A response to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, from a born and bred Alabamian

 

Dear Governor Ivey,

You recently declared that you have no interest in what “folks in Washington,” or “out-of-state liberals” have to say about Alabama’s Confederate monuments.

Ok then, how about a white native-born and bred Alabamian that has made a life out of historical research and writing, and who teaches history to college students right here in our mutually beloved state? Would you mind hearing from me?

You claim that “to get where we’re going, means understanding where we’ve been.” Yet I am not so sure you fully understand where we have been.

Stay with me here  . . .

I was born in the turbulent year of 1968 on Birmingham’s Southside, at St. Vincent’s hospital.

I’m sure you can remember the year well: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam led to President Johnson’s decision to not seek reelection; Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, sparking racial violence in many of America’s cities; Bobby Kennedy was shot down after winning the California primary; young American war protestors clashed with the police in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention; Richard Nixon won the presidency by blowing the proverbial “dog whistle” about “law and order”; And our very own George Wallace made a strong third party showing in the election, despite (and because of) his recent career of standing firmly against integration.

Oh, that George Wallace. I’m sure you know about how he won the job you now have by proclaiming he would resist “outside agitators” that wanted to integrate our schools. “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he declared, while harkening to the Confederacy and the “heart of the great Anglo-Saxon southland.”

Yet those “outside agitators” were mostly southern born and bred African Americans. MLK? Heck, he was just a young Georgian that got his first job in our state and first gained fame as a resident here.

And then there was that time Wallace stood in the door of Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama campus, speaking out against the “tyranny” of Washington DC that was forcing the school to integrate.

He lost that battle as Vivian Jones and James Hood, two native born Alabamians, were allowed to register. Damn those outside agitators.

Jones and Hood, getting registered at their own state’s flagship University

In the years afterward, a lot of white Alabamians placed their kids in private academies to avoid integration, but I was part of the first generation of Alabama school children that went to integrated public schools their whole life. From first grade in 1975 until I graduated from Homewood High School in 1987, my world was filled with black faces and friends that I sat next to in class and in the lunchroom, played sports with, hung out with on the weekends, and walked across a stage with to receive our diplomas.

Turns out that integration wasn’t so bad after all, and is likely the main reason why I grew up largely judging people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.

Yes, that was MLK’s dream, that Georgian who lived and spent much of his life in Alabama. Oh, and remember that time he marched across the Pettus Bridge in Selma alongside native born Alabamian John Lewis, the same guy that was a leader in the Freedom Rides? Damn those outside agitators.

King and Lewis, those darn agitators.

Anyway, after finishing up high school, I went to college at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, where I majored in history. Guess what I learned in both those Alabama public schools and at UAB? I learned that the reason the southern states seceded from the Union and tried to establish their own government was so that they could prevent the destruction of slavery.

It seems that they too did not want “outside agitators” like abolitionists and a democratically elected president in Washington DC to tell them what to do with their domestic institutions.

So they seceded, establishing a Confederacy that their vice president unashamedly declared to have been built “upon 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. This, our new government [the Confederate States of America], is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Yes, that Confederacy. The one we have all those monuments to.

While at UAB, I also learned much about the “Lost Cause,” the successful attempt of white Southerners to rewrite the history of the Confederacy after its defeat, stressing that secession had been about “state’s rights,” not slavery. Furthermore, they insisted, slavery had been a benign institution that benefitted both races, and that a strict racial hierarchy had created a much more peaceful and harmonic society than existed elsewhere in the country.

Yet if slavery had to be gone as a result of the efforts of “outside agitators,” white Southerners believed they could at least recreate its racial order through “Jim Crow” segregation laws. At the forefront of those efforts during the late 1800s and early 1900s, was the construction of memorials to the Confederacy and its gallant soldiers. Monument dedications became “teachable moments” in which speakers enthralled crowds with the deeds of the glorious dead that gave their lives in defense of a superior racial order.

Yes, I learned much of that while at UAB, from a professor that was born and raised in Mobile and received her PhD in Georgia. Damn those outside agitators.

Also while I was at UAB, Birmingham opened its beautiful Civil Rights Institute and Museum, and I took enormous pride in the facility’s effective presentation of the role of my hometown in some of the Civil Rights movement’s most dramatic events in fighting to end those Jim Crow laws.

