-What is liberty?
Oh, wow.
That's quite a question.
I suppose almost nobody really asks themselves that question.
Well, I can always quote the Declaration.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal."
And the moment I do that, I'm in trouble again
because obviously I was not included in that pronouncement.
"That they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these rights are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Ah, what is liberty?
-That's the great writer James Baldwin
speaking to me for one of my earliest films,
which I made on the Statue of Liberty.
That question, "What is liberty?"
was my very first question for him,
and that interview,
which we did in a classroom at Hampshire College
was one of the most memorable conversations
I've ever been a part of.
It taught me an indelible lesson --
our monuments, even those as revered
as the Statue of Liberty,
are representations of myth, not fact.
And as we consider what role monuments play in our culture,
it's the history, not the mythology,
that we must remember.
The Statue of Liberty was hand
built by French laborers in Paris.
Italian immigrants built the pedestal in New York,
and ordinary people, French and American,
donated money to complete the construction.
The colossal figure was to be the tallest structure
in the Western Hemisphere,
the vision of one stubborn Frenchman,
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.
Inspired by the recent abolition of slavery
in the United States and fearful of the tyrannical rule
of Napoleon III in France,
the idea was to create an enormous work of art
to celebrate democracy and use America as an example
to restore liberty in France.
On July 4, 1884, after nearly a decade of work,
the completed statue was finally presented
to the Minister of the United States.
That same year in New Orleans,
Louisiana, a large crowd gathered in Tivoli Circle
on George Washington's birthday to dedicate a new statue --
a 60-foot marble column in the center of the city
with a 16-foot-tall bronze statue
of Confederate General Robert E.
Lee.
During the 10 years in which the Statue of Liberty
was constructed, 20 Confederate monuments
were erected across the United States
in places as large as New Orleans
and Charleston, South Carolina,
as small as towns like Quitman, Georgia;
and Marianna, Florida.
And since then, hundreds more have been built,
the most recent in 2015.
These monuments were efforts to reimpose white supremacy
and rewrite history.
They are racism memorialized in our public spaces.
When we look at the Statue of Liberty
and think about the ideals it's meant to represent,
we cannot forget the larger context
in the country at the time.
The Jim Crow era in the South was just beginning.
The Chinese Exclusion Act, a piece of legislation
explicitly barring any Chinese laborers
from entering the country, was in full swing.
And more than half the American population couldn't vote.
And all of this leads back to my interview with James Baldwin.
Just as the interview was ending,
Baldwin took a long, thoughtful pause,
looked back up into the camera, and said this.
-Liberty is the individual passion or will to be free.
But this passion, this will is always contradicted
by the necessities of the state, everywhere,
for as long as we've heard of mankind,
as long as we've heard of states.
I don't know if it will be like that forever.
For a black American,
for a black inhabitant of this country,
the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke,
meaning nothing to us.
-Earlier in the film, many people explain how,
to them, the Statue of Liberty is a beacon of hope,
a reflection of our highest American ideals,
and yet here, Baldwin's words form a searing counterbalance
that even our most venerated monuments represent a mythology.
While we may hope the statue represents
our highest aspirations
for what America can and should be,
it can also be a reminder of where and how far we fall short.