So, how is your favorite monument? The refurbished one downtown in Basin Park, the WWI soldier, seems to pass the history-we-can-live-with test. Wars, however, are no guarantee. If George Washington and Winston Churchill can come under fire, which they have, it would appear even victory is not a safeguard. Where does the line get drawn? It appears to be in the sand.
With all the recent protests, I was curious to find out what they had done with the public grade school I attended in Dallas, Texas. It was named for Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. I discovered it had been renamed Mockingbird Elementary School in 2017 with a minimum of fanfare. Okay, there were complaints, but only about the cost for signage and so forth.
This made me sad. Not because Stonewall Jackson was erased, but because history wasn’t passing muster. Couldn’t they find someone to capture the imagination of children, a name that might inspire kids to strive or excel? What about Barbara Jordan or Neil Armstrong or Jane Goodall or Robert Smalls? Mockingbirds are lovely, but will this designation encourage ornithology? Probably not. Mockingbird is the street address of the school.
Speaking of down the street, the Christ of the Ozarks statue is also problematic. It’s not the image or how it was rendered, although aesthetic police abound. It’s the builder, Gerald L. K. Smith. His obituary in the NY Times chronicled him as being “an anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, pro-Fascist” crusader. At this point there is a great distance between Jesus the statue and how it arrived on the hill. It stands without contest. Indeed, religious freedom is important, and time has silenced some rash edicts.
Forty miles away in Bentonville, the granite statue on the square is getting moved in August. It is not without a push. Sheree Miller, founder of Shame of Bentonville, was instrumental in working with the remnants of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (disbanded but located) to have the image of the Confederate soldier and later Arkansas Governor James Henderson Berry relocated to a private park near the city cemetery. While negotiated, it is happening diplomatically.
The new modern museum there, The Momentary, has produced a short film by Ariel René Jackson about the statue called “Bentonville Forecast: In the Square.” It displays a large, floating black balloon being held in front of the statue, as if to say, “See through the eyes of one who is black.”
Most of the 713 Confederate monuments in the United States were erected after 1900 during the Jim Crow period. The one in Bentonville was erected in 1908. It and other statues were a way to assert or still validate the Confederacy and its white supremacy stance under the guise of being historical. Where in the world are there statues to a losing side’s generals, mounted years later?
Do those whose extraordinary contributions were to the betterment of the United States, such as Washington or Jefferson, require a different microscope? Influential was our first President, not King. Enduring is the democratic Declaration of Independence. Flawed and imperfect these men were, and honesty about those slaveholding flaws is warranted.
There are those who believe monuments must be only for winners, and specifically, those winners for whom humanity was always priceless. Maybe they can also be for those who established great hope, all men are created equal, even if it was only on paper.