It always struck me that the Children’s March in 1963, (when hundreds of children were jailed and firehosed in the streets of their very own hometown–damn those outside agitators), took place under the shadow of one of those Confederate memorials in Linn Park.

Confederate monument in Linn Park

You know the one. It is the one that Alabama citizens and elected officials in Birmingham now want removed. They stand in defiance of that law you so pridefully signed that prevents local Alabama communities from making their own decisions about what they want to memorialize in their own streets and cities. Damn those outside agitators.

And damn local rights.

After college, I started pursuing a PhD, and that journey temporarily led me out of state. It was then that I learned that many people outside of Alabama believed it was still 1963 down here, with racism and perhaps even Jim Crow still reigning supreme. I tried to tell them about how far our state had come, but it was a tough sell, even in the 1990s.

This had to be written by an “out of state liberal!”

I returned home when the University of Alabama lured me with fellowships and scholarships, and it was there that I earned my PhD by researching and writing a book about the roles that enslaved African Americans played in the fight against the Confederacy. Imagine that! A white Alabamian writing about such a thing! Don’t only “out of state liberals” focus on the Confederacy’s commitment to defending slavery? Damn those outside agitators.

I’m still here in Tuscaloosa, but now I am teaching—about slavery, the Confederacy, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, the Civil Rights movement. And guess what? I can promise you that even if every last Confederate memorial were to come down, those things will still be researched, written about, and taught in schools. History would not be erased.

And it will continue to be taught in ways that corrects the history that those monuments were built to distort.

The irony here is that I am actually not in favor of removal of the monuments (I support contextualization), but I am in favor of local communities deciding for themselves what they want to do with them. They shouldn’t be dictated to by people outside their community.

Even those in Montgomery.

Governor Ivey, I know that your defiant message probably plays well with many of your constituents. But please understand that when you use the language you have about “out-of-state liberals” and “folks in Washington” you’re using the same message as proslavery advocates when they resisted abolition, post-Reconsruction era politicians when they maintained white supremacy by passing Jim Crow laws and building Confederate monuments, and anti-integrationists like your predecessor George Wallace when he led the state against the Civil Rights movement.

And just like Wallace, you’re ignoring the fact that native-born Alabamians, then as well as now, are on the forefront of these efforts at racial reconciliation, Civil Rights, and an honest reckoning of our history.

You only insult and belittle them and demonstrate that you care little about listening when you label their beliefs “politically correct nonsense” coming from outside the state.

Do you really want to sound like you’re on the same side as proslavery advocates, Jim Crow, and George Wallace? If so, perhaps our beloved state actually is still stuck in 1963, and you’re definitely not the one that can lead it forward.

Sincerely,

A proud Alabamian.

 

The rebel monument debate comes to my hometown (and another dear to my heart).

City workers covering up a Confederate memorial in Birmingham

UPDATE on 1/15/2019: my prediction below that Birmingham would win the court fight turned out accurate, although I am pleasantly surprised that it didn’t require a higher court than the Jefferson County Circuit Court to strike down the stupid state law.

We all know the debate over Confederate monuments has gone white-hot, especially after the events in Charlottesville.

I have weighed in on this debate several times in the last year (and have no stomach for the argument that removal is “erasing history,” as I argued here) and I am firmly on record as favoring contextualization rather than removal, either by placing them in a museum (as the University of Texas did), or leaving them where they are and putting up new signs that explain the reasons the monuments were put up in the first place (like the University of Mississippi did). I also favor counter-monuments that help diversify the history we choose to remember and memorialize.

But above all, I favor letting local communities decide for themselves what they choose or don’t choose to memorialize.

However the events of the last couple of days, and Trump’s stunning reaction to them, started pushing me closer to supporting full removal.

Last night, I emotionally felt pretty much exactly as did CNN’s Van Jones:

But because I have been asked,  I want to weigh-in again on this issue by focusing on part of what Trump said, and specifically on two cities that are very close to my heart: Richmond, Virginia, (where I got my masters degree, worked at its National Battlefield Park, and lived for eight years) and Birmingham, Alabama (my hometown).

