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Take Down the

Confederate Flags, but
Not the Monuments
Instead of of sanitizing the past, communities need to
strike a balance between confronting history and
respecting the needs of the present.

In Charleston, a statue memorializing the Confederacy is taped off after police said someone spray-painted it

with the words "Black Lives Matter."

David Goldman / AP

ETHAN J. KYTLE AND BLAIN ROBERTS | JUN 25, 2015 | POLITICS

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On Sunday, in Charleston, South Carolina’s White Point Garden,

vandals struck the Fort Sumter Memorial, a neoclassical paean to the
Confederate defenders of the city. They spray-painted the phrases
“Black lives matter” and “This is the problem #racist.” Two days later,
the Calhoun Monument, which stands in Marion Square just blocks
from Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was similarly
defaced. The word “racist” was painted in red near the base of the
towering tribute to the South Carolina statesman, a dogged defender of
both slavery and the Old South. Protestors also modified the engraved
testament on the 1896 monument, which reads “Truth Justice and the
Constitution,” by scrawling the words “and Slavery.”

Some people have cheered this vandalism. Others, including New

Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and students at the University of Texas
at Austin, have gone further. They insist that Confederate and
proslavery monuments deserve the same fate as the Confederate battle
flag and should be taken down. There are good reasons to get rid of
these monuments, but there are better reasons to leave them up.

Over the past week, as the country has reeled from the murder of nine
African American worshipers at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, Confederate
symbols that still dot the Southern landscape have come under
increasing scrutiny. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley altered her
stance on the Confederate flag that flies on the state capitol grounds
and called for its removal. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley also took
steps to disassociate his state from its secessionist past, ordering four
Confederate banners to be taken down from the Alabama Confederate
Monument on Capitol Hill in Montgomery. Meanwhile, protestors from
Baltimore, Maryland, to Asheville, North Carolina, to Austin, Texas,
have vandalized statues that pay honor to the Confederacy and those

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who fought for it.

Opposition to Confederate and proslavery memorials has a long

history, even in a Deep South city like Charleston. In 1908 in White
Point Garden, a bust of poet William Gilmore Simms, an outspoken
supporter of slavery and secession, was smeared with red and green
paint. Nearly a century later, in 2004, someone spray-painted the word
“genocidal” across the Fort Sumter Memorial’s inscription “To the
Confederate Defenders of Charleston” and added the phrase “Kill
Whitey” on the back of the monument.

Memorials to John C. Calhoun have been the most consistent targets.

Not long after Confederate troops abandoned Charleston in February
1865, a former slave destroyed a bust of Calhoun that sat in the office
of the fire-eating Southern newspaper, the Charleston Mercury. In May
of the same year, The New York Times reported that portions of
Calhoun’s tomb, which was located in St. Philip’s cemetery, had been
“battered off” and that several unspecified inscriptions had been
penciled on the stone slab.

And the city’s two Calhoun monuments—the first unveiled in 1887 in

Marion Square, a park at the heart of Charleston, and a much larger one
that replaced the original in 1896 and that still stands today—were
subjected to a lengthy campaign of vandalism.

African American educator Mamie Garvin Fields, who grew up in

turn-of-the-century Charleston, recalls that local blacks took the first
Calhoun Monument personally. “As you passed by,” she said, “here
was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘…you may not be a
slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.’” So, she
remembered, “we used to carry something with us, if we knew we
would be passing that way, in order to deface the statue—scratch up the
coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose.”

Black Charlestonians also threw stones at the second Calhoun statue,

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despite the fact that it was more than 80 feet tall, because the
antebellum politician “didn’t like us,” according to one woman. As late
as 1946, the city’s Historical Commission reported that the Calhoun
Monument required repairs because of “wanton mutilation by
unknown persons.”

The earlier, emancipation-era defacement of Charleston’s racist

memorials highlights African Americans’ newfound ability to shape the
commemorative landscape in ways that they saw fit. The passage of
time, however, afforded few new tools of resistance. By the late 19th
century, rocks and brickbats no longer represented convenient weapons
but, instead, the only options available to attack these monuments.
Politically disenfranchised and living under the tightening noose of Jim
Crow, what else could black Charlestonians have done?

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A statue commemorating Denmark Vesey, the leader of an attempted slave

rebellion and a founding member of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston,
South Carolina. (Courtesy of Ethan J. Kytle)

In the post-civil-rights South, the situation has vastly improved. Over

the last five years, community activists have transformed Charleston’s
public spaces. They have erected a dozen historical markers that
memorialize the black freedom struggle from the antebellum period
through the civil-rights era. Most significantly, in 2014, a statue of

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Denmark Vesey, leader of a failed slave uprising in Charleston in 1822

and an early member of Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, was installed in a
park in the northern part of the city. This victory came after a nearly
two-decade battle between its proponents and those who view Vesey as
a terrorist, and not before opponents managed to prevent the
installation of the statue in Marion Square.

