Historians warn against rushing to take down statues

Associated Press

NEW YORK

It’s not just about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

The national soul-searching over whether to take down monuments to the Confederacy’s demigods has extended to other historical figures accused of wrongdoing, including Christopher Columbus (brutality toward Native Americans), the man for whom Boston’s Faneuil Hall is named (slave trader) and former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo (bigotry).

Historians interviewed by The Associated Press offered varying thoughts about where exactly the line should be drawn in judging someone’s statue-worthiness, but they agreed on one thing: Scrapping a monument is not a decision that should be made in haste during political fervor.

“If we do this in some willy-nilly way, we will regret it,” cautioned Yale University historian David Blight, an expert on slavery. “I am very wary of a rush to judgment about what we hate and what we love and what we despise and what we’re offended by.”

Blight and other historians say the way to determine whether to remove these monuments, Confederate or otherwise, is through discussions that weigh many factors, among them: the reason behind when and why the monument was built. Where it’s placed. The subject’s contribution to society weighed against the alleged wrongdoing. Historical significance. And the artistic value of the monument itself.

Some historians also say a statue in a public place can serve an important educational purpose, even if the history is ugly, that might be lost if the monument were junked or consigned to a museum.

“By taking monuments down or hiding them away, we facilitate forgetting,” said Alfred Brophy, a law professor at the University of Alabama who has been studying the issue. “It purchases absolution too inexpensively. There is a value in owning our history.”

Monuments to Confederate-era figures have been slowly coming down around the country since the 2015 fatal shooting of nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., by a 23-year-old white racist. But after the violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Va., this month during a white-supremacist protest against the removal of a Lee statue, the movement picked up steam.

In New York, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered a 90-day review of “symbols of hate” on city property, arguing that one of the first that should go is a plaque to Philippe Petain, a World War I hero later convicted of treason for heading the collaborationist Vichy government in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.