Richmond of course, is famous for its beautiful Monument Avenue, featuring enormous and imposing statues of rebel leaders such as Jefferson Davis, JEB Stuart, and Stonewall Jackson.  This summer, city leaders formed a commission to discuss how to best contextualize, but not to remove, the statues.  They held a public hearing to discuss options, and what followed was predictable mass chaos.  The audience seemed to disregard the fact that removal was not on the table, as it turned into a fight over whether to remove the statues or not. Not surprisingly, it quickly turned into a fight over what caused the South to secede. It got ugly. 

I was not there, but I have a friend and fellow historian that was, and based on his emotional and mostly sensible Facebook posting that night, it was an unmitigated disaster that probably only hardened people’s hearts and opinions, frustrating everyone.

After the stunning events of the last few days, Richmond’s mayor has decided that removal IS now on the table, and has instructed the commission to add that option to its deliberations. He made it clear he personally now favors removal. Even more powerful, two great, great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson have called for removal in a powerful plea. 

I can’t say I blame any of them, as my emotional reaction to Charlottesville, as I said above, was also to take all these rebel monuments down.

Yet stepping back from those emotions causes me to feel that of all southern cities, Richmond is probably the one in which it is most important that they stay up.

As the Capital of the Confederacy, (sitting within easy driving distance of some of the war’s most important and preserved battlefields), the city is perhaps the only one that people actually travel to just to see the monuments. (No one is going to New Orleans, or Baltimore, or Nashville, JUST to see rebel memorials).

And from an educational and public history perspective that is a GOOD THING. The city has done an exceptional job over the last decade to create institutions, memorials, and other public education endeavors, telling the WHOLE and diverse story of the Civil War and the Confederacy, and the connection of both to the institution of slavery.

The monuments not only draw people to these educational opportunities, but they themselves are important educational tools for demonstrating how previous generations chose to interpret the Civil War in an effort to promote the “Lost Cause.”

Most rebel monuments were originally placed as means of denying that the South had seceded in order to preserve slavery.  Their purpose was to glorify and distort the causes of the Confederacy’s attempt to break from the United States, painting it as an effort to defend “States Rights.” (Just how successful that effort was has been made all the more clear lately—-that Richmond public hearing, for example).

At the same time, they are monuments to white supremacy and resistance to efforts at racial justice. This chart detailing when most of these monumnts and memorials went up, demonstrates this very effectively. Thus, the erection of the monuments has a history and purpose all their own.

If you want the perfect classroom for exploring the Lost Cause, its meanings, and its successes, there is no better one than standing at the base of the Lee monument, or especially the one of Jefferson Davis. Contextualization in those spots could be a powerful way to educate the public about the white supremacist movements that for so long successfully distorted America’s understanding of the Civil War for their own political agenda. (And which has once again reared its ugly and violent head).

So I favor contextualization in Richmond, and the addition of more monuments that tell a more inclusive story (how about one to the African American troops that played a large role in reclaiming the city for the United States, for example?). Of course the problem is that most people view the monuments as they ride quickly by in cars or tourist buses, and thus I’m not sure how much contextualization signs would be visible and/or effective. This is definitely a problem.

Still, I think this is the right solution for Richmond, and they, above probably all other cities, have the ability to set the model for how these rebel monuments can be used to educate the public about how and why so many people are misinformed about the causes of the Civil War, and how those efforts were tied to resistance to black progress and racial justice.

I hope they get it right.

And then there is my hometown.  I took a lot of pride when it was announced in January that Birmingham’s Civil Rights district was being turned into a national park. The Confederate memorial near this area creates a strong contrast to the newer (and increasing) memorials and interpretive signage marking the pivotal events that occurred in Birmingham, especially those in 1963 that played a prominent role in pushing President Kennedy into proposing the Civil Rights Act. Make no mistake, the new park is preserving an American battlefield for racial justice:

The events in Charlottesville had me feeling that rebel monuments in Birmingham should come down, as they are an insult and black-eye on this historic district. Yet, a local news story may have pushed me back the other way again.

In the wake of what happened in New Orleans, the state of Alabama passed a ridiculous law making it illegal for local communities to remove rebel monuments. The hypocrisy here is amazing, considering that Republicans stand on the principle of power resting in the hands of localized government (a concept I have been mostly sympathetic to most of my life). Of course this is akin to the hypocrisy of Republicans calling for a small federal government that does not involve itself in our lives, and yet wanting one that legislates morality. If there is one thing the Republican party needs right now, it is consistency of principle.

