Well, I have complicated views, but my first reaction to that is they're not all the same. They're treated as if they're all exactly the same, and they're not. There are the Silent Sam monument, which was on the campus at UNC for years. It had some of the rhetoric when they dedicated that is really horrific. It's horrible rhetoric, and I can understand why that needed to go. There's what was called the Battle of Liberty Place monument in New Orleans that was a white supremacist monument, very definitely that.
I think local places should decide these. Wherever the monument is, I think that's who should decide. And I think there should be a process for how they decide it. Let people have a public hearing, but they did that in Charlottesville actually. Had a public hearing. I went and talked at it. Lots of other scholars and local people talked at it. And then they had a commission that they had set up, and the commission voted to keep the monuments in place but re-examine them with text that put them in context, and then put up new monuments to previously ignored groups.
The city council then came in and overrode that and decided they took them all down in Charlottesville. They also took down the Lewis and Clark monument and there's a George... They took down all the monuments that had been put up. I think many of the Confederate monuments, the kind of ones on courthouse lawns and so forth, that were put up by the Confederate generation, that is the veterans themselves and the women who were alive during the war, tend to be monuments to the common soldiers, this kind of lost generation of young men.
The later wave of monuments that came were put up by other groups that were not... They're not really Confederate monuments. The ones that were put up in the '20s and '30s. A third wave were put up in reaction to the civil rights activities in the '50s and early '60s. And then a fourth wave went up after the movie Gettysburg and Ken Burns's series. But they're complicated, and I see them as historical, and I understand the arguments on both sides. I understand people who just say they're hateful, they bring up hateful remembrances, we should get rid of all of them, every one of them. I used them as teaching tools in Charlottesville for years with groups of teachers and students. There were five monuments in Charlottesville.
Two that were put up by veterans, two that were put up by groups later. The Lee and Jackson statues were those, and then there were two bronze plates on the side of the Rotunda that just listed UVA graduates who died in Confederate service, had about 500 names on them. Those were all of the Confederate statues there, and I used them to talk about different strains of memory. The main tenor at the Lee statue when it went up was this reconciliationist Lee. Lee wanted the nation back together. Lee at Appomattox, that kind of stuff. Didn't have anything to do with Jim Crow or white supremacy. Although all the people who put them up probably would have, clearly we would consider them racist. They were in favor of white supremacy.
But you don't need statues in the post-war South and the Jim Crow South. You have the police force, state law, local law, state troopers. That's what enforces white supremacy, not statues. The historian in me likes to use them as part of the historical record, interpret them, use them to explain different parts of US history. That's how I use them. Having said all that, I did and still do believe that it should be a local issue. If a locality decides they don't want them up anymore, then don't have them up anymore.
I think if we ignore history, we're going to be doomed to repeat it. We should never censor books. We should read books. We should read Mein Kampf. We should read books that capture a certain moment in history, even if it's a hateful moment in history, even if it's a destructive moment in history. We need to understand or have them read texts written at the time that have language that we wouldn't use now. It helps you understand the time.
There are a lot of hard edges in the past. There are a lot of nice edges, too, that make you feel good. But there are a lot of really hard edges in the past. And if you're going to be serious about coming to terms with history, you need to accept that and deal with them and talk about them and not just try to erase them, I think. There are a lot of books that people won't read now. I taught a graduate seminar at one point on foundational 19th century texts, and one of the texts I assigned in the class was Huckleberry Finn. And a lot of the students said they wouldn't read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it that they didn't want to see those words.
