
Why Memorials Matter: A Tribute to the Celebrating the African Spirit Memorial Marker
By Katherine Hite, CAS Co-Chair and Co-Founder, Professor of Political Science at Vassar College
“If we want to understand why memorials like CAS’s matter, let’s just take our current president’s recent executive order “to restore truth in America,” namely by redoing by the Smithsonian museums, calling out the National Museum of African American History and Culture specifically, because according to the Administration, the Museum contains “improper, divisive, anti-American ideology.” Well, that’s a problem. Since the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 over 12 million have visited the museum; they won’t unsee it.
He also ordered Confederate monuments to be restored. Why is this? What does it say to us about why memorials matter? This administration knows that social movements demanding that we take a close look at our violent racist past to better comprehend our present have been winning out, they have raised awareness among millions of people, particularly among young people. Nationally, Black Lives Matter spearheaded cries for Confederate monuments to come down, calling out the monuments as symbolic embraces, as literal elevations of white supremacy. Black Lives Matter and others demanded attention to the deep links among centuries of slavery, racial terror post-Emancipation, decades of Jim Crow legislation in the south, national redlining and sunsetting, federal legislation on so-called fair housing, mortgage practices, and urban renewal that proved undeniably racist, and a criminal legal system ruinous to the lives of a grossly disproportionate number of people of color. Around the country, citizens have formed groups like CAS.
For many, it has been a moment of recognizing how little we understood our history, how little we were exposed in school and elsewhere to the history of slavery and its very long, harmful aftermath. And with this has often come white defensiveness, white denial about our own racism. Denial already assumes you know something, like “plausible deniability.” Deniability begins with a knowing of something. The common white person’s assertion, “I am not a racist,” might be based in part on ignorance, but it is also a defensive reach that at least in part is a recognition, a knowing.
One of the most powerful memorials today is in Montgomery, Alabama – the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, better known as the lynching memorial – recognizing the history and ongoing realities of racial terror and injustice. In fact, the memorial to the men and women who were lynched throughout the U.S. south was designed by MASS Design, whose founder, Michael Murphy, is a native of Poughkeepsie and a product of the City of Poughkeepsie schools. It is such a powerful and important site.
The Montgomery memorial focuses mainly on the south, yet it also recognizes how both historic and ongoing racism and discrimination was upheld by national institutions, including the Supreme Court, some of whose chief justices were New Yorkers. Maybe because I grew up in Texas, I become a little defensive or something, but I often worry about how northern whites seem to get let off the hook regarding racial terror and racism. My kids went through the City of Kingston schools, they were never taught about slavery being a historic reality in New York, about how New York City and the state benefited enormously from slavery, or about the fear that black freedmen and women had to live with here during the period of slavery, as they also contributed important knowledge and skills to our community. I believe the work we can do both for and around a memorial in the City of Poughkeepsie can be so important, in terms of education, recognition, and even toward mobilizing for racial equality in the here and now. Memorials are clearly no substitute for justice, for reparations, but they can help open up and thicken such conversations.
Today is Juneteenth and I am from Texas, the birthplace of Juneteenth, where in Galveston on June 19, 1865, two years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, and in the state where the last Civil War battle was fought, U.S. troops, black and white, officially declared the end of slavery, even though Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox two months before. During those two years between 1863 and 1865, and well before that, many enslaved people in Texas in fact escaped South to live in Mexico, where slavery had ended in 1829, while many others escaped North, traveling through several states like Missouri and Kentucky—Northern states whose enslaved people were not included in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Texas was the first state in the country to declare Juneteenth a state holiday, in 1980. It was first celebrated by newly freed Black Texans on Juneteenth, 1866, and every year since, even though there were several years where the celebration came with enormous risk, due to racist retribution and terrorizing. Over many decades, Black Texans can be credited with spreading the practice of Juneteenth throughout the country. As you know, Texans like to claim credit for a lot of things.
In any case, I am very proud to be a part of CAS and the establishment of this marker that our great Kalimah Karim spearheaded. James Baldwin once wrote that “To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressure of life like clay in a season of drought.” Memorials help us do the learning work as a society; they elevate moments, places, and people. Memorials represent pasts that are often painful and violent as well as beautiful and accomplished. They must be for, and about, all of us. And it falls to all of us to protect the past this new memorial contains from those who intend to re-invent it.”