Anyway, the city of Birmingham’s mayor and city council has decided to figure out some way to challenge this law, maybe by removing the statues and fighting it in the courts (I think they would win in the higher courts), or just paying the fine. In the meantime, they have opted for covering up the monuments, first with a tarp, and now with some plywood.

As a result, the state’s attorney general is suing Birmingham for violating “the spirit” of the law. So the battle has been joined. 

UPDATE on 1/15/2019: my prediction that Birmingham would win the court fight turned out accurate, although I am pleasantly surprised that it didn’t require a higher court than the Jefferson County Circuit Court to strike down the stupid state law.

What struck me in a local news story, however, was a reporter mentioning that the monument is in the shadow of the places dear to the Civil Rights movement. For instance, the A.G. Gaston motel where Martin Luther King stayed during “Project C” is within a rock’s throw of the rebel monument. Here he and other heroes coordinated their assault on Birmingham’s white supremacist laws and racial injustices, right near a monument to the very forces they sought to destroy. And it was here that dynamite was thrown into the building in an effort to kill these Civil Rights leaders.

Does not the presence of this Lost Cause monument make what King and the hundreds of Civil Rights footsoldiers did in Birmingham even more profound?  Would we not lose part of the story if we move the Confederate monument? Is it not a perfect symbol of everything that the Civil Rights movement fought against and brought to its knees in Birmingham?

Properly interpret that monument, in the context of its purposes and also within the Civil Rights movement, and you’ve got a powerful public education tool. Removal takes that away.

So I stand for leaving it up.

ON THE OTHER HAND, you should read this op-ed by Mississippi State University Professor Anne E. Marshall, who argues that she once stood for contextualization, but has changed her mind after seeing its failure in Louisville, Ky. I can’t say she doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yet I still  think Richmond, as well as Birmingham, are different cases than Louisville—Which only reinforces my conviction that this is best left to case-by-case decisions from within the effected communities.

And then there’s Trump. I am not going to comment on how sad I was to hear our president say that there were good people in a crowd organized by white nationalists. Honestly, I can’t add anything to the outrage that has already been expressed.

Yet I have been asked by past and present students, as well as friends, about my thoughts on one aspect of what he said. So I’ll comment briefly on that.

Trump, echoing many others, insisted that if we take down a monument to Lee and Jackson because they were slaveholders, this logically would lead us to take down monuments to other slaveholders, many of which were our founding fathers. Where would it end? There goes the Washington Memorial in DC!

Make no mistake: This is a proverbial red-herring that gets repeated over and over again by those who oppose the removal, or even the contextualization, of these monuments.

So let us be clear, despite Trump’s (and Fox News’) claim, the rationale for taking down the monuments is NOT based on the fact that the Confederate leaders were slaveholders. The logic behind taking them down (or contextualizing them) is that these were people who committed an act of treason against the United States to defend the institution of slavery and white supremacy. (In the case of Lee and Jackson, they broke sacred oaths they took when they joined the US military).

Washington and Jefferson and other founding fathers were certainly flawed men, guilty of America’s original sin of slavery (among other things), but they did not commit acts of treason in the name of white supremacy.

Oh, but they were treasonous, you say, because they rebelled against their government by breaking from the British empire.

I have LONG been sick of this argument. Washington and Jefferson rebelled against a government in which they had no representation, which, you know, was kind of the whole point. Don’t we learn in grade school, “no taxation without representation!?” They believed that taxes could only come from institutions in which they were represented (specifically, their own colonial legislatures).

Robert E Lee, on the other hand,  rebelled against a government in which he had representation.  In fact, because of the 3/5ths clause of  the Constitution, southern white men like him were OVERLY represented in that government, which was pretty much the reason the Republican Party was formed in the first place—to bring down this overly-represented and overly-politically powerful “slave power.”

So there is a big difference between Washington and Lee. HUGE difference.

Please do not listen to Trump or anyone else when they insist that taking down rebel monuments would lead to pulling down all monuments to slaveholders or otherwise morally flawed leaders. It just isn’t so.

This is about the Confederacy and its causes. Insisting otherwise, or that the Civil War was not caused by a defense of slavery and white supremacy,  is FAKE NEWS.

