CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS, STATUTES, AND INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: SLAVERY, JIM CROW, AND ADOLF HITLER

A debate that sometimes flares into violence now rages in the United States over Confederate monuments and statues. The deaths of African American men and women in police custody like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have provided new urgency to an already invigorated movement for removing such monuments and statutes from city streets, government buildings, and college campuses. We stand squarely with those who would destroy or relegate such structures to museums or other places that can put them into proper historical context.

We acknowledge an arguable distinction between monuments honoring Confederate officials and military officers and symbols of the Confederacy on one hand and those recognizing founding fathers of the nation who enslaved people, but did not rebel against the United States.  Monuments honoring Thomas Jefferson and George Washington require a different conversation and we defer that to another day. We concern ourselves now with people who took up arms against the country.

We fear supporters of keeping Confederate monuments prefer forgetting inconvenient truths about what those monuments represent. Today we remind them.

It was About Slavery

The War Between the States, as supporters of the Lost Cause like calling it, was fought about one thing: The South’s desire to preserve slavery and expand it into the western territories. In the early 1800s, as Americans marched westward and new states sought admission into the Union, the South realized it had a problem. If those territories entered as free states, soon the South would find itself out gunned in Congress. The number of representatives and most importantly, senators, from free states would outnumber those from slave-holding states. The South would lose its hold on power in the national government. The South couldn’t have that, since it risked the end of slavery.

Too many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) two things about slavery -- how brutal it was and how important it was economically. When we wrote recently about the movement that would make Juneteenth a national holiday, we identified museums that tell the story of slavery’s horrors. We’ve noted before how

Professor Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism provides a thorough understanding of both slavery’s brutality and its economic dimensions. The book describes in chilling detail murders, rapes, and physical abuse that went along with slavery and explains the relationship between the peculiar institution and development of the United States as a world commercial power. It will disabuse any reader of the notion the Civil War (its proper name) was about anything else.

The Monuments and Jim Crow

Advocates of keeping Confederate monuments glossed over when most were

erected. It wasn’t immediately after the Civil War when supporters of the Lost Cause might have focused on memorializing their heroes. Only a few went up in those years. In fact, many monuments went up after reconstruction as part of an organized campaign against recently freed enslaved persons that promoted Jim Crow segregation and, later, resistance to the civil rights movement.

       

 

Richmond, Virginia, for example, installed a statue of  Confederate President Jefferson Davis on its famous Monument Avenue in

1907. The statue of Robert E. Lee removed in 2017 from a street in New Orleans went up in 1884. The Lee statute in Charlottesville, Virginia that sparked violence in 2017 was installed in 1924. South Carolina began flying the Confederate battle flag above its state capitol in 1962, as a protest against school desegregation. USA Today reported thirty-five Confederate monuments erected in North Carolina after 2000.

These historical facts suggest erecting monuments to Confederate leaders had more to do with intimidating blacks and the civil

rights community than with preserving “heritage” as monument supporters so piously claim. Students of history know context means everything. Context in this instance speaks volumes about the message the monuments were established to send.

Hitler?

Yes, Adolf Hitler. Frankly, we’ve been surprised many people appear hesitant about comparing

the  memorializing of confederates who fought against the United States with German and Japanese leaders during the Second World War. Well, we’re not. We’re not because we don’t see a distinction. No American city or university would erect a statue of Hitler. The United States military wouldn’t name a base after Erwin Rommel, the general who

commanded German forces resisting the D-Day invasion at Normandy. How about a monument honoring Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Yet, statues in cities and on college campuses and the names of military bases honor defeated, treasonous Confederate officers. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Braxton Bragg, and other Confederate battle commanders fought as hard against the United States as Rommel and Yamamoto. Davis sought destruction of the United States just as Hitler and Japanese Emperor Hirohito did. A distinction is artificial and intellectually dishonest.

If we have made harsh pronouncements on

this issue, so be it. Some principles require expression with moral clarity and certainty, unadulterated by diplomatic or cultural nicety. For us, this is such an issue.

We stand by our assessment. None the less, we remain interested in contrary views. We’ve stated ours, so let us hear from you about yours. 

