STATUES OF LIMITATION

STATUES OF LIMITATION

There are more than 1500 monuments to the Confederacy in the United States, over 700 of which are  statues. 

Five of those statues -- including those of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens -- are in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol building.  In the Hall, each  of the fifty states is allowed to designate two of its citizens for sculptured immortality.  Mississippi long ago designated Davis as one of its honorees, and the Stephens statue was given by Georgia in 1927.   For years, one of Virginia's heroes, Robert E. Lee, had a statue in the Hall.  It is now in the Capitol crypt, still part of the government's collection and on display, but at a remove from the glory of the rotunda's Hall.

Over the course of the last twenty years, there have been regular efforts to remove Confederate statues and monuments from public places and to re-name highways, streets, parks, buildings and colleges  named for Confederate leaders.  Those efforts wax and wane and in any case are both monumental (pun intended) and disjointed given the sheer number of memorials and the fact that they exist in pretty much every corner of the country. 

As of the summer of 2017, more than a hundred roads in eleven states were named for Jefferson Davis.  Since then,  countless memorials or designations of one sort or another have come down or been changed thoughout the old south, many of the Davis highways foremost  among them. The same has also occurred in New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, Montana, Washington and  California -- decidedly non-Confederate precincts that nevertheless were moved to remember for one reason or another the south's putative heroes.

Removal, however,  has not been universally approved.

In a 2017 Reuters poll, 54% said the monuments should remain, 24% said they should be removed, and 19% were undecided. Though the recent killing of George Floyd sparked renewed removal efforts, public opinion remains more or less unchanged.  In this month's HuffPost/YouGov poll, 51% oppose flying the Confederate flag but 49% also oppose removing the monuments.  This indecision is also reflected in legislative efforts.  Virginia, with more Confederate monuments than any other state, just repealed a law protecting them, and Congressional Democrats want to introduce legislation to have the Capitol remove them. The Virginia law, however,  gives localities the final say on the issue, and the Congressional  effort is a long-shot and not remotely bi-partisan. 

So most of the statues still stand.

And the question arises . . .

What gives?

Why are monuments to slavery and treason fit symbols for public art?

In our naming and sculpting, what are we trying to remember?

Or forget?

To begin, the monument craze wasn't a natural or inevitable outcome of the Civil War.  Robert E. Lee himself opposed the whole notion, rejecting any memorials other than cemetary headstones and explaining to any who asked that monuments would keep divisions alive and retard development in the south.  He refused to fly the Confederate flag at the college over which he presided.  He was not buried in his military uniform, and the southern Civil War veterans who walked him to his final rest were similarly non-uniformed. His alternative, a form of suppressed acceptance, may not have been any better inasmuch as it counseled the sort of stiff-upper-lip denial that often mistakes a vacuum of ignorance for tolerance and progress.

But it was certainly a far cry from the "lost cause" mythology that came in its place.

And come it did.

In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist, published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates and laid the first of the myth's two foundations. The south's erstwhile "system of servitude", Pollard announced,  was "the mildest in the world", did not "rest on acts of debasement", "elevated the African", and was therefore one in which "that odious term 'slavery'" could not be "properly applied". Two years later, Pollard followed up with The Lost Cause Regained and laid the second foundation -- state sovereignty.  Thereafter, the warriors in this just fight were said to have lost only because of the north's "overwhelming numbers and resources" (according to Lee) and uncivilized "ferocity" (according Jefferson Davis).

New ideology announced, the defeated south eventually re-made itself into the segregated, white supremacist, Jim Crow post-bellum south.

And valorized Confederate veterans.

If there is any group that spearheaded monument making, it was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).  Formed in 1894, the UDC's object was to commemorate Confederate soldiers and erect monuments to them.  To the UDC, the rebellion had been "a glorious fight" and those who undertook it "hallowed" veterans.  Out of the universe of statues and monuments, only a small number were erected shortly after the war or in the three decades that followed it.  The vast majority went up with UDC support (and often on account of the group's prodigious fundraising) in the first decades of the 20th century.  Their dedications, moreover, were major community events, Confederate flag-festooned pageants that attracted long speeches and large crowds.  In 1907, somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand showed up at a dedication in Newton, North Carolina.