Bottom line: I am still for contextualization in Birmingham and Richmond. But if locals in those places and in other cities decide to take them down, I’ll shed no tears for the Confederacy, (unlike the real ones I shed after our so-called president’s response to Charlottesville).

 

 

I promise you, Confederate history is NOT being erased

Oh my gosh! Look at that man erasing history! NOT.

Quick thoughts on monuments in the news:

So, New Orleans has begun the process of taking down monuments, starting with one that is NOT a Confederate monument (no matter how it has been labeled as such by the media). They are set to remove three others that ARE Confederate monuments in the coming days. I really don’t have the desire to comment much on these types of removals, because I think I have made my position on this very clear in the past.  Simply put, I prefer contextualization and/or counter monuments (which is a powerful way of confronting and challenging the iconography of previous generations in a way that is in itself educational) instead of removal. Yep, you heard me right. I do not think removal is the best way to deal with this.

BUT removing them is NOT “erasing history,” it is an attempt to be honest about it. If I hear or read another person claiming this is an attempt to erase history, I am going to have a full on conniption fit. As I have seen other historians say, don’t worry folks, we are not going to be letting anyone suddenly forget what the Confederacy was and what it stood for, I promise you that. It is what me and a great number of other people are paid to do, and we do it passionately. Research and teaching about the history of the southern confederacy and the Civil War isn’t going anywhere, monuments or no monuments.

So don’t worry, hundreds of Civil War books are going to keep coming out every year, the Civil War is still going to get taught in class, more and more battlefield land is going to be preserved (which has only increased in recent years), and historians are going to keep increasingly getting involved in public history and on social media.

But you say, it is erasing older interpretations about the Confederacy and the Civil War, and replacing them with ones you don’t agree with. Nope. We may be correcting/challenging older interpretations, but we aren’t  erasing them. The fact that people once interpreted the Civil War in the ways reflected in the monuments is not going away either. It too is part of the story, and I can again promise you that historians are not going to let anyone forget how the Civil War used to be interpreted. This is called “historiography,” and every professional historian is trained in it. You can’t be a good historian without learning how events have been interpreted by others, and how that has evolved over time.

In fact, the removal of these monuments only adds to the story that historians tell about the Confederacy and the Civil War. In essence, it is Confederate history continuing to be made today. The removals are now part of a story that will never be erased. So please just stop saying that history is being erased. Just stop it, please.

But as to the removals, regardless of mine or anyone else’s opinions, these decisions are best left to local communities that have the right to commemorate or not commemorate whatever they want to.

Yet there are two things I find funny/hypocritical in the nationwide reaction to New Orleans’ decision. 1) We hear people say that Trump protestors need to “get over it” and move on. Yet the people that say that seem to be the most vocal against these removals, which is ironic given that the placement of the monuments themselves was done by people who couldn’t “get over” their loss in the war. It was their attempt to reframe what it was all about. (The “Lost Cause.”)

And 2) it seems that Republicans are the most vocal against these removals (like this clown pretending to be a southerner and running for governor of Virginia), which is ironic because they are supposedly the champions of letting state and local governments do most of our governing. So shouldn’t we let local governments/communities make their own choices about these monuments? I’m just calling for some consistency,  . . . again.

And while we are on the Lost Cause, yesterday was “Confederate Memorial Day” here in Alabama. Ugh. But I take it as a sign of progress that the ceremony marking the day at our state capitol building was attended by a whopping 150 or so people. Nice. It is a good thing we have these people around to remind us of the Confederacy, since its history would apparently just disappear if they weren’t here to remind us.

 

Lastly for today, and on a different subject: Another news story that is all over the place is that a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered in a British archive. Unfortunately, the story is getting blown out of proportion and/or misunderstood by people that are apparently inspired by that stupid Nicholas Cage movie. My local news got it all wrong last night, as has been the case all over social media. This is not an unknown second “original” copy of the Declaration. It is a handwritten copy that was made on parchment in the 1780s, which is rare indeed, but not exactly an original and/or something that should set off conspiracy theories. Researchers believe it was commissioned by James Wilson (who was the signer that was treated so poorly and portrayed so inaccurately in the otherwise awesome musical 1776). How did it wind up in Britain? That seems to be mostly a mystery.