My first public history experience was at the USS Alabama museum in Mobile. Learning the history of the ship was incredible to me, even at a young age. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

My first experience, that most clearly sticks out in my mind, was visiting the USS Alabama in Mobile. I was about 8 or 9 years old, and it was memorable to me because of how it made me feel to actually be able to see and touch history and see how things were for the men that served not only on that ship, but also in WWII.

My first public history experience would have to be my sixth grade trip to D.C. and New York. I remember visiting Mount Vernon, and the National Air and Space Museum.

Every summer, my mother would drive my younger brother and I from Mississippi to Ohio. This drive took us through Birmingham, a city a read about, but never visited before living there years later. My mother agreed to a stop at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute one of these summers. This became an extremely memorable experience for me because at the time, I was in middle school, and I read and studied the Movement, but never visited the city where much of the scholarship focused.

The first time I can really remember participating in a part of public history was when my third grade class went on a tour around downtown Huntsville. We went to the courthouse and the historic big spring of Big Spring Park.

Long before the Pandemic, the nationwide protesting, the chaos of 2020, removing Confederate monuments became a popular statement that protesters would make in all kind antiracism rally. One of the cases which left me the most memorable impression was the removal of the Confederate Monument in UNC, also known as Silent Sam. Like many other confederate monuments I have visited in the past, Silent Sam was vandalized multiple times before it was pulled down. This hundred and five years old monument was pulled down by protesters on the night of August 20, 2018. For the people on the rally, it is a symbol to “tear down UNC’s white supremacy.”

For all the confederate monuments across the United States, they are all facing the same problem, would they be the next monument on the removing list? I believe the deeper question about those monuments is this: is the confederate monument a historic artifact, or a political statement? I think instead of thinking do monuments belong in a museum, think do they have a place in the museum is better to suit the current environment we are living in. The study of history is not isolated from our political environment, the public opinion. And so far many people see those monuments as a symbol of racism and the failure of the system. In the past months, we have seen the painting of the BLM slogans on a lot of monuments, and many of them have been removed or vandalized during the riots.

I recently visited the Vicksburg national park which contains multiple confederate monuments. In some ways, those monuments belong to this public “museum.” But what worries me is if the people cannot stand one confederate monument on their public street, how can they be ok for more of the monuments stand on their public land?

What to do about those statues? The easy answer to the literally monumental question facing American cities and towns is “put them in a museum.” It seems like an obvious thing to do; we ostensibly don’t want to destroy our history and so preserving these monuments in a museum where they can be placed in a different context seems like the best option. Yet, I can’t help but think; why?

Firstly, and more basically, there simply isn’t enough physical space for the monuments. Monuments are physically massive, especially the important or iconic and therefore the most problematic ones. Sure, the podunk monuments to the Confederate grunts that litter the cemeteries of the South are small and could conceivably be stored out of sight in a county museum’s closet, but where do you put any of the massive equestrian statues of Confederate generals? Where do you put the formerly intact column of General Lee from New Orleans? Or, hypothetically, where do you put the bronze statue of Jefferson from his memorial, or, even, the structure itself? How would one even attempt to displace the Washington Monument? Certainly, those might seem like wild hypotheticals right now, but merely fifteen years before their destruction Lee and Beauregard in New Orleans were placed on the NRHP for eternal preservation. 

Secondly, even if we disregard the physical troubles of storage and presentation of monuments, what’s the point? Perhaps this is an overly cynical look at the issue, but what kind of museum is going to be created by a government for the things a government is attempting to remove? If a monument is being removed from a location, this monument is no longer wanted. It’s being removed for a reason, which, almost always, is to“de-contextualise” the public space that it resides in. For example, the removal of the physical Cecil Rhodes in Oxford is to remove the metaphorical Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, the re-contextualization of Oxford as one without Rhodes, without imperial connections. As museums, while not as public as a plaza or park, are still very much in the public space, the movement of monuments to such a location is counterproductive to the point of moving the monument in the first place.

The local governments’ reluctance to keep offensive statues is perfectly understandable, of course. Despite the best efforts of people far more intelligent than I, I don’t really see any good way to re-contextualize these monuments, either in situ or in a museum. Monuments are created with explicit intent. They are unquestionably propaganda, created to evoke a specific and intentional emotion. An equestrian statue of Lee is explicitly created to link him to the military geniuses and statesmen of the Western tradition. No matter if the statue is still on location and has a plaque placed on the base to inform the viewer of the crimes of Lee and the society that created the statue or is in a museum display with the same information, the effect is the same. So long as the statue is extant and intact the intention of the statue is intact; he is still linked to that tradition. Some would say that the monument can be modified to change its intention (for a great example, look at the Ukrainian town that paints their Stalin statue like Batman), yet in my mind this kind of extreme modification is essentially the same as destruction; the monument is no longer extant, it has been destroyed and made into another piece of art. That’s fine, but in my mind it isn’t the kind of “preservation and re-contextualization” that people talk about when referring to moving monuments into museums, which I think is served perfectly well by a photograph or two.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Lithuania had a lot of leftover statues of former Communist leaders. To start, most of them were taken down and placed into storage. However, in 2001, one man, Viliumas Malinauskas — a “mushroom magnate” — requested that he be given 86 of the statues. That year, he used all of the statues to build Grūtas Park, a forested park in Lithuania that, among the statues of mostly dead Communists, also contains play grounds and a gift shop.