The UDC aggressively promoted the myth of the lost cause and enthusuastically supported the south's post-bellum regime.  In its world, slavery had been benign (because it civilized blacks) , segregation was legitimate (because Reconstruction had made former slaves savage and immoral),  and noble Confederate soldiers had simply been overrun (by the uncivilized hordes that were the enemy's army).  In 1896, according to one historian, the group established an auxiliary Children of the Confederacy (COC) in order "to  impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future." To do so,  according to another, it made sure public schools  "perpetuate[d] Confederate mythology" by vetting text books and setting curricula.

It also venerated the Ku Klux Klan. 

In fact, in 1926, in North Carolina, the UDC even put up a memorial to the KKK.

None of this was done absent northern complicity. 

To the contrary, having left the south to its own devices after federal troops departed in 1877,  white northerners for the most part accepted Jim Crow and segregation, the latter of which the Supreme Court legalized in 1896 and northerners themselves practiced for much of the next century with only slightly more subtlety.  As for  lost cause mythology, they treated it like a palliative.  Without curing the underlying disease, it allowed peace to replace rebellion,  promoting reconciliation  by suppressing memory.   

And the statues and monuments to that lost cause,  dotting the American landscape in increasing numbers?

They stood as . . .

Silent sentinels to that suppression.

It's unclear what would have happended had the myth not taken hold in the south or been ignored in the north.  We might have become honest sooner, and in any case the racism that infected all corners of the nation could have been confronted earlier.  Alternative history is always speculative, but the south of Reconstruction (from 1865 to the early 1870s) was one where former slaves voted and held office,  the Ku Klux Klan was eliminated (it re-emerged much later), and vigilante justice was for the most part avoided.  Had it survived and matured, there might have been no Jim Crow and, with space and time, a peaceful and multi-racial polity.

But it didn't.

And there wasn't.

The UDC never erected a statue of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass or the dozens of  black law-makers who initially served in the newly re-admitted Confederate states along with the freedmen who put them there.  Their stories were central to the Civil War but had no place in the myth of the lost cause.

And the statues and monuments remind us of that too. 

In Charlottesville in 2017, neo-Nazis marched in opposition to plans in that city to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation (formerly Lee) Park.  The proposed removal had been spurred by the shootings of Trayvon Martin in Orlando and Michael Brown in Missouri, and since then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,  114 Confederate monuments have come down. Today, in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, there are renewed efforts to remove even more.  

The deaths of Floyd and Taylor and Arbery are tragedies.

But the real tragedy is that . . .

The same thing keeps happening.

You can drive almost anywhere in the United States these days --  big and small cities, mid-sized suburbs, rural backroads,  red states and blue --  and see signs that say "Black Lives Matter".  

They do.  

They always have.  

But the statues and monuments say . . .

They don't.

It's time . . . beyond time . . . for them to go.

HOW NEWARK HONORED GEORGE FLOYD . . . AND SCHOOLED AMERICA

HOW NEWARK HONORED GEORGE FLOYD . . .
AND SCHOOLED AMERICA

George Floyd was killed on Monday evening a week ago.

When he died laid out on a street in Minneapolis with a knee on his neck and two on his back, Floyd was a forty-six year old father, grandfather, and restaurant security guard. He had lived in Minnesota for five years.  He was born in North Carolina and raised in Houston, where he had been a star high school athlete.  He was also a black man.  Among his last words were "I can't breathe," "my neck hurts," "everything hurts," "I'm about to die,"  and "Don't kill me."

None of them mattered.

At the time Floyd died, three cops were on top of him.  One, Derek Chauvin, had his knee on Floyd's neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Two others were kneeling on Floyd's back and legs.  Another stood alongside Chauvin.  At some point, a bystander told the police to "get [Floyd] off the ground," and complained that "You could have put him in the car by now.  He's not resisting arrest or nothing."

Those words didn't matter either.

When EMS arrived, Floyd was non-responsive.  He was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 9:25 pm.  The four cops were fired the next day,  and three days after that, Chauvin was arrested on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.  He now sits in a maximum security jail with bail set at $500,000 but apparently not met, and is scheduled to appear in court for the first time on June 8.  The other three are at large and have not been charged at this time.

A county medical examiner  ruled Floyd’s death a homicide and an autopsy performed by Dr. Michael Baden, the world renowned forensic pathologist and NYC's one-time chief medical examiner, concluded that Floyd's death was caused by the three policemen who held him down.

In the week since, protests have broken out in 141 American cities and a handful of foreign ones. The protests were multi-racial and bi-partisan.  In many cases, the police themelves either participated or were openly supportive.  And they should have been.  Floyd's death is only the latest in a long line of blue on black excessive force that stretches back over the decades and too frequently results in the deaths of black men.

Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, et al.

The list is long.

It's also part of a systemic problem that plagues law enforcement.  There's a reason for "the conversation" every black parent has with his or her child; the one warning the kids to keep their hands visible and their mouths shut whenever a cop approaches.

The alternative can be death.

Though large numbers of the protests -- and protesters -- were peaceful, a not insignificant number were not.

A Minneapolis police precinct was torched on Thursday and in cities throughout the country rioters  have overturned and set police cars and utility vehicles ablaze; in New York City, two lawyers  threw a molotov cocktail into a police car in Brooklyn.  Looting is commonplace, with property damage running into the millions, and as of Monday, four thousand had been arrested.  In twenty-one states, the National Guard has been called up.  At least five people have died and dozens of mayors have imposed curfews.

One city, however, did not burn.

Newark, New Jersey lies fifteen miles west of Manhattan as the crow flies and is home to 282,000, 84% of whom are black or Hispanic.  This past Saturday afternoon, 12,000 of them took to the streets to protest George Floyd's death at the hands of three of Minnesota's supposed finest.  Among the protesters was the poet's son and city's Mayor, Ras Baraka.

During the protest, no one was arrested, no police cars were torched, no looting occurred, and (save for a few slashed tires) no property was damaged.  The police chief, a white guy, decided that the cops monitoring the protesters' march would not be wearing SWAT or riot gear, and a citizen-manned, fifty person community street team created six years ago self-deployed to de-escalate any tension.

And de-escalate they did.

At one point, a white protester started smashing the window of a Dunkin Donuts.  At another, a group moved toward buildings owned by Prudential Financial, a business anchor that has been in Newark for over 145 years. The street team stopped both. Later that night, outside the First Precinct where riots had begun in the 1960s, an angry crowd of close to a thousand apparently bent on destroying or  trashing the place was faced down by a line of cops . . .

And the hundreds of citizens who stood with them.

By 10:30 pm, the crowd began to disperse as the street team told any who didn't actually live in the city to leave.

Newark's official historian, Junus Williams,  was a law student in the '60s when Newark burned.  Over the weekend, he praised the Mayor. Said Williams: "[T]he people . . . don't see [Baraka] as an obstacle to their righteous anger.  They know that he's angry, too."  Prudential's CEO was even more direct. "You can't underestimate [Baraka's] influence in this. It's . . . an overall image . . .  that we can do more together than we can do apart."  The best praise, however, came from the Rev. Louise Scott-Rountree, the head of Newark's Interfaith Alliance,  and was extended to her flock.  "You better not mess with my family," said the Reverend,  "That's Newark."

No kidding.

Call it Ghandi and Dr. King's non-violence . . .

On steroids.

Yesterday, a little more than two hundred miles south of Newark, the President of the United States had a different idea.

In a conference call, he told the nation's governors that they were "fools" who had "to get much tougher" with the protesters.  "You have to dominate," said Trump.  "If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time.  They're going to run all over you, you'll look like a bunch of jerks."

Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper were also on the call and echoed the president. Barr told them they needed "adequate force" to "dominate" and "control" the protesters.  Esper war-gamed the whole problem, telling the governors that they had to "dominate the battle space."  Following the call, and driving his point home, the President then announced that, if the governors didn't get tougher, he would invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military to do the job "for them."

As with all things Trump, it's not at all clear that he has the power to do what he is now threatening to do.

The Insurrection Act was passed in 1807 and empowers the President to use the military to quell insurrection, civil disorder and rebellion in any state; to enforce federal law and protect Constitutional rights where the state cannot or refuses to do so; or when requested by a state's governor. None of those conditions have been met here, nor are they likely to be.  And a later law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, expressly bars the use of the military to enforce any  president's domestic policies.

So, bluster aside, Trump either doesn't possess the power he so brazenly claims is his or that power has by no means been triggered.  Though he did order the military to  move a peaceful protest in DC's Lafayette Park yesterday so that he could walk across the street for a photo-op in front of St. John's church, he could do that only because DC is not a state.

From where I sit, if the governors want advice, they now have a choice.

They can call Cadet Bone Spurs -- the man-child  president who  never met a problem involving race that he didn't make worse (see, e.g., Charlottesville) -- and have him send in the marines . . . 

Or they can call Newark's Mayor Baraka.

I'd start with the Mayor.

His plan actually worked.