We’re in Charlottesville for a few days in belated celebration of my mom turning 29 for the 32nd time. We’re going to James Madison’s estate today. Fargo’s holding down the fort back in Austin.
What comes to mind when you hear the word, “Charlottesville?” Is it the town? The university? Thomas Jefferson? For me, it’s the rally. Those hate-filled days in 2017. I suspect it’s the same for many.
It’s tragic when this happens, when one worst day takes over a name. Columbine isn’t primarily a flower anymore. Katrina isn’t primarily a name. Charlottesville isn’t primarily a storied, quaint college town.
I realized last night, reading about those days, refreshing my memory on the how and the why and the what, exactly, that we were staying just a few blocks from Market Street Park, formerly Lee Park. If you, like me, forgot what exactly sparked the conflict, it had to do with this park. There was a statue of Robert E. Lee here. Some people wanted to take it down.
This morning, on my walk to write this, I walked past Market Street Park. I think we walked past it last night, too. We just didn’t know it was that park. Presumably thousands of people pass it by each month, not knowing it was that park.
The park’s lovely now, a city block of green with some sidewalks through it and benches and, to be honest, I haven’t seen it yet in the light of day. It’s empty of the statue. The statue was finally removed this summer.
A question asked, when the topplings come, is whether statues like these should play a role in how we remember history. The question isn’t always asked honestly, but often, it is, and often, it’s asked honestly even if it comes from a rather dishonest foundation. And it was striking, looking at that empty park this morning in the dark, looking at where the statue used to be, how that’s the wrong question. The statues don’t remember history at all. The statues are part of history.
Statues like and including that Robert E. Lee one were erected at the height of the Jim Crow era, at the height of Confederate legitimizing in the United States, back when lynchings were at their peak and Woodrow Wilson was resegregating the federal government. They were monuments not to remember history, but to pervertedly honor a genocidal way of life. They were not telling the story. They were continuing it.
Similarly, the statue’s removal doesn’t end the story. It continues to tell it. Once again, here in Charlottesville, with American blood shed. There’s a through line, here, from the Confederacy to the world which put the statue up to honor the Confederacy to the world which removed it to remove that honor. The story doesn’t end. It continues. But it’s good to be here. To be here, in a place in that story in which the statues aren’t going up anymore, but instead are coming down.