BACK TO THE DOLLARWAY SYNDROME: A WORK IN PROGRESS

In 2019, Rob began previewing the book he’s writing about what he calls “The Dollarway Syndrome” – the proclivity white Americans have for treating individual black Americans with kindness, civility, and compassion while, at the same time, supporting and espousing political and social policies that retard black progress. In this post, he relates more about how The Dollarway Syndrome works.

I’ve organized the book into three parts. The first three chapters comprise a memoir in which I relate basic facts about me and report incidents and stories that describe the Dollarway  Syndrome. These incidents and

stories mostly occurred during my time at Dollarway, the small, Pine Bluff, Arkansas high school from which I graduated in 1969. Part two explores the connection between geography and race in America and some basic human behavior concepts. It serves as a bridge between the memoir section and part three, the portion of the book in which I offer explanations for the Dollarway Syndrome, what it means in our broader racial context, and how we might minimize its negative effects. Part three connects the Dollarway Syndrome with ideas about race discrimination offered by scholars, journalists, and others who focus on racial issues.

Today, I relate part of a story from the memoir chapters that harkens back to a political campaign in which Henry, Woodson, and I all took great interest – the 1966 Arkansas governor’s race between moderate

Republican Winthrop Rockefeller and the Democratic nominee, arch segregationist state supreme court Justice Jim Johnson. Rockefeller, who won and for whom Henry later worked, vigorously courted black voters

while Johnson reportedly regularly tossed round the n-word.  The encounter I describe with one of my white classmates left a lasting impression because it shook me and represented my first experience with the duality of the Dollarway Syndrome.

Reading Partners

I arrived at Dollarway as a sophomore in 1966, attending under a freedom-of-choice desegregation plan that lets students pick their school. Only a handful of blacks (three in my class) elected Dollarway. Most remained at all-black Townsend Park High.

One of my white classmates noticed I carried around paperback books that weren’t on our English class reading list. He shared with me that he was also an avid reader and fan of the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason  novels

he’d noticed me reading (the popular television series starring Raymond Burr had just ended). For several weeks, this student and I cultivated a friendship based on our mutual affinity for those novels, whispering back and forth and passing notes in study hall about the latest one we’d started reading.

I felt this student and I developed a genuine friendship based on mutual respect and trust.

Unlike other white Dollarway students, he never used racial slurs. We interacted in a way that made me feel his equal. For a few weeks, I thought of him as the best friend I had at Dollarway, white or black. That’s why I felt betrayed by what happened a little later.

A Locker Room Conversation

Besides English class, this student and I took physical education together. One day in October, with the hot gubernatorial election nearing its climax, as we dressed after gym class, he asked me, “Hey, Wiley, you think ol’ Rockefeller’s gonna win the election?”

I hesitated. Should I make known my

intensely pro-  Rockefeller views? I wondered how being honest with him would affect our friendship, since I knew many white Dollarway students favored Johnson.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know who’ll win. I know who I hope wins.”

I hung back, acknowledging the first part of his statement, but ignoring the second part. “I can’t say now who’ll win. It’s close, real close from what I hear.”

“I don’t like Rockefeller.”

My heart sank a little with his words, but I only nodded and waited for his reason. I lifted my eyebrows but remained silent in the moment.

“Johnson will be stronger,” he continued. “You know, tougher. Rockefeller seems weak to me.”

“I don’t know,” I said, buttoning my shirt,

picking up my gym bag, and moving toward the door. “I guess we’ll just have to see how it turns out.” I left before he could say more. Later, I reflected on his last words. They nagged at me.

After thinking about it a long time, really until after things white people said during the 1968 elections two years later, I realized what my reading partner probably meant. He meant ‘stronger’ and ‘tougher’ on blacks. I’ve always believed he preferred not saying that to me, given the time we’d spent together and the decency he’d shown toward me. I assume he knew talking in overt racial terms would jeopardize the friendship. For his own reasons, I imagined he didn’t want that.

Far worse instances of white people engaging in racially insensitive behavior after befriending me occurred during my Dollarway years. This one stung so much because it was the first.

This student and I remained friends for most of the rest of that school year. We drifted apart over the remaining two years of high school. The relationship was never the same after what happened in the fall of ’66. As I saw it, being for Jim Johnson and recognizing racial equality wasn’t possible. By being friends with me and supporting Johnson, was he saying it was? I’d never considered such an idea and I’m still troubled by people who’d suggest that. One thing was clear after that locker room conversation. I’d seen something I never had before. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.