Thursday, July 09, 2020
What Now?
Around the nation, protestors and local governments are taking down Confederate memorials. It is a recognition after more than a century and a half that the South's reliance on slavery to bolster its economy was wrong and states' rights arguments were fiction. So, the noble statues of Lee on Traveller are disappearing along with those of his generals and memorials to ordinary soldiers. But the largest monument of all remains because it might be too difficult and expensive to remove it. This is the bas relief carved into the rock of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta. Everything about it is huge, and the park that spreads out before it is a testimony to the gentility of the Old South without mentioning slavery. In other words, the mountain and the park are a lie write large. What might be needed, to reference a Black scholar, is to allow the monument to survive but to put it into context. All that one sees is a Jim Crow and KKK vision of what the South meant to its bitter survivors. It's ugly in every respect but instructive. Segregation is gone, but racism survives. Black officeholders and citizens of the future might use the monument as testimony to the hatred they triumphed over.
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