“’History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,
but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.’ Those words, by the late poet Maya Angelou,
greet visitors entering The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass
Incarceration in Montgomery, Alabama. They serve as a thesis statement for the
National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates 4,000 lynching
victims. The museum and the memorial
were conceived by lawyer and activist MacArthur “Genius” Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson
says the project was designed to offer a direct counterpoint to the country’s
penchant for softening representations of slavery—minimizing its brutality and
its racist legacy. ‘Our nation has tried
very hard to create a picture of slavery that is benign and inoffensive,’
Stevenson tells artnet News. ‘We don’t generally show the chains, the
suffering, and the brutality. As a result, we’ve done a poor job confronting
the legacy of slavery or acknowledging the shame of white supremacy and racial
bigotry. This museum will be a new
experience for many people in the US because we don’t typically acknowledge our
failures or confront our history of racial bigotry,’ Stevenson says. ‘But
changing the narrative about the legacy of slavery requires some measure of
courage. We’re asking people to be brave. We believe that understanding our
history won’t harm us, it will actually empower us to create a better future.’ The memorial has been in the works since
2010, when EJI began researching and documenting thousands of lynchings that
occurred in twelve states. The organization’s work culminated in their 2015
report, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” In the heart of Montgomery—the former capital
of the domestic slave trade in Alabama—the Legacy Museum stands on the site of
a former slave warehouse and is just steps away from what was once one of the
most prominent slave auction sites in the country. The exhibits combine a
variety of media and archival materials to recount the history of slavery, racial
terror, segregation, police violence, and mass incarceration in America. The 11,000-square-foot museum also features a
selection of contemporary art. ‘Artists
help us understand aspects of the human struggle that are difficult to
articulate with mere description,’ Stevenson says. ‘Great art can illuminate
history and interpret our hopes and fears in ways that can be powerful,
beautiful and unforgettable.’” (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/legacy-
museum-memorial-peace-justice-1272686)
Robert E. Lee said, “A nation which does not remember what
it was yesterday does not know where it is today. A land without memories is a people without
liberty.” I believe we can agree with
Maya Angelou that it is important to remember history. Kay Ivey in her recent campaign ad said as
much in defense of the Memorial Preservation Act. The Charge to the Sons of Confederate
Veterans implores us to act as guardians for Confederate history and ensure
that the true history of the South is presented to future generations. Our SCV National Confederate Museum in Elm
Springs will no doubt serve as a counterpoint though to this “Legacy Museum” in
Montgomery. Interesting to note that the "Legacy" lynching story is based on research
done at Tuskegee University, an historically black college which may impart a
bias in the data set, conclusions and “understanding (of) our history”. According to the report, the museum
apparently restricts its portrayal to the twelve southern states as the
entirety of the story of “Lunching in America” and that as purely a “Legacy of
Racial Terror” while disregarding the a more widely recognized view of historical lynchings such as those of frontier justice.
“Texas, Montana, California, and the Deep South, especially the city of
New Orleans, were hotbeds of vigilante activity in American history. The state
of Montana holds the record for the bloodiest vigilante movement from 1863 to
1865 when hundreds of suspected horse thieves were rounded up and killed in
massive mob actions.” (https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lynching/)
Montana and California fail to fit their desired narrative unfortunately. The museum details the deaths of 4000 blacks
over an eighty year period. But, more
recent and relevant, “Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed (nationally) in
2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide victim total to 7,881.
Those 7,881 “black bodies” are 1,305 more than the number of white victims
(which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks
are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. Who is killing these black victims?
Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally
shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the
Washington Post. The paper categorized only 16 black male victims of police
shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and
violent resistance to arrest. Contrary
to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from
black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police
officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed
black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all
cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the
population. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of
blacks numbered only 243.” (https://nypost.com/2017/09/26/all-that-kneeling-ignores-the-real-cause-of-soaring-black-homicides/) In “39,000 homicides: Retracing 60 years of
murder in Chicago” (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-history-of-chicago-homicides-htmlstory.html),
the statistics show that just in the last twelve years there were over 4000
murders in the Windy City the vast majority (72%) black-on-black. But, this story doesn’t paint as convenient a
picture of victimhood as the narrative the Legacy Museum wishes to portray.
Robert E. Lee stated, “So far from engaging in a war to
perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that Slavery is abolished. I believe it will
be greatly for the interest of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this that
I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered
all that I have suffered to have this object attained. There are few, I believe, in this enlightened
age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and
political evil.” Jefferson Davis said,
“The war...must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his
tracks...unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not
fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or
extermination, we will have.” But, the
story of the Legacy Museum emphasizes that it stands on the site of a former
slave warehouse and close by a slave auction “in the heart of Montgomery—the
former capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama”. The slave owners singularly identified by the
Legacy Museum of course are white racist Southerners which ignores the history of black
slave owners and indentured servants of other races such as the Irish
immigrants. Ignoring the history of
Northern slavery and slave trading for the two hundred years of American
colonization and statehood and later antebellum restrictions on black movement
and settlement in Northern states to further 20th century examples,
the Legacy Museum turns a convenient blind eye northward in favor of
perpetuating the convenient racist Southern stereotype. Who are the bigots? In part of the very period this
museum is supposedly investigating, “The 1920’s was an era of growing
hostility, as blacks moved north. Restrictive covenants blocked black entry
into many neighborhoods. Schools were openly segregated. Shopkeepers and
theaters displayed “whites only” signs. Sugrue writes in “Sweet Land of
Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North”, “Even (black) celebrities
had a hard time finding rooms and faced Jim Crow in restaurants when they
toured the North. In the ’30s, racism
prevailed in many government programs. Federal housing agencies deemed black
neighborhoods unworthy of credit, and federal officials segregated public
housing. The ’30s and ’40s also saw white riots – in cities such as Chicago,
Detroit and Los Angeles – aimed at restricting blacks to neighborhoods they
already occupied.” (http://inthesetimes.com/article/4124/jim_crow_in_the_north)
It is astounding the millions of dollars invested in the
creation of this “Legacy Museum” and the backing and publicity it has
received. It paints a dire picture of
the battle we face in perpetuating the truth of Southern history. But it is our Charge to carry forth, to build
the National Confederate Museum, to utilize every means including the power of
social media to reassert the principles for which our Confederate ancestors
contended. As Jefferson Davis said, “Nothing
fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southern man apologizing for the
defense we made of our inheritance. Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had
I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon
me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I
would do it all over again.” The article
for the new Montgomery museum espouses the worth of art to “help us understand
aspects of the human struggle that are difficult to articulate with mere
description, illuminating history and interpreting our hopes and fears in ways
that can be powerful, beautiful and unforgettable.” This is the very argument Southern heritage
proponents have made in defending the Confederate monuments as historical works
of art. While antagonists maintain that the Confederate monuments are painful
representations of an oppressive time and should be removed from public sight,
apparently the statue of the chained slaves at the Legacy Museum is just "illuminating". Who are the bigots? But it
was never about the flags and the monuments but the drumbeat of attacks on
“white privilege”, "white guilt", an agenda of division, and our very country’s history of liberty and Constitutional
democracy, a representative government by the people with their consent.
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