down this month, as people continue to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a long list of people of color who have died violently in police custody or languish in our prisons.
Arguments about displaying the familiar confederate battle flag and monuments to the short-lived Confederate States of America are not new, yet something feels different.
The Marines, followed by the Navy, banned displays of the battle flag, and then NASCAR did it.
And this week, retired Army General David Petraeus wrote an essay for The Atlantic arguing that the names of confederate leaders should be stripped from U.S. military installations. I confess I learned from his essay that 10 U.S. Army bases are named after officers who fought against the United States in the Civil War.
Fort Bragg? Named for a confederate general – and a poor one, to boot.
Fort Benning: named for another confederate general.
Fort Polk: named for an Episcopalian bishop who disrobed to fight for the confederacy.
Fort Gordon: named for still another confederate general, and later a United States senator, also may have been a higher-up in the Ku Klux Klan, though he denied that.
I didn’t know any of this, and to read Petraeus’s piece, it sounds like a lot of people on active duty don’t know it either. Do they?
History and monuments are not the same thing. Monuments stare down at us from pedestals. You can knock them over but their subjects don’t disappear from history. Many of the monuments coming down this month were erected in the 20th century. They are a way of telling our story in our own time. We may erect statues and name high schools after people in this century who don’t seem worth honoring in a later century.
And these are not merely figures who fought against the United States; they fought on behalf of something. They were a part of ourselves that fought hard for white supremacy. We defeated their fledgling republic but not their idea that all men are not created equal.
This week’s developments suggest we might be turning a corner and, slowly, confronting the idea of white supremacy and how it functions in our institutions and our economy. And all, by the way, led by people of color and local communities, not by political saviors.
How exhilarating it is. How refreshing to look on possibility.