This is an engaging piece detailing the need to come to grips with history and historical memory. Your writing is a bit of an updating of Cash’s writing ( Mind of the South ), and a needed corrective for the somewhat glib view that taking a statue down somehow erases history. However, there does exist the possibility that doing this so quickly and without the input of communities ( including doing the legwork of discovering when the statue/memorial was erected, who put up & why, and what the purpose was for the edifice in the first place….if it was during the 1870s, it would be useful to note that it occurred coterminously with so-called Redemption, if after, it is useful to note the edifice coincides chronologically with the emergence of the newly minted KKK in the 1920s. In short, it would be beneficial to know the history and historiography of each statue/edifice. Are they obelisks residing in battle sites in parks? Are they the “whispering witch” variety that were placed in cemeteries? Are they the typical equestrian variety valorizing men who shouldn’t be valorized?) can possibly turn into a type of Cromwellian idol-smashing that itself invites sanitizing and amnesia. To finish, I am of the opinion there are ways to combat the oppression and racist past of many of these statues and monuments. Erect statues of John Brown and his crew at Harper’s Ferry. Erect memorials to victims of the Fort Pillow Massacre. Erect statues of Grant, Sherman, and Joseph Mower across the South. Turn some statues into pasquinades ( an Italian way of mocking the self-importance of those memorializing ugly and divisive concepts and ideas ). We can all employ some Swiftean satire and leave mocking poems, signs, and drawings at an offensive commemoration of Nathan Bedord Forrest.
