Statues Come Down
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Statues Come Down Lauren Weiner
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
In Chapel Hill, North Carolina on August 20, 2018, rioters on the campus of the University of North Carolina toppled the statue of a soldier nicknamed “Silent Sam.” Video of exultant protestors stomping on the downed figure, a symbol of the school’s alumni who fought for the Confederacy, was reminiscent of Baghdad fifteen years earlier, when the dictator Saddam Hussein’s defaced likeness lay on the ground. How does an architectural fixture in a city, town, or township in the United States that has been there for decades suddenly become a flashpoint? Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have been contesting public symbols for a long time. The ACLU brings legal challenges to religious displays in the public sphere, such as the case of the “Peace Cross” in Bladensburg, Maryland, whose constitutionality the Supreme Court recently upheld. The motivation of the church-state separationists, of course, is their reading of the First Amendment. To them the amendment’s Establishment Clause mandates vacuuming the public square clean of any and all references to faith. At least they have a reading, however flawed it may be. It’s not clear that the people who showed up in Chapel Hill, chanting “Cops and the Klan go hand in hand” and “Nazis go home” (there weren’t any Nazis present) as they destroyed school property, have much tolerance for debate or regard for First Amendment freedoms. Regarding the Civil War and public memory, the upsurge of conflict over the last few years was given extra impetus from abroad, with the controversy over
Lauren Weiner has written for a number of prominent outlets, including Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Law & Liberty, First Things, National Review, and the Washington Times; [email protected]. From 2007 to 2010, Weiner served as a speechwriter for U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. She last appeared in these pages in summer, 2020 with “Howard Zinn: The Debunker Debunked.”
L. Weiner
Cecil Rhodes. The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement began in South Africa in March 2015, on the campus of the University of Cape Town, when a student poured excrement on the seated bronze statue of the nineteenth century imperialist and industrialist. That cry of protest was picked up at Oxford University in England, where students at Oriel College demanded that the college’s Rhodes statue be taken down. The “dead white males” of various U.S. colleges and universities came under heavy scrutiny around that time, part of the activism of groups formed to protest the deaths in altercations with police of Michael Brown and other black Americans. Those among Princeton’s founders who owned slaves were lambasted, along with the racially bigoted Woodrow Wilson, a former Princeton president. Inside Education reported that sticky notes were being put on statues of Thomas Jefferson at the University of Missouri at Columbia and at Virginia’s College of William & Mary, bearing the words “rapist
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