Chicago's Monuments: A Monumental Debate

Goodbye, Columbus and 19th century white elitists; hello to a range of tributes to minorities, women and local history events, according to the final report of the Chicago Monuments Project (CMP), released August 19.

Collective soul-searching about Chicago’s 500 monuments began in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020. Forty-one monuments necessitated discussion, based on stereotypical depictions of American Indians or racist acts committed by those portrayed, according to the report.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot initiated the CMP partnership, with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), Chicago Park District and Chicago Public Schools, in fall 2020. Outreach ran throughout 2021; analysis and recommendations continued over spring and summer of 2022. CMP officials call it the nation’s first, comprehensive, community-focused engagement process, and compare it to the national debate over Confederate monuments. Leading the effort was the CMP Advisory Committee, a group of community leaders, artists, architects, scholars, curators and city officials.

“The art we place on public property must represent history without injury, insult or denigration,” CMP Co-chairs Mark Kelly and Bonnie McDonald said in the final report.

While the CMP report acknowledged that the Columbus statues in Grant Park and Arrigo Park are viewed with pride by Italian Americans, the explorer’s image has also “become a bitter reminder of centuries of exploitation, conquest and genocide.” Continued city display would seem to condone the historic wrongs committed by Columbus, according to the report.

But most of all, given the significant public demonstrations against the statues, “Providing for the long-term security of the artworks and ensuring public safety is resource-prohibitive.”

Also going into storage is the bust of Melville Fuller, a Chicago lawyer who became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court that handed down the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which enshrined “separate but equal” segregation in the U.S. for over half a century. The CMP report suggested that the Chicago Park District also remove Fuller’s name from the park located at 331 W. 45th St., which is surrounded by the like-named neighborhood.

Although Illinois is the “Land of Lincoln,” as the CMP report noted, Chicago’s depictions of the 16th president, including “Standing Lincoln” (in Lincoln Park), “Seated Lincoln” (in Grant Park), “Lincoln Rail Splitter” (Garfield Park) and “Young Lincoln” (Senn Park) were a cause for concern. The statues will remain, but their descriptive text will be modified and community members, including American Indians, will stage artistic interventions.

The CMP report does not detail Lincoln’s white elitist actions, but according to history.com, Lincoln volunteered (and did not see combat) in the Black Hawk War, which pushed local tribes across the Mississippi River. As president, he was consumed by formulating strategy to win the Civil War, so he deferred to the reactionary Indian policies of his predecessors, which meant broken treaties and millions of acres of tribal lands confiscated in the name of westward expansion.

The censured monuments had one or more things in common: they promoted a white supremacy narrative or demeaning characterizations of American Indians; they memorialized individuals connected to racist acts, slavery or genocide; they presented oversimplified views of history; they created tension between those who valued these artworks and those who did not.

“…in the same way that Confederate monuments and flags have come to be identified as unacceptable public symbols of white supremacy, the time has come for an examination and reassessment of the collection of Chicago monuments that misrepresent, oversimplify, or erase history,” according to the report.

Most of the controversial artwork was created between the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 — the Chicago World’s Fair that celebrated technological advances created by Americans and Western Europeans up to that point – and the late 1930s.

CMP participant John Low, Ph.D., an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and associate professor at Ohio State University, wrote that between the 1890s and 1930s, whites believed that Indians had been subjugated and were no longer a threat. As a result, whites created artwork that mythologically memorialized Indians. Native Americans were not seen as participants in modern life.

But monuments give shared communities a sense of origins and set the standard for civic values worth emulating, wrote Adam Green, Ph.D., an associate professor of American history at the University of Chicago and a CMP participant. “What values of ours are likely to be judged as narrow, naïve, or brutally misguided, and which ones might actually prove serviceable to the future? This, to be sure, is an impossible question….Yet we have no choice but to try, for we will be judged by those to come, just as we continue to wrestle today with how best to assess those who came before us.”

Rather than monument removal, most of the CMP solutions involve augmenting, with new public projects and curricula. As part of the engagement process, CMP released a call, “Reimagining Monuments: Request for Ideas,” to solicit proposals from individual artists and community groups to rethink the place, purpose and permanence of monuments in public spaces.

Besides reexamining Chicago history, key action items focused on creating greater visibility for American Indians; considering underrecognized stories and unsung people (only 3% of the city’s monuments depict women); prioritizing programs that engaged youth.

For a start, DCASE has awarded eight $50,000 planning and implementation grants toward the following subjects:

• Mahalia Jackson, gospel singer and civil rights advocate, to the Greater Chatham Initiative, in the neighborhood where Jackson lived

• Mother Jones, Irish immigrant and labor champion

• Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, Chicago’s first settler, and his wife, Kitihawa, a Potawatomi woman

• Chicanas of 18th Street, about the work of women of Mexican ancestry in Pilsen from the mid-60s to 1980

• Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, conceived by artist Patricia Nguyen and architectural designer John Lee, regarding the victims of Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge

• Chicago Race Riot of 1919, with artistic markers to commemorate each of the 38 people killed

• A Long Walk Home, for its “Visibility Project” proposal centered on Black women and girls

• A community-led monument to victims of gun violence in Chicago

The CMP’s public engagement during 2021 involved virtual conversations with 300 members of diverse community stakeholders: African Americans, American Indians, Italian Americans, Latinx, people who are disabled, historic preservationists and youth. There were also seven virtual, drop-in sessions in February and March 2021, with 80 participants. Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) and the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society also hosted a session on the Indian Boundary Lines marker.

Between January and August 2021, the public response, some with personal narratives, numbered 2,000; 3 out of 4 (77%) were from Cook County, but there were also submissions from 30 states, and from Spain, Serbia, Luxembourg, Australia and Mexico. Three of the top four responding ZIP codes were more than 72% white. There were only 15 replies from Chicago ZIP codes that were more than 30% Black, and 23 replies from those with the highest population (67% or more) of Latinos.

CMP and the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative (CAICC) developed a survey that elicited 49 responses from Dec. 21, 2021 to January 14. The Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park was offensive to 87% of them and 75% wanted it taken down. More than half (56%) found “The Defense” bas relief on the DuSable Michigan Avenue Bridge to be demeaning. Said one person regarding this Fort Dearborn battle scene: “There is literally a dead Native person depicted on this relief. I can’t imagine that we as a society would be OK with something like this if it were any other racial/ethnic group.”