Monuments and statues - discuss

[TravelingChris]

My city, Huntsville, AL , integrated with peaceful protests and sit-ins in 1963.  I agree that the horrors of the response on the Selma march and the Birmingham police chief Bull O Connor (and believe me I was shocked and appalled that there are a few things named for him here in Alabama---and I sure want that to go away) and some other horrors definitely changed public opinion.  But so did the photos and film footage of the integrations of some state schools and the hatred shown by the whites who showed up.  And those weren't violent.  

What did happen was federal laws were passed and federal agents were brought in to enforce the change.  I am going to be writing my state senator (an old guy who wants to have the job but not do anything because he now refuses to bring up legislation, saying he is too old), and my state rep  about how we have to change a very badly written law that forbids renaming or changing any building, statue, park, school, etc, etc,  that was named for anybody or any organization and is 40 years or older.  The fine is 25,000.  Mobile and Birmingham have already paid the fine.  Places like University of Alabama had to pay the 25K fine because the stadium is named after someone and is older than 40 years,  We have a statue of a Confederate soldier here by our courthouse that is on County land so Huntsville can't just pay the fine.  The County decided to ask the state for a exception because the plan is to put it in the part of the city's cemetery next to the area where a lot of Confederate soldiers are buried.

OTOH,  I have heard one person calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from our state coat.  I am completely against that since our state seal has all the flags or heralds  of the different countries that have ruled our state and the Confederacy was one of them.  Now I could see redesigning the coat of arms and making the Confederacy flag smaller,  etc.  But the coat of arms has the US Flag on top of the other flags, symbols, and Two Eagles flanking the shield too.  Their is a French ship on top of the shield.

Edited June 28, 2020 by TravelingChris

[Guest]

1 hour ago, TravelingChris said:

What is the response?  I am truly confused.

Me too. I was trying to follow the linked discussion but I didn’t understand it and then it seemed to go to another topic. 

[Corraleno]

2 hours ago, TravelingChris said:

What is the response?  I am truly confused.

 

1 hour ago, Quill said:

Me too. I was trying to follow the linked discussion but I didn’t understand it and then it seemed to go to another topic. 

Try this link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1268463768285188096.html

That link should "unroll" the whole twitter thread.

[Corraleno]

Incredibly moving and powerful essay in the NYT: My Body Is a Monument. 

Excerpts:

"I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
....

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. ... As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
....

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position. Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

[vmsurbat1]

On 6/25/2020 at 6:50 PM, MEmama said:

nteresting. My mother was born in Germany during the war and she has told me many times that they most definitely did not learn about it in school. History books went up to the turn of the century and stopped. And no adults spoke about it, it was all silence.

She learned more details and truths about the era in which she grew up 20+ years after the fact, first while living in France and the UK where she was subjected to horrible discrimination that she did not understand, and then later in the US. Perhaps it was the next generation—ours— that learned more.

This is true.  When I was young (late 60s) we lived in Germany for several years. At that time, you could still see a few tanks left in the forests, so some lingering effects from the war even then.  We weren't military and lived in normal German communities and had lots of contacts with Germans.  There was a definite gap between what older people knew and what preteens (at the time) knew about the war.  It was very hard for the generation who lived through the time of atrocities (and did nothing) to come to terms and live with the consciousness of it all.

Edited June 28, 2020 by vmsurbat1

[Pam in CT]

re Caroline Randall Williams' NYT essay:

1 hour ago, Corraleno said:

Incredibly moving and powerful essay in the NYT: My Body Is a Monument. 

Excerpts:

"I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
....

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. ... As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
....

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position. Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Thank you for this.

[Jean in Newcastle]

2 year old zombie thread 

[Eos]

A thread that hasn't aged well.