The HistoryMonuments

One of the graduate courses I’m taking this semester is about African-American intellectual history. As my final project, I’m researching the “genealogy” of how Black American thinkers and writers discussed monuments and the very notion of building a monument to a person or occasion.

I’ve only just begun to dip my toe into this research, but it’s been constantly on my mind since I attended a virtual panel about the topic this month as part of the yearly conference of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). So, for my blog this week, I thought I’d do a little research into what people in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive had to say about monuments, memorials, etc. Given that there are a lot of people in this archive (2,701 people, to be exact), I found a lot to write about. Here are some of the most interesting quotes about this topic that I found.

To begin, here’s a fascinating quote from James N. Eaton, Sr. that really resonated with me as a former resident of the city of Richmond. Richmond and other communities in the South are, of course, particularly important in any conversation about Black people and monuments because of the huge number of Confederate monuments in that part of the country. Here, Eaton describes living near Richmond’s famous Monument Avenue and the impact it had on him as a young Black man. He gets some of the details wrong—the avenue had monuments to Confederate leaders and not earlier Patriot leaders like Washington and Patrick Henry—but I think the sentiment rings true. Certainly, as Eaton alludes to, things were a bit different on Monument Avenue before the statue to Arthur Ashe, the Black tennis player, was added in 1996. The emphasis to this quote was added by me.

“I would see all these fine statutes, huge statutes, you know, a little kid looking up. They were green, on a big old marble pedestal. One had a picture of George Washington pointing south, and the, the theme was he's saying, "go south nigger, go south". That was the theme. It wasn't written on the statute. That's what everybody in town said. There was Patrick Henry, and there were all the great southern heroes there. But I never saw nobody that looked like me cause it, that's before Arthur, Arthur Ashe's time. There wasn't nobody on those horses looking like me, and I wondered about that. But I would go up there, and I'd cut the grass, and they didn't give me but, give fifty cents. And I would eat on the back porch, and my grandmamma would come out and say "How you doing" or whatever, you know what I mean. So, you know, but that was accepted. Then I had to come back, and the strange about it is, I kept wondering why in the world all these folks on these fine horses, house still there, the avenue is still there, and you can't see any black images that would encourage young black kids to try to be somebody.”

All of the Confederate monuments on Monument Ave. were removed, either by irate protestors or the state government, in 2020 or 2021. There’s something poetic in the fact that the statue of Arthur Ashe, a Black man, is now the only one remaining on Monument Avenue, no?

Photograph of the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue in 2015. Statue by Paul DiPasquale, photo by Ron Cogswell.

Like Eaton, Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., former executive of the NAACP, said in his interview he was profoundly impacted by the Confederate monuments in his hometown of Oxford, North Carolina. He went as far as saying it made him feel as if he was stuck in antebellum times:

“Okay, but so, in the swimming pool the--was segregated, the dime store, the movies. You know, that's--but Oxford--in the middle of town they had this Confederate statue. And you have to drive around this Confederate statute, and it said, ‘To our Confederate dead.’ And I always wondered why this statue was up in town. But in a sense, you know, the people in Granville County, in that part of the South, even though I'm growing up there in the 1950s, they, to a certain extent, they were still living in the 1850s. They were still living in Civil War days, you know.”

HistoryMaker Benjamin Chavis, Jr.

Of course, dissatisfaction from the public over monuments isn’t exclusive to those monuments to white supremacists. People can, and do, get mad because of a monument to a Black or antiracist person. Case in point, HistoryMaker Tyrone Brooks’s interview, in which he talks about the repeated vandalization of a memorial to Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist who was murdered.

