Battles over racist symbols and monuments spread
11th September 2017 · 0 Comments
Several weeks after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. ended in the death of a 32-year-old woman and injuries to 20 others, the nation continues to find itself embroiled in battles over the use of Confederate and white supremacist symbols and monuments in public spaces.
While the threat of more deadly clashes between white supremacists and counter-protesters has compelled elected officials from both major parties to move with deliberate speed to remove these monuments which some call offensive from pubic spaces, President Donald Trump’s defense of Confederate monuments and slaveholding founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson has also stirred the pot and added to already-heightened racial tensions.
In New York City’s Central Park, someone vandalized the statue of a prominent doctor who experimented on enslaved Africans less than a week after a New York City Councilmember called for the removal of the Dr. J. Marion Sims statue.
It was reported Aug. 26 that someone spray-painted the word “racist” on the controversial statue, which was from another park to Central Park in 1934.
In addition to marking up the back of the statue, the vandal covered its eyes and neck in red paint.
“I just love seeing this because it’s people in the streets. It’s the people taking it into their own hands,” said Danny Fisher, 20, a musician living in the Upper West Side.
Not everyone walking past the defaced monument on E. 103rd St. was pleased by what they saw.
“It’s crazy. It’s terrible,” said Irving Lipschitz, 70, a salesman from the Upper East Side. “If I got up there and cleaned it, would I be arrested?” he said.
Hailed as the father of modern gynecology, Sims’ reputation has taken a hit amid revelations that he performed operations on enslaved women without getting their consent or giving them anesthesia.
The monument has come under increased scrutiny following the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12. The demonstration was organized to protest the removal of a statue of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The Sims monument — which was moved from Bryant Park to the edge of Central Park in 1934 — is among the statues that a city commission is reviewing for possible removal.
Mayor de Blasio announced last month plans for the 90-day review of “symbols of hate on city property.”
Councilwoman Jessica Mark-Viverito described Sims’ work as a “stain on our nation’s history” that should be vilified rather than honored.
“We must send a definitive message that the despicable acts of James Marion Sims are repugnant and reprehensible,” Mark-Viverito said.
Strolling past the monument on Aug. 26, St. John’s University law professor Cheryl Wade said she welcomed its defacement because it would likely draw more people into the debate over Sims’ contributions.
“If it inspires people to actually look for the truth and find the truth, I’m so happy it happened,” said Wade.
With a new school year dawning, education officials are grappling with whether to remove the names, images and statues of Confederate figures from public schools — especially since some are now filled with students of color.
The violence on Charlottesville, Va. over a Robert E. Lee statue is giving school officials a new reason to reconsider whether it’s appropriate for more than 100 schools to be named after Confederate generals and politicians from the Old South.
“It does not make sense to have schools named after individuals who were directly connected to that dark past, and force kids in Dallas, a majority-minority population, to walk into these schools every day and have to face this past every single day,” Miguel Solis, former board president and current board member of the Dallas Independent School District, told The Associated Press.
Dallas, along with other cities, began moving to change Confederate names and imagery after white nationalist and Confederate enthusiast Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.
But the reviews gained momentum after the Aug. 12 protest by white supremacists in Charlottesville, which left one counter-protester dead.
“We don’t tolerate hate or discrimination of any form, and we are committed to providing an educational environment where all students can feel safe and welcomed at school,” said Superintendent Aurora Lora in Oklahoma City, where there are four schools named after Confederate generals.
“We want to think about the people our buildings are named after and whether they represent the values we as a district have at this time,” Lora said.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are at least 109 public schools named after Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or other Confederate icons in the United States. Of those, “27 have student populations that are majority African-American, and 10 have African-American populations of over 90 percent,” according to the SPLC’s 2016 report.
Several school names were changed, or new schools were built and named after Confederates “during the era of white resistance to equality,” the SPLC report said.
Solis said he has support for his effort to change school names in Dallas, but “that’s not to say that there haven’t been people who have been very upset because they believe either the history needs to be preserved, or they align the philosophy of the Confederacy or neo-Nazis.”
The South has the majority of Confederate-named public schools in the country.
In Falls Church, Virginia, the school board has voted to rename J.E.B. Stuart High School. Stuart was a slaveholding Confederate general who was mortally wounded in an 1864 battle. In Montgomery, Alabama, the school board is looking at moving Lee’s statue from the front of majority-Black Robert E. Lee High School.
In Arlington, Virginia, Robert E. Lee’s hometown, there is a move now to rename Washington-Lee High School. “It is time to talk about the values these names reflect and the messages we are sending to our children,” Barbara Kanninen, Arlington school board chair, said in a statement.
At some schools, the push for change starts with the students. In Greenville, South Carolina, student Asha Marie started a Change.org petition to rename Wade Hampton High School. Hampton was a Confederate cavalry commander during the Civil War and was later elected governor of South Carolina and criticized the Reconstruction era which put Black leaders in political office.
“Racism, bigotry and a blatant lack of patriotism,” she wrote in her petition. “These are not values of South Carolinians and should not continue to be enshrined in a place of learning.”
But another student, Austin Ritter, started a counterpetition to keep the name. “There is no need to change the school’s name,” Ritter wrote. “Changing the name of this school will also change its history. It will change everything the school has stood for. Everything the school has done.”
At others, alumni and outsiders are the ones sounding the call.
The debate over the Stuart name change in Falls Church kicked off in earnest in 2015 when actress Julianne Moore, who attended Stuart in the ‘70s, and Hollywood producer Bruce Cohen, a Stuart alumnus, launched a petition demanding the name change. In Alabama, it was a community activist who suggested moving the Lee statue out from in front of Robert E. Lee High School.
