WOODRUFF: United States history is dominating the headlines by being at the heart of a debate
that has compelled many to take to the streets. How should Americans remember the past and
confront the deep wounds of slavery?
Our William Brangham explores how the events of recent weeks are sparking a national conversation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WILLIAM BRANGHAM, PBS NEWSHOUR CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It began -- at least according
to the organizers -- as a protest against plans to remove a statue of Confederate General
Robert E. Lee from downtown Charlottesville, Virginia.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it`s a historical monument and it should stay where it`s at.
BRANGHAM: But the events there earlier this month jolted the nation. This week, the nearly
century-old monument was covered in a black shroud, and calls for it to be taken down
continue.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I`m not going to stop in my efforts to try and get it removed, but
I`m glad the city council recognized that it had to be addressed.
BRANGHAM: This most recent push to get rid of Confederate symbols can be traced, in part,
back to June 2015. That`s when avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black
parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The next month, a confederate battle
flag was removed from the statehouse grounds.
Earlier this year, the city of New Orleans removed all its Confederate monuments.
Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu:
MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU (D), NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA: To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal
in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It
is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.
BRANGHAM: But in the weeks since Charlottesville, as even more Confederate statues came down
in places like Baltimore, which the city removed, and Durham, North Carolina, toppled by activists,
a new question emerged: what are we to do with monuments that`s on our honor historical
figures who`ve been accused of wrongdoing?
Among the examples cited recently: statues and commemorations for Christopher Columbus,
whose brutality toward native Americans was well documented; Boston`s Faneuil hall, named
after merchant Peter Faneuil, who had ties to slave trading; and the Philadelphia monument
depicting former Mayor Frank Rizzo, who led a police force widely seen as brutal and racist.
It`s a debate attracting voices from every corner -- including President Trump:
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I wonder, is it George Washington next week?
And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you all-- you really do have to
ask yourself, where does it stop?
BRANGHAM: The national conversation still largely focuses on the hundreds of Confederate
monuments, most of which were erected decades after the civil war, and others during the
civil rights era.
(on camera): Joining me now are three men who`ve thought long and hard about how we
are to wrestle with this history.
Pierre McGraw is founder and president of the Monumental Task Committee, a group dedicated
to preserving and restoring monuments. He`s in New Orleans.
Peniel Joseph is a historian and professor of public affairs at the University of Texas
in Austin. He`s the author of several books on civil rights.
And, Fitzhugh Brundage is a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, with the focus on the south and U.S. history since the civil war.
Gentleman, welcome to the NEWSHOUR to you all.
Peniel Joseph, I`d like to start with you first. I know you are a strong proponent that
we ought to take down Confederate monuments across the country. Explain why.
PENIEL JOSEPH, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS: Well, I think because the Confederate symbols are
symbols of racial hatred, slavery and white supremacy.
So, I think what some critics do is conflate the wish to remove the monuments with somehow
politically correct advocacy of whitewashing or subbing American history. Nothing could
be further from the case. Removing Confederate symbols is not the same as trying to remove
the Washington Monument or symbols of Thomas Jefferson. Those founders owned slaves but
their ideas about democracy and freedom, they were generative ideas that other groups, including
people of color, women, LGBTQ have utilized to perfect the Union.
So, when we think about the Confederacy, that`s something different. There was a civil war
between 1861 and 1865 where over 600,000 people were killed because there was a group that
wanted to abandon our founding values of freedom and democracy, and didn`t want to be a part
of the United States. So, getting rid of those symbols is really honoring the best of our
history and not trying to somehow scrub or efface that history.
BRANGHAM: Pierre McGraw, what do you make of that? You heard what he`s saying that these
monuments to many people are first and foremost, a celebration of the brutal torturous history
of slavery in America. What do you make of that?
PIERRE MCGRAW, MONUMENTAL TASK COMMITTEE: Well, first, thanks for having me on.
I think any time that you`re going to try to edit our history, you`re asking for trouble.
And monuments do mean different things to different people. But it`s really unfair to
judge historical figures by today`s standards.
I think this is all just easy political fodder to go after these monuments. We know now this
argument is much larger than that, having seen monuments to Christopher Columbus smashed.
Just a few days ago, we`ve seen rallies in New Orleans that take down Andrew Jackson,
an American president who saved New Orleans. So, this is a lot larger than just the easy
targets of Confederate soldiers.
BRANGHAM: Fitzhugh Brundage, I wonder if you could give us a bit of context here. I mean,
there is some question as to why they monuments went up, what they are a monument or celebration
of. Who put them up and why? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
W. FITZHUGH BRUNDAGE, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA: Certainly. I think there`s not just
the question of who put them up and why but also when. So, some monuments were put up
in the first decades after the civil war and I think we could understand those monuments
as being simultaneously monuments to the white Confederates who died for the Confederate
republic, as well as symbols of grieve and certainly defiance. Those monuments tend to
be located in cemeteries and were often put up by small local groups honoring local Confederates
who were buried there.
Then, between 1890 and roughly 1930, there was an explosion of Confederate commemoration.
And those monuments are bigger ones that we typically think of that are monuments of -- monuments
to Confederate soldiers often depicted in military garb, on top of a pedestal or a column.
And those monuments often include inscriptions which honor not just the Confederate soldiers
but the Confederate cause itself.
BRANGHAM: So, Peniel Joseph, I`m curious if you`ve seen this, with the NEWSHOUR and NPR
and Marist recently put out a poll that showed that roughly six in 10 Americans feel that
for their historical value, that Confederate ought to stay up. I`m wondering what you would
say to 60 percent of the nation who seems to believe that. What would you say to try
to convince them of your point of view and what would you like us to do with them?
JOSEPH: Well, I would tell them that these monuments are un-American. I would argue that
these are symbols of white supremacy because one of the other things that happened after
that period of 1930, that Fitzhugh Brundage spoke of is the 1950s and `60s after the Brown
Supreme Court decision in 1954, different states start to put up the Confederate battle
flag as white massive resistance against the idea of civil rights.
So, I would say that it`s un-American. It`s not -- we think about our founding documents,
Constitution, Declaration of Independence, we said that all people are created equal.
Even though the document says all men, we`ve since expanded and revise that to include
people who are gay or straight, Muslim, Christian, atheist, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native
American, we truly are multicultural, multi-racial democracy. And that`s why we are the envy
of the world.
We are only liberty`s surest guardian when we are true to our moral and political values.
The Confederacy was not true to those values. Slavery is not true to those values. Racism,
sexism, none of those things are true core American values.
So I would say we don`t need to honor Robert E. Lee, but we`re on sure ground when we honor
abolitionists, when we honor the founding fathers and mothers, when we honor people
who reflect the values of making America the world`s last best hope for freedom and democracy.
BRANGHAM: Pierre McGraw, what do you make of that? I know that you were strongly against
what happened in New Orleans, which was bringing down Robert E. Le and several other Confederate
monuments. My understanding is that those are down now, that they will eventually end
up in a museum where they will be wrapped in some kind of a context.
What`s wrong with that? They haven`t been melted down. What`s wrong with removing them
from these central places in our cities and towns, put them in a museum and saying, here`s
what they stood for in history but take them out of the center square so to speak?
MCGRAW: Well, I think that`s an amusing concept. I mean, the Robert E. Lee monument is over
70 feet tall in New Orleans. I don`t know where you would put that. But if you have
ever been to New Orleans, it`s a very special city, a unique city.
And we have monuments to all kinds of events and to people. But -- basically and since
New Orleans has more historic districts than any city in America, the whole city is in
essence a living museum and these monuments were designed for where they were placed.
They were put up by New Orleanians. These were not put up by governments.
Mothers held bake sales to raise money. Women want to honor their husbands who didn`t return.
This is a way for the South to grieve and to show that, you know, they were still in
business. They were still a proud people.
The other gentleman mentioned that there weren`t any monuments put up for a little while after
the war and only in cemeteries. Well, that was the case in New Orleans too because the
reconstruction government, it was forbidden to put up any monuments until reconstruction
was over. So, that`s when they launched into these series of putting up these monuments.
As far as spending a lot of money to take down monuments, moving down, spending a lot
of money to put them back up somewhere in public view just does not make any sense.
The people who find these objectionable in the public view do now will find them equally
as objectionable if they`re in a museum context.
BRANGHAM: Fitzhugh Brundage, I wonder if you could take on this idea, that the practicality
of this. I mean, there are enormous amount of these monuments around the country. Is
there any way you could imagine that they might be able to stay up and that context
could be applied in some way to existing monuments that would make them -- to give them context
that you would be comfortable with?
BRUNDAGE: Well, I think there`s necessarily going to be some kind of triage in this process
because as you said, there are so many hundreds of monuments, indeed, more than a thousand
probably, maybe as many as 2,000 scattered all over the landscape. As a practical matter,
it`s a huge undertaking. But I think there are questions as well about, given that these
monuments are controversial, they provoke very strong emotions and we do live in a different
society, a profoundly different society than the one that created these monuments, to continue
to maintain the monuments where they currently exist also entails money and is presumably
going to entail more money in the future.
So, I do think, I would be cautious about allowing a sort of dollars and cents argument
to decide whether or not it`s appropriate to remove the monuments.
With regards to removing them, I certainly think it`s entirely within the community`s
right to move a monument into a new setting and provide it with the kind of historical
context that a monument standing 70 feet in the air that middle of a traffic circle in
a modern city is never going to have. There`s no signage you could put up that is going
to interpret that monument so that people driving past it on tour buses are going to
gain an understanding of it, at least an adequate understanding.
So I think the question of reinterpretation and how you do it is a very good question
to have but I don`t think it`s one that`s going to be resolved by deciding it`s cheaper
to leave them where they are than it is to move them.
BRANGHAM: All right. Fitzhugh Brundage, Pierre McGraw, Peniel Joseph, thank you all very,
very much.
BRUNDAGE: Thank you.
PIERRE MCGRAW, MONUMENTAL TASK COMMITTEE: Thank you.