Statues

The war of the statues is no longer a battle over the memory of slavery, or the Confederacy, or the deployment of stone dead generals to reinforce Jim Crow. It is a battle over the legitimacy of the United States which, despite all the evils, is history’s greatest and possibly final experiment in human freedom.The struggle has turned from Confederate generals to the Founders: from those who seceded from the United States to those who laid its foundations. Students at the University of Missouri are petitioning for the removal of a statue of ‘racist slave owner’ Thomas Jefferson, whose statue at Birmingham, Alabama was damaged in an arson attack. Last week at George Washington University, Washington’s bust was toppled from its plinth.

Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood have I done a double take. I was raised in a slightly weird place. In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional distinction in the US is hard to come by, and I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t grow up around folks who wished the South had won the Civil War and wanted to bring back slavery.