Changing a school’s name is not cheap. In Oklahoma City, Lora said it could be $50,000 or more to change signage, letterhead, business cards and more for each school. Other school officials have quoted higher and lower figures.
“You can make any excuse you want to try and stop something like this and dollars are what a lot of people lead with,” said Solis, who called it a “hollow argument.”
Instead, people should get creative, he said, for example, in Texas possibly renaming schools currently named after Robert E. Lee after golfer Lee Trevino, allowing them to keep the “Lee” identity.
In Arlington, there has been some talk among some at Washington-Lee High School about possibly changing Robert E. Lee out of the school name to be replaced by his father, Revolutionary War Major-General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who also was a Virginia governor and congressman, unofficial school historian John Peck said. Or perhaps rededicating the school to an ideal and de-emphasizing the namesakes, he said.
“Keep the names, but take the namesakes out,” Peck, who said the school’s basketball team was the first integrated team to win Virginia’s state basketball title in 1966, told The Associated Press. “Take Washington out, take Lee out. They don’t seem to mean all that much to the alumni who really, really cherish the school’s legacy itself as built up by the students and the faculty over the years.”
In New Orleans, Take ‘Em Down Nola has identified more than 130 Confederate and white supremacist monuments, memorials, school names, building names and street signs that honor slaveowners and the legacy of racial oppression. The group, which successfully fought for the removal of four Confederate-era monuments this past spring, has called on the City of New Orleans to finish the job it stared in the spring.
However, while New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu officially promised to assemble a panel to determine whether there are other monuments that should be removed from public spaces, he now says that he has no plans to take down any additional Confederate or white supremacist monuments.
In Hollywood, Fla., a city commission voted Aug. 30 to strip the names of Robert E. Lee and two other Confederate generals from the suburb’s streets, the latest in a recent spate of skirmishes over whether those who led the Southern army should still be honored 152 years after the Civil War ended.
The Hollywood City Commis-sion voted 5 to 1 to remove the names of Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Bell Hood from residential streets that hopscotch through the Fort Lauderdale suburb. More than 200 supporters and opponents of the change packed the commission chamber and the adjoining lobby, with most of the approximately 100 speakers generally spirited but polite.
Mayor Josh Levy, who voted for the change, said he hoped it would bring the community together by showing a “spirit of companionship” that recognizes that many Black residents were offended by these names.
“These streets are symbols of men whose deeds symbolized oppression and bigotry against a whole group of people,” Levy said.
Five of the commission’s six white members voted for the change.
The one Hispanic, Peter Hernandez, walked out of the meeting before the vote in protest over procedure. Before he left, he said he opposed the change because he says the commission had not followed its rules and he thought there would be a push to change other street names.
Hernandez, a Democrat, also said the change was “a Democratic national agenda that is being pushed upon us.”
The commission will vote to rename the streets at a later meeting, The Associated Press reported. The members indicated they will likely rename Forrest Street for Frankie Mae Shivers, a Black, female city police officer who was shot to death in 1982.
The change was supported by the city’s Chamber of Commerce and by more than half of the meeting’s speakers.
Benjamin Israel, a Black resident who was one of the early leaders to change the street names, said the idea that residents would be “inconvenienced” by the name changes was “ridiculous.”
“Think of the inconvenience of the Civil War. Over 600,000 were killed. This will help make a better America,” Israel said. “This is not a racial matter. Most of the people killed in the Civil War were white.”
Opponents argued that stripping the names of Lee, Hood and Forrest will be erasing history.
John Jacobs of the group “Save Our Streets,” which opposed the change, said the commission trampled on residents’ rights when the members waived a city ordinance that says affected property owners need to be polled before a street name can be changed, knowing there would be little support. He said change supporters “waged a propaganda campaign by making outlandish and false accusations” against the generals. Lee, he said, didn’t fight to support slavery but to uphold his home state of Virginia’s right to secede.
“These were not treasonous men. They were 19th century men and shouldn’t be judged by 21st-century standards,” he said.
Some opponents, meanwhile, suggested keeping the name of Lee Street by renaming it for Harper Lee, who wrote the classic Southern novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
A few hours before the meeting, protests briefly turned tense when a lone pro-Confederate protester charged at about 100 anti-Confederate demonstrators. Hollywood police quickly tackled Chris Tedino, 21, of Miami, throwing him and his Confederate flag to the ground before he was led away. The confrontation occurred outside Hollywood City Hall, hours before the commission meeting opened.
If the measure passes, Hollywood would join Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, and the Gulf Coast town of Bradenton as Florida cities that have removed Confederate memorials. Those two cities removed statues. Tampa will remove a statue in the coming weeks.
Tedino had been standing alone, holding a flag that was half-Confederate battle flag and half a black X on a white field. He was yelling at the other group, calling them “traitors.”
Several street names dating to the city’s 1925 founding honor military officers both U.S. and Confederate. Others are named after U.S. Civil War Gen. George McLellan, Adm. David Farragut, who led the Union Navy during the Civil War, as well as World War I Gen. John J. Pershing.
The debate over Confederate street names, statues and other symbols is being conducted in several communities around the U.S. The memorials have been under increased scrutiny since deadly violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month.
In Kentucky, group of Black lawmakers, pastors and advocacy groups called anew last week for the removal of a Jefferson Davis statue in that state’s Capitol. That landmark building is home to five statues of famous Kentuckians, including former President Abraham Lincoln and Davis, the only president of the Confederacy.
This article originally published in the September 11, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
