Past Is Prologue
A Historian Explains Why Confederate Statues Should Come Down
History studies the evolution of landscapes. Freezing them in time helps no one.
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A couple of folks have recently asked me how, as a historian (I’m a librarian now, not a historian, but I have a master’s in U.S. history), I could be so very supportive of the removal of Confederate monuments from Monument Avenue here in Richmond, Virginia.
During the Civil War, Richmond served as the capital of the Confederate States of America. In the years and decades that followed the war, the city reconstructed the history, memory, and mythology of the South and the war it had fought a generation before. The most vivid manifestation of that effort was the creation of Monument Avenue, an internationally famous boulevard lined with the homes of Richmond’s elite and stocked from the 1890s to the 1920s with monumental sculptures of generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other figures of Confederate military history.
To be honest, it’s precisely because of my training in history that I’m okay with removing those sculptures. If my studies taught me anything, it’s that times and people and spaces change.
That we should pick one particular time to “freeze” a place that is still very much part of a living community — and if “living” doesn’t describe the American streetscape, I don’t know what does — is a very strange idea. Frankly, it strikes me as a particular form of arrogance. Who are we to make that decision about how much of this evolution is “enough”?
By way of illustration, consider Times Square in New York City. In the late 19th century, that area — then called Longacre Square — was the center of New York’s horse and carriage trade. As Lower Manhattan pushed north, homes and theaters and prostitution followed the tide of commerce. Longacre Square got its first theater in 1895. Middle- and upper-class theatergoers started to throng the area in subsequent decades. In 1904 the New York Times moved to 42nd Street on Longacre Square, which subsequently got renamed to Times Square in 1905.
After World War I, Times Square filled with theaters, music halls, and hotels. But with the Depression, many…
