Education Week - August 23, 2017 - 32

COMMENTARY

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LETTERS TO
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Facing Our Confederate Past

don't need to turn on the news to
understand that Confederate monuments send powerful messages. I
knew it long before blood ran in the
streets of Charlottesville, Va., where
a statue of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee was to be removed
and relocated.
That event stirred memories of my boyhood in the late 1950s, when I was much impressed by an imposing equestrian statue on
Monument Avenue in my home city of Richmond, Va., the former capital of the Confederacy. I asked my father who the man atop
the pedestal was, and he answered, "That's
General Lee."
I don't recall Dad saying much about what
he called the War Between the States, even
though his own grandfather, as I learned
much later, had served as a Confederate
artilleryman. Yet the grandeur of the Lee
monument left no doubt in my mind that the
general had been a great, triumphant figure.
Then, during a family vacation when I
was perhaps 6 years old, I met an older boy
from someplace farther north. We decided
to play "Civil War," and I announced that I
wanted to be Robert E. Lee. The other fellow gently warned me that this meant I
would have to lose.
I was incredulous. But my playmate,
evincing the sophistication that attended
his status as a 5th grader, marshaled various proofs that Lee had, in fact, fought for
the losing side. Knowing nothing about the
actual issues over which the Civil War had
been fought, I nevertheless cried tears the bitterness of which would be matched only one
other time in my childhood-when I stumbled on the truth about Santa Claus a couple
years afterward.
I need no convincing that these monuments
matter.
A flood of moonlight, magnolias, and mint
julep glasses given away by local businesses
blotted out virtually any mention of slavery
during the Civil War centennial in the early
1960s. You might expect that my formal education in Richmond likewise actively burnished the heroic luster of Lee and the other
Confederate luminaries enshrined on Monument Avenue.
But within the walls of my public school,
my white classmates and I were not taught
Confederate nostalgia-nor much about the
emancipation of the enslaved. A particular
lesson that one teacher did proffer was that
the Confederacy's defeat had been a fortunate
thing in that it passed down to us a unified
country equipped to defend freedom in the
Cold War world.
I learned in college what no one had ever
taught me in public school: Confederate Vice
President Alexander Stephens, like various
other leading Southerners, openly proclaimed
that the "cornerstone" of the new Confederacy

Cook Collection/The Valentine Museum

By Melvin Patrick Ely

A crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered in Richmond, Va., on May 29, 1890, to view the
unveiling of the Gen. Robert E. Lee Monument.

was "the great truth, that the Negro is not
equal to the white man; that slavery-subordination to the superior race-is his natural
and normal condition."
As an adult, I came to understand that
the Confederate monuments in Richmond-like the ones removed in New Orleans in May and the many others that appeared across the South between the 1880s
and the 1920s-celebrate, in part, a victory won by leading white Southerners. By
1900, most white Americans-North and
South-accepted the idea that Confederates had gallantly fought to defend states'
rights, and that the white South ought to be
left alone to deny basic rights to its AfricanAmerican neighbors.
Not many ordinary Americans know this
history; we need to be teaching it. Even
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who
presided over the recent removals of Confederate shrines in that city, admitted in a
recent speech to having earlier "passed by

32 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 23, 2017 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

those monuments a million times without
giving them a second thought."
Because hundreds of Confederate monuments remain, the controversy will not go
away anytime soon. That allows us-obligates us-to frame for our students, in
ways that promote inquiry and reasoned
analysis, the debate over what to do with
monuments.
How might we do that?
Mayor Landrieu rightly noted that memorialization in the South perpetrates "a lie by
omission"-namely, the near-total absence
of monuments to those who suffered under
and resisted slavery, lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation. The creation of new
monuments to black heroes and other champions of human rights has already begun in
some places. Schoolteachers and their pupils
should follow and even participate in that
process, which would offer many opportunities to learn history.
As for the Confederate monuments them-

selves, one proposed way forward is to put existing monuments "in context." Explanatory
signage would convey what the Civil War was
about; what roles the men depicted played
during the conflict; who erected those shrines
of memory, and when, and why. Social studies curricula, augmented by field trips to such
places, could then cover the monuments and
the emotions that have swirled around them.
Of course, new controversies would burst
forth over the right to control the content of
the interpretive material.
The debate over contextualizing monuments can teach our students an important
life lesson: that compromise is not always
possible. Many ask, for example, how there
can be any legitimate memorialization of a
cause that embraced (among other values)
slavery and a belief in African-American inferiority. Meanwhile, recent public hearings
to consider the future of Richmond's Monument Avenue revealed that even devotees of
the Confederate heritage who are not among
the alt-right regard contextualization of the
statues as "desecration."
Students could be asked to examine individual American monuments, whether Confederate or not, and to discuss their genesis
and whether they deserve to remain. They
could debate whether we should mothball
every statue that commemorates a flawed
person; however, they would soon realize that
this could leave us with no monuments at all.
They would also discover that even ownership of slaves, if adopted as a winnowing device, would wipe out much of the American
pantheon, disqualifying not only Washington,
Jefferson, and Madison, but also John Winthrop and Benjamin Franklin.
Some students might propose an amnesty
for slaveholders who eventually opposed the
institution or provided for their own bondpeople to go free; that would "winnow back
in" Washington and Franklin. But what, a
good teacher might then ask, do we do about
a person who denounced slavery eloquently
and drafted the Declaration of Independence,
yet expressed racist views and freed almost
no enslaved people?
For the moment, we Americans need to
focus our hopes and efforts on preserving human life and safety and on trying to
awaken whatever latent capacity for moral
leadership may remain in our public sphere.
As we move forward, we should also make
full use of the many opportunities to talk
seriously about race, history, and American
values that the controversy over Confederate
monuments offers us. n
MELVIN PATRICK ELY is the William R. Kenan Jr.
professor of humanities at the College of William &
Mary. Previously, he taught in public high schools in
Richmond, Va., and in western Massachusetts. He
specializes in the history of African-Americans and of
the South. He is the author of Israel on the Appomattox:
A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the
1790s through the Civil War (Vintage, 2005).

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Education Week - August 23, 2017

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