Those calling for the removal of Confederate monuments are often accused of faddish political correctness, but African Americans have been objecting for more than a century.
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Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast |
On April 30, Maya Little, a graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was arrested after she smeared red ink—and her own blood—on Silent Sam, an embattled Confederate monument installed on the campus by the United Daughters of the Confederacy
in 1913. She was charged on May 7 with defacing a public statue. If
found guilty, she could be sentenced to up to 60 days in jail.
A leader of a student group pushing for Silent Sam’s removal, Little explained her actions in a message directed at UNC chancellor Carol Folt. “Silent Sam is violence,” wrote
the African American student. He is “a symbol of UNC’s commitment to
white supremacy… You should see him the way that we do, at the forefront
of our campus covered in our blood.”
Little characterized her
defacement of the statue as the latest salvo in a black student campaign
against Silent Sam that dates backs to the ’60s.
Others have
connected Little’s actions to the wave of protest and vandalism against
Confederate symbols that has swept across the country since an avowed white supremacist
murdered nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,
South Carolina, in 2015. Just ten days after that tragedy, African
American activist Bree Newsome climbed a flag pole at the South Carolina capitol in Columbia and removed the Confederate flag that had flown there since the early ’60s.
To
some extent, Little’s and Newsome’s acts of civil disobedience reflect
our post-Emanuel moment. Yet they have deeper roots—roots that stretch
back not just to the civil rights era, as Little suggested, but to the
late 19th century. And then, as now, it was often young people and women
who led the struggle against white supremacist monuments. The
prominence of African American women in the long battle to topple these
memorials is particularly notable. After all, it was primarily their
white counterparts, working through groups like the United Daughters of
the Confederacy, who made sure they were erected in the first place.
Ground
zero for this earlier outburst of cultural protest was Charleston, the
site of the Emanuel massacre, the capital of American slavery—where
close to 50 percent of the slaves brought to the United States first
stepped foot on our shores—and the birthplace of the Civil War.
As we chronicle in our new book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy,
Charleston’s Confederate and proslavery memorials have long been
vandalized. In 1908, residents strolling through White Point Garden were
“astonished” to find that the bust of poet William Gilmore Simms, a
strident supporter of slavery and secession, had been streaked with
vermillion and green paint.
Charleston’s many memorials to John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina
statesman who famously called slavery “a positive good,” have attracted
the most attention from opponents. In the final months of the Civil War,
a freedwoman destroyed a bust of Calhoun that sat in the office of the Charleston Mercury.
Meanwhile, visiting New York minister Henry Ward Beecher noticed that
“vandal hands” had chipped off portions of the marble slab that lay atop
Calhoun’s tomb in St. Philips’ Church cemetery.
And for more than
a half-century, black Charlestonians took aim at the city’s two Calhoun
monuments, both of which were erected by the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument
Association. In 1887, these elite Charleston women unveiled the original
statue in Marion Square. Nine years later, they replaced it with a much
larger one that still towers over the park today.
African
Americans sometimes used the first Calhoun statue for target practice.
In 1894, a black boy was arrested for shooting a white toddler in the
head with a tiny pistol. He told the police that he had not intended to
harm the child—who was not seriously injured—but rather to hit the
monument.
Black Charlestonian Mamie Garvin Fields provides the
clearest window into the lengthy campaign of vandalism against the
Calhoun monuments. “Blacks took that statue personally,” Fields wrote of
the first monument in her memoir. “As you passed by, here was Calhoun
looking you in the face and telling you, ‘[Y]ou may not be a slave, but I
am back to see you stay in your place.” So, Fields explained, “we used
to carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in
order to deface that statue—scratch up the coat, break the watch chain,
try to knock off the nose.” Fields observed that they beat Calhoun up so
badly that “whites had to come back and put him way up high, so we
couldn’t get to him.”
It’s unclear if African American defacement
was, in fact, responsible for the decision to install the taller
monument, though it likely played a role. What is certain is that the
second Calhoun monument—which soars more than 100 feet in the air—was a
target, too.
City officials repeatedly tried to safeguard the memorial with fencing and lights and asked police
to patrol the square to protect against attacks that typically came
under the cover of darkness. But these measures had little effect.
“Wanton mutilation by unknown persons,” as the city put it, prompted
repairs to the second monument as late as 1946.
Of course, some
black Charlestonians undoubtedly knew the identity of the unknown
persons, just as they well knew their motives. One African American
woman remembered that in the ’30s a high school classmate had hurled
rocks at the Calhoun monument because the politician “didn’t like us.”
Today, some defenders of Confederate monuments denounce critics with cries
of “political correctness,” trivializing their objections as the
overreaction of a new generation of liberal snowflakes. This is far from
the case. As Charleston’s history demonstrates, from the beginning
African Americans have clearly understood the function of—and have
loathed—these monuments. And from the beginning, it was frequently the
least powerful members of the black community—women and young people—at
the forefront of the effort to bring them down.
Maya Little and
her fellow students carry on this protest tradition, though under
different conditions. They can operate in the open; indeed, Little’s
protest was a deliberately public spectacle, broadcast by supporters on
social media.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the
visibility and visceral nature of her actions will convince white
America to finally listen to what African Americans have been saying
since the end of the Civil War. The fact that she has received multiple death threats in recent days is a terrifying indication that it will not be easy.
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