Is the destruction of monuments a rewriting of history?

In a speech celebrating the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, President George W. Bush said to the assembled guests: “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” He went on to describe the enslavement of millions of people as America’s original sin. Facing that tragic flaw and working to correct it continues to assume vastly different forms, including the recent besieging of Confederate monuments by angry mobs. Protesters who arrive at monument sites with chains, ropes, and sledgehammers have no interest in deliberative conversations that wrestle with the mythology behind these propagandistic installations. They only want to see bronze icons memorializing racism knocked off their perches and dragged through the streets.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this anarchical purging is that it gives fire to critics eager to argue that vandals are attempting to rewrite history. What’s missing from such critiques, of course, is the fictional narrative behind the monuments themselves, bronze and granite monoliths installed to rewrite history and whitewash truths about the searing legacy of slavery. Most of the monuments were not erected in the decades immediately following the Confederacy’s defeat. They were commissioned and installed at the height of the Jim Crow era when white supremacists holding public office or leading civic institutions wanted to send a strong message to anyone championing racial equality. At the very time that Jim Crow laws sought to remove political and economic gains made by black people during Reconstruction, these towering monuments served to disguise the Confederacy’s doomed act of mass treason and failed attempt to preserve slavery.

For those less certain that Confederate symbols deserve more attention for removal than other memorials dedicated to other historical figures with morally tainted lives, former New Orleans mayor Mitchell Landrieu provides helpful perspective. When his city took down four Confederate-related monuments in 2017, including one of Robert E. Lee atop a 60-foot obelisk, Landrieu advised: