Don't tear down Confederate monuments - do this instead By
Published: 18:20 BST, 24 July 2015 | Updated: 18:20 BST, 24 July 2015
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By Jack Hitt

July 24 (Reuters) - 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.

In Tennessee, for example, there is a debate about whether to remove the bust of General Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state capital.
Forrest was a cavalry commander during the war, but he also helped found the Ku Klux Klan. Here's a line easy to draw: Those Civil War figures who engaged in postwar domestic terrorism? Off to the relics room.

But the statues of thinkers and leaders who led us to civil war?

Consider Calhoun, the slave owner who died before the war but deployed his considerable genius to wrap the idea of owning human flesh with our Constitution. However one looks at it, Calhoun partly defined the 19th century. Should his statue be completely removed from public view?
Or should we perhaps debate and then rewrite the inscription on its plinth?

And why not simply add more statues? The best thing about parks is that there's always room for one more bust. Having grown up in Charleston, I know there are many African-American heroes from this period who have gone unacknowledged.

Denmark Vesey was one of the early 19th century's most astonishing slaves.

He bought his freedom after winning a lottery - seriously. He is alleged to have organized the most mythic - and failed - slave revolt of that time (although there's compelling evidence it was all rumor).

But Vesey also foresaw the basic need for an African-American right to assembly - the first step that would eventually march to 1964 and the landmark Civil Rights Act.

So he helped found an all-black church, Emanuel AMC on Calhoun Street - the very one Dylann Roof entered on June 17. An attempt not long ago to have a statue of him stand near Calhoun's in the prominent Marion Square failed, and Vesey's statue was marooned uptown at Hampton Park.
Let's rethink that decision.

Similarly, why eliminate street names that tell one part of Southern history when we can amplify them to tell even more of it? Charleston is the home of the Heyward-Washington House and the Aiken-Rhett House - hyphenation is not just a thing.

It's a tradition.

So instead of erasing Calhoun Street, let's amplify it: Smalls-Calhoun Street.

Robert Smalls was, in brief, a great American. He was a slave in 1862 when he hijacked a Confederate ship in Charleston harbor and cunningly outsmarted numerous Confederate ships and Southern fort commanders to slip out until he found refuge with the U.S.

Navy. His audacity forced President Abraham Lincoln to advocate for deploying African-American troops in the war.

Smalls returned to South Carolina after the war and got elected to the House of Representatives, where he became a key advocate for public education. He eventually purchased the house in which he had once been a slave.

Smalls-Calhoun Street would be an avenue for cars, sure, but also for history.

Every mention of the street would be an invitation to understand the narrative of a place that for too long told only one revisionist half of it.

This solution works everywhere, even the North. Yale University, which is struggling with what do about one of its older colleges - called Calhoun College - could rename it Creed-Calhoun. The first African-American graduate of any Yale college was Van Rensselaer Creed, who was appointed by Lincoln to serve as a surgeon in the Union Army and who developed mixed-race practices in New Haven and Brooklyn.

And then there are all those Confederate memorials.

Hardly a hamlet, village or crossroads in the South lacks one. As we have been told, they were put there to mark valor in battle and the supreme sacrifice. What to do with them?

Maybe the northernmost confederate memorial in America (that I know of) can be instructive.
It's on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

That's right. A Confederate memorial stands not only on Martha's Vineyard, but it's located in the historically African-American hamlet of Oak Bluffs. Years ago, Tony Horwitz, the author of "Confederates in the Attic," pointed it out to me.

According to the local story, a Confederate veteran moved there after the war and was coldly shunned by everyone on the island.

Trying to heal the breach, he raised the money to build a memorial to the Union dead, which stands in the park today, right near where the ferry docks.
Some Union veterans felt that they should reciprocate, and so, in time - 1925, in fact - aged Union veterans added a plaque honoring the Confederate dead as well. It says, "The chasm is closed."

Maybe the solemnity of those Yankee vets should instruct us now.

Keep the Confederate memorials standing. Honor their sacrifice. But honor the valor of their enemies as well.

Doesn't that somehow fit aptly into the reaction to the Charleston massacre - to those families of the dead telling a fuming, ignorant racist to his face that they forgive him?
Close the chasm. Let the monuments, the statuary and the streets of the South start to tell the rest of the story. (Jack Hitt)




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