According to an article in The Economist about Grūtas Park in 2017, Malinauskas’ goal was to save these impressive works of art from a destiny of rusting into obscurity, but to simultaneously contextualize them in a way which reflects how they are currently understood by the Lithuanian population.

“Grutus Park remains an interesting example of how statues can be recontextualized,” the article reads. “As countries grapple with their unsavoury pasts and consider the rightful place of their controversial monuments, the park offers and alternative model to museums or destruction.”

Personally, I think Grūtas Park is a really good example of how the environment surrounding any kind of monument is often reflective of the attitude that the governing body holds towards the people, ideas, or events being depicted. In other words, statues of Josef Stalin have a significantly different connotation when they are placed in a different context.

However, as good of an analog for Confederate monuments as Grūtas Park could be, there is one glaring difference. Nearly everyone in Lithuania, at least in 2001, agreed that Soviet Communism had been a bad thing for their country. Remember, these statues were not taken from pedestals to this park. Originally, they were left to deteriorate because the people through their government had chosen to no longer venerate the Stalins and Lenins of their past. Many Americans, on the other hand, are still strongly pro-Confederacy. In turn, the government that represents those people — Alabama’s for instance — has not only not removed the monuments, but it has made it legally more difficult for local municipalities to get rid of their own.

Grūtas Park is a great example of how the historical and artistic value of statues can be venerated and appreciated far from the public eye of a town square. Simultaneously, it is also an example of how reaching that point of historic and contextual appreciation cannot be achieved until a large enough governing body agrees to no longer glorify the ideas expressed in those statues.

                Monuments and statues that celebrates figures of the past, whom have a controversial background has been the topic of discussion for years when talking about removing them.  Perhaps this year the discussion has become even greater during recent months, largely due to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.  It reminds me of the controversy that was caused by the tragedy that took place at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Due to the incident, Governor Haley had the Confederate flag removed from the state’s Capitol.  Opposing clashed over the decision one side supporting Haley’s decision and the other opposing it.  The monuments and statues that are being removed now, are symbols of the confederacy.  But when these statues and monuments is removed, what happens to them.  I do not believe the confederate monuments or symbols should be destroyed, because it is American history.  I think they should not only be used to teach about the good that were thought of them during those times, but also the bad and ugly they represented.  The monuments should be in a place where the whole history of that era should be represented along with the heroes of the other side of the cause, the heroes that stood up to the oppression and gave their life fighting.  I understand how people that are descendants of confederate soldiers have pride towards the confederacy, their ancestors fought and died for a cause.  But on the other side there is another group of people that died and fought against the system of slavery and exploitation that the confederates represented.  I understand during this time when these monuments and statues were built, they were made to represented pride to the south.  But to color people, these statues promote racism and bigotry during a time when their ancestors were enslaved and exploited.

When we look at monuments, what do we see? We may see an enormous statue dedicated to the generals of past wars, or memorials to those that fell during conflict, fighting for what they believed in, or we may see a monument to the ideals of a bygone era. While, objectively, each of these types of monument is inherently important to the historical narrative, and is a piece of history we cannot afford to forget lest we run the risk of committing the same mistakes, we can still learn about and from them if they were removed from their current public space into a museum. It is my opinion that it is the states’ responsibility to not perpetuate the racist ideals associated with Confederate monuments. What that means is the deliberate placement of these memorials on state property, i.e. the capitol building in Montgomery, AL., should be banned. These things can be moved into museums and still serve the purpose of educating future generations of the atrocities of the Old South. By placing them in front of a building that is supposed to be dedicated to the equal protection under the law of ALL citizens certainly undermines that idea by alienating those not born white in the South.

All of that said, I must be clear, I do not support the destruction of these monuments because of their historical significance. They are too important to be effectively removed from the narrative all together. Furthermore, I recognize that not all would be able to be moved to a new location, and for those I would suggest either the alteration of the monument to more accurately display them for what they are, or we better contextualize them so that we are no longer painting the Confederates as heroes. They were traitors that were upset they couldn’t own people anymore. I’ll leave you with this: if we continue to idolize these men and ideals, we are no better than them. If anything, we’re worse because at least they had the guts to actually fight for what they believed in, however evil and corrupted their beliefs were.