History, Racism
The Racist History of Mount Rushmore
A symbol of bigotry and betrayal
Source Wikimedia
Much older than the Alps and the Himalayas are the Six Grandfathers — formed when subterranean pressure raised the earth’s crust into a huge elliptical dome sixty-five million years ago. We know them today by the name of Mount Rushmore, a ‘shrine of democracy’, a symbol of American greatness and presidential patriotism. For many American’s it still remains a grand tribute to democracy.
From 1927 until his death in 1941, Gutzon Borglum tore down hundreds of thousands of tons of stone to carve the presidential memorial out of Six Grandfathers. Borglum picked his four presidents based on their role in Manifest Destiny — widely held American imperialist cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. Washington got the things started, Jefferson helped the Louisiana Purchase, Roosevelt the Panama Canal and Lincoln preserved the Union.
However, for Native American’s Mount Rushmore is a symbol of desecration, defacement of the sacred site with connections to the Ku Klux Klan. The insult of Rushmore is at least four-fold:
1. It was built on land the government grabbed from Native Americans.
2. The Six Grandfathers (original name of Mt…
