A modest proposal

But I Digress
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

I grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland. For those of you not familiar with its history, Maryland was a border state during the American Civil War. The state never seceded, but many who lived there were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. Some families even made the painful decision to send sons to fight on opposite sides during the war. As a father, I can’t begin to imagine how difficult that must have been.

Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were both born into slavery on Maryland’s eastern shore, and the underground railroad passed through the state. The Mason-Dixon line runs along Maryland’s northern border, and schools were integrated only a few years before I was born.

I share all of this as a prelude to what I’m about to write: yet another opinion piece on statues, monuments, and memorials.

I personally know people with very strong opinions about this topic on both sides of the debate. I have friends whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy. I have friends whose ancestors fought for the Union. I have friends whose ancestors were slaves in this country. My own family came to the United States sometime after the war. Most were German. They settled in the north. So I have to admit my own feelings about this matter are not rooted in the same personal history as some of my friends.

I wrote briefly about this topic in my last post, basically saying the matter should be left up to the institutions and municipalities that house these statues. I stand by that statement. However, that doesn’t preclude me from having my own opinion on the matter. This is America, after all.

Personally, I believe the statues in question belong in museums or battlefields, rather than in town squares and public parks. Moving these statues doesn’t erase or rewrite history. In some cases, it actually undoes a wrong that should never have happened at all. I’m referring to statues that were erected during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras — statues whose sole purpose was to intimidate and try to keep people in line. These statues deserve no honor or reverence at all.

Of course, not all statues fall into this category, and trying to discern the reasons a statue was erected is never quite so cut and dried. Sure, you can look at the historical context of when it was raised, who raised it, and that group’s motivations behind sponsoring such memorials, but even then, things aren’t always crystal clear. Many statues featuring Confederate generals and officers were erected to honor a town’s native son or someone important to an area’s past. Some bear no such connections at all. I completely understand the “slippery slope” argument. I mean, ESPN recently announced it was reassigning one of its play-by-play commentators because his name is Robert Lee, for crying out loud. That’s just ridiculous. The man literally has NOTHING to do with the Civil War or the Confederacy. He just happens to have the same name as the South’s top general. That’s it. Whatever brain trust came to that decision is giving everyone who has legitimate concerns about the actual issue at hand a really bad name. But I digress.

Since there is so much ambiguity — and since many on the side of keeping statues in place are concerned about rewriting or sanitizing history (two things that should concern us all) — I propose a different solution:

Rather than removing Confederate statues outright, why not instead supplement those monuments with additional memorials to the victims of America’s slave trade and to heroes of the civil rights movement? Placing a statue or monument clearly honoring Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, Rosa Parks, lynching victims, or former slaves next to a statue of a Confederate dignitary would strengthen the existing monument’s message of remembering a time we don’t want to forget— or repeat. To me, that makes more sense than just leaving statues in place that might be misconstrued as somehow condoning slavery or white supremacy. That’s something nobody on either side of this debate wants to see happen.

In the final analysis, it matters little what I think about these things. It’s ultimately up to the communities where monuments exist to decide what to do with them. Or it should be up to those communities. Angry outside voices from both sides of the debate should not drown out the will of the communities and institutions making these decisions. My own voice included.


Stepping down from my soapbox and depositing two pennies in the jar…

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But I Digress

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