Biden honors Emmett Till and his mother with monument
At a time when the United States is struggling with issues of race and history, President Joe Biden will create a national monument to honor Emmett Till, a black teenager who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1955, and his mother. signed a declaration to do so. (July 25th)
AP
In Chicago and Tallahatchie, Mississippi, a national monument honoring Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley is becoming a reality, marking the life and legacy of the 14-year-old Chicago boy who was lynched and mutilated in 1955; It honors his mother’s subsequent advocacy. Open casket funerals were the catalyst for the American civil rights movement.
Same goes for Memphis parks. monument to listeningan installation honoring the heroic actions of Tom Lee, a 39-year-old black laborer who pulled 32 people from the Mississippi River after their steamboat capsized in 1925.
And in Washington, D.C., the Bureau of Indian Affairs begins collecting oral history from survivors of the federal Indian Residential School System as part of its efforts to commemorate the era of the system and the government’s role in its creation. It is expected to be.
All three initiatives are underway with support from: monument projecta $500 million funding initiative by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aims to change the stories America’s national monuments tell.
“We see this project as a way to really begin to represent in the public sphere the many amazing and diverse stories that make up America,” said Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander.
“Monuments let us know what’s important.”
Monuments and monuments are the way a country tells and teaches its stories, the project website says, and Gregory Downs, a history professor at the University of California, Davis, agrees.
“Monuments show what is important and what will be remembered,” Downs said. Although he was not involved in the project, he is one of several historians who asked President Barack Obama to designate several sites in Beaufort County, South Carolina, as Reconstruction-era national monuments. “From an incredibly vast and complex past, they pick out things that they can say are important and have meaning.”
According to the Monuments Project, America’s memorial landscape “disproportionately celebrates a select few, overlooks the many who have shaped and shaped our society, and diminishes our collective history.” “It limits our understanding of the
The project hopes to change that by supporting “efforts to represent, enhance, and preserve the stories of people who have often been denied historical recognition.”
Foundation doubles down on commitment to untold stories
The foundation launched the project in 2020 as a $250 million initiative and recently doubled its commitment to $500 million. The grants will fund public initiatives that focus on stories that are rarely told through permanent facilities, cultural programs, and efforts to preserve archival materials and historic sites.
In Los Angeles, Mellon funding will help the Los Angeles County Museum of Art develop augmented reality monuments and murals that use technology to reflect community perspectives and celebrate the region’s diversity. In Newark, New Jersey, we will help the Newark Arts Council commission and construct a monument honoring Harriet Tubman’s legacy and the city’s role in the subway.
Alexander, the foundation’s president, said the project is funding a community effort that has engaged in self-exploration and discussion about what and who should matter.
At the National Cathedral in Washington, cathedral officials considered whether to install stained glass windows depicting Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, completed in the 1950s, in the chapel. Ultimately, the decision was made to replace those windows with windows that reflected racial justice, an effort the Mellon Foundation supports.
“This is an example of hard work in the community to be able to say we are willing to provide resources,” Alexander said.
Helping communities tell their own stories
The project provided $170 million to 80 projects across the United States. Other projects funded by the foundation include:
- The Juneau, Alaska Totem Pole Trail is a series of 10 totem poles created by Native artists from Southeast Alaska that tell the history of the region’s Native peoples along the city’s two miles of public waterfront. .
- In Lawrence, Kansas, the University of Kansas will safely relocate the Sacred Red Rock, a 25-ton stone of spiritual and cultural significance to the Kawse people of the Kaw Nation, as well as provide support for its installation and associated programs. Preparing the place. To celebrate its return.
- In Los Angeles, the University of Southern California is working on a project to create a special book, “Irename Monument,” listing people of Japanese ancestry imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II, as well as an interactive website and former national internment site. I am currently working on a project to create a lighting installation for a local office.
Mellon’s investment in promoting these commemorations comes as efforts to ban books and curriculum that focus on marginalized communities are spreading across the nation’s school and library systems.
The authors of the audit of U.S. monuments, produced by Philadelphia-based Monument Lab in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, found that “a lack of full recognition and accountability for past harms has led to present suffering. ” he wrote. “The memorial serves as a place to tap into national memory and recognize collective forgetting as the twin forces sustaining this nation.”
Women are more often represented as mermaids than real humans
2021 Monument Lab Audit It turns out that the majority of monuments in the United States worship white men, and one-third of them commemorate acts of war or conquest. Researchers scoured records of nearly 500,000 historic properties to create a final study set of more than 48,000 monuments, listing the 50 most frequently honored. .
The “Top 50” list included 11 U.S. presidents and 12 generals. Half the list represented people who enslaved other people. Of the 50, only five were black or indigenous, and only three were women: Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, and Sacagawea.
“We found that what existed hardly reflected what this country was made of,” Alexander said. “Women were more often represented as mermaids or fictional characters than as actors in our history or important contributors to our future.”
The top six names, in order, were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., St. Francis of Assisi, and Robert E. Lee.
Sierra Rooney, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse who is not involved in the monument project, said the origins of Western monuments cannot be separated from a history of war and conquest.
Structures traditionally thought of as monuments (militarized masculine figures carved in bronze or marble on plinths) have historically been rooted in the authoritarian practices of Roman emperors. She said there is. These rulers, and more recently Napoleon, created statues to honor their military exploits as part of their imperialist policies.
“That legacy is all over the American landscape,” Rooney said. “These monuments typically do not address the real-world effects of conflict, such as the devastating loss of military and civilian life, the environmental impact, or the long aftermath and recovery from war.”
Public reckoning over monuments
The country’s global reputation for public monuments, heightened by the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2020 killing of George Floyd, and the 2015 shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, has given rise to concerns about oppression and oppression in local communities. It urged us to rethink the symbols of racism, colonialism and injustice. . Some communities, such as Charleston and New Orleans, have taken action to remove them. Other monuments were also destroyed or demolished.
“This was a major turning point in the public’s relationship with monuments,” Rooney said. “It began a widespread rejection of what the ‘hero on a pedestal’ represented. … New monuments should not only address who and what they commemorate, but also how such commemorations are conducted. It also casts doubt on whether it will be possible.”
Much of that calculation focuses on the American South, and Downs, a professor at the University of California, Davis, said many Civil War commemorations were made between the 1880s and 1920s, when the South was recovering from the war and trying to reintegrate into the national narrative. He said a monument had been erected. Led by white southern politicians, Downs said efforts to promote racial segregation and disenfranchisement of black voters redoubled.
“It’s not just about white people, it’s about a particular version of history that’s contested and includes other white Southerners,” he says. “They are the result of an economic and political context.”
Throughout the South, Confederate heroes were commemorated not only in statues but also in street names, schools, parks, and city buildings. Karen Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who is not involved in the project, said efforts to counter this narrative are complicated in some places by local laws that prohibit removal or installation in obscure locations. He said that it has become. of such monuments.
She wonders what a counter-monument might look like in such a case.
“I’ve talked to these communities and they’re running into a brick wall,” Cox said. “It can’t be a 4-by-6 panel because 30-foot monuments still predominate. The community has to be creative.”
Even if removal is possible, correcting the narrative is not just about removing the monument, Downs said. It’s about finding ways to effectively replace them.
“It’s not just about erasing the past, it’s about thinking about how to make history better in the present.”