Volume: 59 Issue: 10
NOVEMBER 11, 2015
driftwood.uno.edu
PRIDE OR PREJUDICE?
Confederate monuments ignite controversial debate about complex history of BY TISHAWN MITCHELL Driftwood Staff “The most important thing is for Americans to come to terms with the war’s roots in slavery and the way that slavery has shaped American society: what slavery meant,” said LSU history professor and author Dr. Gaines M. Foster. “Whether slavery helps or hurts those causes, I don’t know.” To help kick off UNO’s Alumni Week, Foster delivered a lecture in the Grand Ballroom of the UC on November 3. The subject of the lecture was the sesquicentennial, or 150-year anniversary of the Civil War. Foster’s presentation, the second installment in the Homer L. Hitt Distinguished Presidential Lecture Series, was titled: “The Memory of the Civil War: What Americans Think About It- and What They Should!” “I suppose I should start with an apology to those of you who actually read the title of this talk,” Foster said. “I used that title for a course this spring that had to be approved by the faculty board of the Honors College. They sent it back to me, told me I couldn’t do it. That we only teach people how to think; we don’t tell them what to think. So if I’ve offended, I apologize, and I won’t tell you what to think. I’ll just give you a few suggestions.” Dr. Foster, who is a Murphy J. Foster Professor of History at LSU, is the author of over 100 book reviews, a dozen encyclopedia articles, 20 scholarly articles and essays and three books, including “Ghosts of the Confederacy Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South.” “You may have missed it,” Foster said. “It ended in April, and passed with [a] surprising lack of comment. There were some battlefield reenactments..But by and large, for
most people, the sesquicentennial passed with surprising lack of public involvement.” “And then,” Foster said, “a very interesting thing happened: Dylann Roof savagely and senselessly murdered nine people at the AME church in Charleston. All of a sudden, the war seemed more intense than it had at any time during the sesquicentennial.” The incident mentioned by Foster is the June 2015 massacre of nine African-Americans during a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. Prior to the attack, Roof ran a now-defunct website called The Last Rhodesian. The site featured racist rants, a lot of them targeted towards the African American community, and photos of Roof in various poses by Confederate monuments and museums. Upset over the media coverage that the Trayvon Martin murder case had received, Roof, who had hoped to incite a race riot, “chose Charleston (to commit the crime) because it is the most historic city in my state and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country,” according to a post on the website. Roof is currently in jail for murder, awaiting trial. The killings didn’t spark a race riot, but they did ignite a nationwide debate over the way that Southern states, particularly through the use of Rebel flags and Confederate monuments, chose to portray events of the Civil War. In July, Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed that at least four monuments in New Orleans be taken down. “We didn’t hear about this for a very long time because the people who controlled politics and public discourse weren’t worried about monuments,” Foster said. “So, as African Americans have joined the
slavery and race in South
PHOTO BY GRANT CAMPBELL
conversation in ways that they couldn’t have in 1890 or 1896, they can in 1996 and 2015, and we’re seeing the war in different ways because we have to see the way that it looks in their eyes.” “We have to think about how the monuments look in their eyes.” Foster admitted that the historical White Southern view of the Civil War, an event that, by his estimation, killed over 700,000 American soldiers, can be seen as misguided at best. “There is, in the White south, a fear of dishonor. Much of the celebration, much of the Civil War, focuses on the battlefield. That reconciliation is based on ignoring both the issue and the cost of the war. It becomes a grand crusade, a tremendous, wonderful event.” At the end of the talk, Foster took a few questions from the audience. “I’m going to ask a question and bring us into 2015,” an audience member said. “Regarding our monuments, I personally feel that history should never be erased. I believe that we do need to honor our soldiers, North and South....by taking down our monuments, we’ll eventually just make this go away by the wayside, and it needs to be remembered.” The comment drew some applause. “I was really hoping that that question would come sooner,” Foster said, “There’s tremendous division over the monuments, which the applause suggests. I’m with you; we don’t want to erase history. We also want to confront history. If my talk said anything, it said that we’ve never really come to understand the war.” “One of the problems is most of the monuments that you’re talking about in New Orleans, most of the Confederate monuments in particular, go up not to help us understand history but to confuse it. The mon-
uments are really tough for me. Let me not answer yes or no, but tell you how to deal with it.” Dr. Robert Dupont, Associate Professor and Chair of UNO’s History Department and a former student of Foster’s, gave a short introductory speech before Foster’s lecture. Dupont is not as divided about the fate of the monuments. “Well, I may have a little bit stronger opinions than he did,” Dupont said. “There are some monuments that I think need to come down.” “I don’t see any reason why we have—still, although it’s put off to the side now—the battle of Liberty Place, I think it’s called. That really was a monument put up to honor white racism. It wasn’t put up to honor a person; it was put up to honor a victory when a mob of White people overcame federal authorities in the city during Reconstruction. So, that one I don’t have any trouble with saying, ‘Let’s get rid of it.’” Dupont also doesn’t see any particular need for a monument honoring Jefferson Davis. “He was not a noble soldier. He was a political leader, but he was a political leader of a rebellious part of the United States and that’s not something that we should honor. I’m more torn when it comes to the military stuff, like Lee, Beauregard. But I see the argument for either cutting them back severely or taking them out.” Foster said that he’s not so worried about what to do with the monuments; he’s more concerned about how the South, based on the way that it has portrayed its association with slavery in the past, will depict those ties in the future. “I think that what’s happened is that we suddenly have more voices in this debate, and we’re still trying to figure it out.”
“...we don’t want to erase history. We also want to confront history. If my talk said anything, it said that we’ve never really come to understand the war.” — Dr. Gaines M. Foster, LSU history professor and author