“Well, we built this--SCLC/WOMEN [Southern Christian Leadership Conference/Women's Organizational Movement for Equality Now, Inc.] did it, I said we, it was the SCLC/WOMEN, Mrs. Evelyn Lowery, they built monument up on the hill there. And she's gotten the Alabama Power Company to put a fence around it with some lights up. The reason she had to do that is because the Ku Klux Klan would come by, and they would shoot it up, even years after she'd been buried. They would shoot at it, the monument, shoot it. They would go up and vandalize it. So they got this fence, this, this wrought iron fence with a gate on it. Now, you just can't walk in. You can see it from the outside, but they had to put the fence around it. And they, Georgia--Alabama Power has put up these big, bright lights over it. And if you drive from Selma to Montgomery on Highway 80, say if you're in Selma going to Montgomery, it's on your right-hand side, you know, right there in, about halfway up in the White Hall, in Lowndes County. You can't miss it. It's a beautiful monument up on the hill. It's a little white church right next to it, but every first weekend in March, Mrs. Evelyn Lowery takes hundreds, primarily youth which she tries to recruit the youth from the high schools and the colleges. And she takes them on this trip. I've been on it several times.”

The memorial to Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo in Lowndes County, Alabama. (Wikimedia Commons)

Other people in the archive described how they had been instrumental in building monuments. HistoryMaker Colin Powell, a U.S. Army officer who also served as the Secretary of State, spoke in his interview about helping ensure that a monument to the famous “Buffalo Soldiers” was built at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Once again, I added the emphasis to this quote in which Powell discusses Black American military history and the monument:

“Black military history is a rich history. And it's not that well known. And it goes back three hundred years. Blacks were always brought into [U.S.] military service when there was a need for additional bodies and blood. But when the conflict was over, then blacks were sent back into servitude. And it was the case in the Revolutionary War, where [President George] Washington had a number of blacks serving under him. It was the case in the War of 1812 when black men were promised their freedom and property if they fought for their country. They didn't receive that. But nevertheless, they fought. And every war we've ever been in, blacks stepped forward because it was the one place they could demonstrate equality. They weren't slaves. They weren't being oppressed. They may be in segregated units, and they may not have gotten the same pay or rations or equipment as white soldiers, but nevertheless, they were able to show that they were as brave and courageous as any other group of Americans. And they also knew that every time they did that, they would put the lie to racial discrimination to the test. With every step forward, they knew there would be progress. And it was really after the Civil War, when for the first time, blacks were allowed to remain in the military, not in an immediate time of war. And they created those four regiments, two cavalry and two infantry. And some of them were at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And when I went there as a brigadier general, maybe almost a hundred years later, there still was no monument to them. There's a monument to [General William Tecumseh] Sherman and all of the other great generals of our time. And I said, "Where is the monument to the black soldiers who were here?" It took us years, but we put that monument up. And I'm very proud of it because those black soldiers, the Buffalo Soldiers, as they were known, wore the same blue uniform as the white soldier. They had brass buttons. They carried a weapon and they had U.S. on their--U.S. on their collars, and they were every bit the American as their white counterparts.”

The Buffalo Soldier Monument in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, described by Colin Powell in his interview with The HistoryMakers. (Wikimedia Commons)

Dorothy Height, a civil rights activist for both Black and women’s rights, talked about meeting with then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower to arrange for a monument to be built to prominent African-American woman Mary McLeod Bethune. This monument, according to Height, was the first of any woman in a public park in D.C.

“The, my meeting with, with President Eisenhower, had to deal with getting his approval of a federal law to establish in the, in the nation's capital, what is the first memorial to an African American or a woman of any race, is the [Mary McLeod] Bethune Monument in Lincoln Park [Washington, D.C.]. And we worked several months to get President Eisenhower to sign that bill. It meant that we had to do that without costs to the federal government. But it was he who signed that bill, and we worked on it for fourteen years, through several presidencies and several sessions of Congress. And in 1974, that monument was unveiled and delivered to the federal government as a part of the National Park Service. … [I]t's the first monument to a, an African American or to a woman of any race in the nation's capital in a public park.”

Another interesting thing I learned from my research was that there is a monument to Haitian soldiers, of all people, in the American South. This is the Haitian Monument in Savannah, Georgia, which honors free Black soldiers from Haiti who fought for the colonial side in the American Revolutionary War.

The “Haitian Monument” in Savannah, Georgia. From slaverymonuments.org.

