Can offensive monuments from the past help hold us accountable today?
Perhaps the names once chosen for honor can now spark meaningful conversation.
This summer, there has been renewed conversation about the ten US military bases that are named after Confederate officers. This conversation follows a broader controversy over the past decade about the extent to which statues, monuments, building names, and the like should continue to pay homage to a time when the ownership of human beings as chattel was widely accepted. Questions have been raised about numerous institutions and leaders, from explorers to founding fathers to presidents, from churches to schools to military installations.
One of the military bases in question is Fort Polk, in Louisiana. Established as a training base during World War II, it is named after Confederate general Leonidas Polk, who was killed in battle in 1864—and who was also a bishop of the Episcopal Church.
Before Polk, a leading founder of the University of the South (Sewanee), became bishop of Louisiana, he lived in Maury County, Tennessee, where people enslaved by his family erected a church that is still visited in pilgrimages. Records from 1840 suggest that Polk was the largest slaveholder in the county; he owned even more enslaved people after he moved to Louisiana.
