It’s Time To Tear Down Confederate Symbols And Replace Them With Civil Rights Statues

On Friday, the deaths of two giants of the American Civil Rights Movement, Reverend C.T. Vivian and Congressman John Lewis, prompted America to once again mourn a dying generation of leaders who changed the course of a nation. By peacefully, but resolutely, exposing Americans to the indignities of racial hate and injustice that have plagued the nation since before its founding, these two men helped represent the conscience of a country. But in their passing, they also help highlight one more way the nation can honor the legacy and future of American freedom fighters:

Replace fallen confederate symbols with statues of heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.

Over the past several months, the nation has grappled with the legacy of its racist past, particularly the way symbols of slavery and the Confederacy have been sustained in the nation’s public memory. As statues of Confederate generals have been torn down and battle flags of the Confederacy have been banned, there has been a national reckoning for what America remembers about its past, and how.

Which is why, in the wake of the deaths of two lions of the Civil Rights Movement, the answer is both timely and apparent. If the Civil War was about America’s battle for the right to subjugate and enslave Black people, then the Civil Rights Movement was about the timeless battle to free them from the systems of institutional racism and discrimination that have been pervasive through history. Why then, shouldn’t now be a time when America meets a moment of uncertainty by honoring those whose certainty in a just cause and righteous anger help a catalyze one of the nation’s greatest chapters in the struggle for racial justice?

Prior to the most recent wave of social protests, during which a number of Confederate statues have been removed, there were over 1.500 public memorials of the Confederacy, including over 715 statues. While over the years there has been an ongoing debate of the message and meaning of these monuments, prior to this past May, they were seldom removed. That is rapidly changing, however. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, between 2015 and 2017 at least 60 memorials of the Confederacy have been removed, yet in the past two months alone more than 30 monuments have been removed. Even more are scheduled to be taken down in the coming months.

As a result, now is the perfect time for there to be a concerted effort to honor the fighters of an ideal, and an era, that America needs to be sorely remember. The legacy of the fight for freedom from slavery, Jim Crow, segregation are not only stories of the past, but they are also roadmaps for the future. And as the elders of the Civil Rights Movement transition from being our elders to becoming our ancestors, we need more public reminders of their righteous struggles and hard-earned wisdom.

How can we do this? While every state and countless cities have memorials to freedom fighters such as Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, there are still far too few reminders of the vast number of Civil Rights Movement heroes, past and present. There are also far too few monuments of women Civil Rights Movement leaders.

No doubt the present moment has raised awareness of Black Americans’ struggle against systemic discrimination, but the truth is that too many Americans know too little about the Civil Rights Movement is because of the lack of public visibility of those leaders that changed American history. This is why we urgently need more monuments that honor their legacies and educate their beneficiaries - we all stand on the strong and upright shoulders of these leaders, and we should look up to them in marble and stone as well.

How will we do this? At the least, there should be a concerted national effort, instituted by legislation in Congress, to invest in an expansion of the construction of civil rights monuments on federal lands, as well as provide resources to help state and local government authorities designate and construct their own monuments to civil rights heroes. An initial first step would be to create a commission, with an urgent timeline, to develop and distribute a set of recommendations for the memorialization of the Civil Rights Movement across America, as well as an allocation of funding to help make that memorialization a reality.

For far too long, the United States has honored its troubled past with memorials to the Confederacy, a badly conceived rebellion,  grounded in the defense of slavery and institutions of oppression. In contrast, the Civil Rights Movement was an exercise of liberation and of what the late Congressman and Civil Rights Movement icon John Lewis referred to as “good trouble.” That is the kind of leadership we should be honoring through our memorials…

And our actions.