How do I know about Haitians in the American Revolution? It’s all thanks to the HistoryMakers interview with art curator Nicole Smith:

“When, when Washington [President George Washington] needed help, and then it turned to France, Lafayette [Marquis de Lafayette], Lafayette, Lafayette was--went to Haiti and recruited soldier. He didn't go to France to get the soldiers. He recruited the soldiers in Haiti, and many of the soldiers were freed. They were mulattoes or black that were freed, you know. Their--Haiti had not been independent yet, but those people were freed by their masters or because they were the sons of the French, okay, or daughters of the French. So, Lafayette bought--went to Haiti and recruited several, several hundred Haitians to come and fight. In fact, and they, they fought on the--they fought victoriously in Savannah [Georgia], where there is now on a, a monument to the Haitians that fought there.”

Other people in the archive discussed monuments that they wanted to have built. Specifically, I’m thinking of HistoryMaker Sidney L. Rushing, who in his interview discussed wanting to have a monument to Black aviator John C. Robinson built in Gulfport, Mississippi—a town where both Robinson and Rushing lived. (Look up Robinson if you ever have the time; he has a very fascinating life story and fought for Ethiopia against fascist Italy a few years before conventional scholarship agrees World War II began.) Rushing said this in 2002:

“Yes, we, we, we hope that there will be a museum built, and, and that museum will, will be called the John C. Robinson museum. It's, I mean we, I mean we're in the planning stage for that now, but, but there are a lot of--there, there's a lot of steps that, that hasn't been taken into consideration yet.”

As of twenty years later, there is no Robinson museum. But it was nice to see Robinson acknowledged and honored on the Mississippi Aviation Heritage Museum’s website.

Despite the efforts of people like Height and Powell, in his interview, James Earl Reid, a painter and sculptor used part of his interview time to encourage the Black community to actually do much more to honor its leaders and heroes with monuments, without the help of white people:

“One thing that has been absent within our community is a collective will to celebrate ourselves, to celebrate our heroes, to … raise them and communicate to the world our greatness. Now, we do not take, we do not tend to take the responsibility to truly celebrate our heroes and we tend to look to the white man too much to take the initiate when we should, you know, get together on our own and build our monuments and celebrate our people, celebrate our culture, and celebrate our heroes and I believe God put me on this earth for this purpose to do these monuments because he gave me a profound gift and ability to do that and that's just what I want to do. I am generally distracted from other life issues, such as being an embattled artist rather than a thriving and successful artist and economically. But, frankly that wouldn't really matter to me, economic success wouldn't really matter though it is extremely important. What really matters to me is that I fulfill and serve my purpose, is that I'm actualized through the opportunity to do my art.”

Statue of singer Billie Holliday in Baltimore, Maryland, sculpted by HistoryMaker James Earl Reid. Photograph by Eli Pousson.

Educator and HistoryMaker S. Allen Counter remarked in his interview in 2005 that Washington, D.C. should erect a monument to this country’s enslaved workforce. While the National Museum of African American History and Culture has since been built, Counter’s vision has still not been realized.

“I'd like to see in my lifetime some monument, not hidden off in some corner, but on the Mall, to the contributions made to the advancement of this nation by people who were forced to work for nothing, who formed the free labor force, for people who have no other basis for owning them than they were white.”

In closing, here’s what Bishop T.D. Jakes had to say about how he wants to be remembered—which I think offers a refreshing perspective on the very idea of monuments and monumentality:

“That's my legacy. That's what I want. Doesn't have to be a monument, doesn't have to be a statue. They don't have to put my name on the building next door. They don't have to name a program after me or anything like that. My legacy will live in the lives of the people who heard me. They will be the wind and the feet of the young people who ran because of me. If I can say something that makes the next one coming after me run faster, overcome obstacles, get up out of the mud and try again, they will be living legacy and nobody has to come and sit on a bench beside them and feed any pigeons. I'm cool with them being on the move. And I had a part of it.”

HistoryMaker T.D. Jakes

Thank you for taking this quick journey with me through what people in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive had to say about monuments!