These new monuments and markers add a counterpoint to the

harmonious story Charleston’s streets have told for decades. Shoppers
meandering down King Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in
the city, are now forced to confront the sidewalk marker outside the
former S.H. Kress Store. There, in 1960, 16 students from all-black
Burke High School were arrested after staging a sit-in at the lunch
counter. The Vesey Monument best embodies this disruptive power.
Small wonder that its foes fought against putting the statue at the center
of the city. What better way to contest the claim that slavery was “a
positive good,” as Calhoun once proclaimed, than to place a statue of
Vesey next to both the Calhoun Monument and the original Citadel, the
military arsenal built to police the city’s enslaved population in the
wake of the Vesey conspiracy.

Erecting memorials that provide a more inclusive and accurate

narrative of the past, then, seems a more effective way to counter racist
monuments than does defacing them. And those who seek to challenge
a specific Confederate monument’s message directly might consider an
alternative—supplementing a statue with a marker that provides
historical context about its origins and meaning. A group of students at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has proposed installing
just this sort of plaque next to Silent Sam, a Confederate statue erected
by the United Daughters of the Confederacy on the campus in 1913.

As historians of memory, we
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worry about the unintended

consequences of sanitizing the
commemorative landscape.

The other option, tearing all Confederate monuments down, is

troubling—however satisfying it would be. As historians of memory, we
worry about the unintended consequences of sanitizing the
commemorative landscape. Historical monuments are interpretations
of one era but also artifacts of another. Confederate and proslavery
memorials embody, even perpetuate, deeply flawed narratives of the
Old South and the Civil War. Yet they also reveal essential truths about
the time during which they were erected.

Mamie Garvin Fields, speaking about the first Calhoun Monument,

said, “I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through
that statue.” She was right. White Charlestonians used their
monuments to Calhoun to justify the system of segregation they
worked so hard to impose on African Americans after the promise of
Reconstruction. Whites could not re-enslave blacks, but they could
raise a likeness of one of the peculiar institution’s most vocal
champions to remind them of their “proper place” in the New South. If
we do away with monuments like the Calhoun statue, we risk erasing
how these memorials reinforced racial inequality in the past. This
would constitute a distortion of history, of memory, in its own right. We
also risk losing sight of the insidious legacies of these monuments
today.

Of course, this same logic could be applied to the Confederate battle

flag in Columbia, which was not raised over the South Carolina capitol
until 1961. Why, one might reasonably ask, should we take down this
banner—which, after all, is an artifact of the state’s embrace of massive
resistance to the civil-rights movement—but not Confederate

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monuments?

Because there are salient, if somewhat slippery, distinctions between

flags and monuments. For one, removing Confederate banners and
placing them in museums—as President Obama, among others, has
urged—is more feasible than dismantling the hundreds of statues,
many far too large for any museum, that would need to come down.
Moreover, flags by their nature are symbols of governmental authority,
while monuments do not always carry the same weight. When South
Carolina and other southern states fly the Confederate battle flag on
state grounds, they imply official state sanction of what the banner
stood for in the 1860s—the preservation of slavery—and in the
1960s—the maintenance of racial segregation. To be fair, Confederate
busts in capitol buildings and monuments on capitol grounds also carry
the imprimatur of the state. As such, they might be good candidates for
relocation to museums. But the vast majority of Confederate
monuments stand on public land—parks, university campuses,
battlefields—not directly associated with governmental authority.

Leaving Confederate memorials up and supplementing them with more

accurate historical monuments as well as contextualizing markers is not
a perfect solution. And it raises difficult questions. Why, in the year
2015, should communal spaces in the South continue to be sullied by
tributes to those who defended slavery? And how can Americans ignore
the pain that black citizens, especially, must feel when they walk by the
Calhoun Monument, or any similar statues, on their way to work,
school, or bible study?

But the statues also bear mute witness to the Jim Crow culture that
venerated men who initiated a bloody civil war to protect an inhumane
institution. If they make the public uneasy, that is because this past is
uncomfortable. Taking down Confederate flags, but allowing properly
contextualized Confederate monuments to stand, strikes the right
balance between promoting a complete picture of the past and

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respecting the needs of the present.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ETHAN J. KYTLE is an associate professor of history at California State University,

Fresno. He is the author of Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in
the Civil War Era and, with Blain Roberts, a forthcoming book about the memory
of slavery in Charleston, South Carolina.

BLAIN ROBERTS is an associate professor of history at California State University,

Fresno. She is the author of Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and
Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South and, with Ethan J. Kytle, a forthcoming
book about the memory of slavery in Charleston, South Carolina.

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