This is a story of two monuments — one of a sort you’d expect to see toppled today, the other never built.
The first was on the banks of the Mississippi, in the Deep South. I first encountered it in 1971, when one could still see the signs of Jim Crow, extant in the public square. Waiting rooms and water fountains were still marked as “colored” in some bus stations. My future wife and I were on what V.S. Naipaul would later call a “turn in the South,” when, on a walk along the banks of the Mississippi in Memphis, we spotted the obelisk and its plaque. “To Tom Lee: A Very Worthy Negro,” it read. It was, the inscription told us, a tribute to a black Memphis levee worker who had used a wooden motorboat to save 30 people from drowning when the river steamer M.E. Norman overturned.
Tom Lee briefly became a local hero, even a national celebrity. He went to the White House to meet with President Calvin Coolidge. All those years later, the story was obscure — but, in an instant, the monument’s inscription spoke volumes about the old South. The words a “worthy Negro” suggested that because Lee was black, he was exceptional in his worthiness. The tribute dripped with patronization and condescension. We thought to ourselves that we weren’t in Boston anymore (though, of course, Boston was on the verge of erupting in anti-busing racial violence not long after).
A version of the Lee monument still stands — however, with a modest modification that can serve as a model for people rethinking the meaning of statues in our public spaces today.
The original obelisk almost fell victim to what might seem today like a divine wind of political correctness. A freak windstorm toppled it in 2003. By that time, of course, attitudes had changed (at least superficially). But the obelisk was, surprisingly, not scrapped. Instead, in addition to a new monument to Lee built on the original site, the old one and its plaque were relocated to another section of the riverfront park named for Lee, with a slight but telling addition to the plaque: “Erected 1954.” It was, in other words, to be understood, and in its own way, appreciated, as a reflection of its era.
In that sense, it could be instructional — both of Lee’s heroism, and of certain attitudes and language norms that we have thankfully left behind. (Incredibly, the original monument was blown over a second time in 2017; today, only the amended plaque survives, along with a new memorial.)
Memphis had figured out that placing the memorial in its era was not a continuation of racism, but a clue to the past, one that could be followed — for instance, to the moving nearby Civil Rights Museum, housed in the converted Lorraine Hotel, on a balcony of which Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
The second monument that comes to mind is one that does not exist. If it did, it would be in a rural, small-village section of Germany from which my wife’s family emigrated — some as late as 1936.
We had long been intrigued by a comment from her elderly cousin Roselle that she and her family had fled the area after they “saw Hitler speak.” A combination of research and a fortuitous referral to a regional guide well-versed in the history of the Jews in northern Saxony led us to a hillside named Bückeberg near the town of Emmerthal — where Adolf Hitler had, in fact, addressed multitudes annually from 1933 through 1937 in what was known as the Reich Harvest Festival (Reichserntedankfest). There in the German agricultural heartland where my wife’s family had been small merchants and cattle traders, up to a million people gathered as Hitler strode up a path in the middle of the hill.
If we looked closely, our guide, Bernhard Gelderblom, a published historian, advised, we could still see the path that Hitler and his guards trod. But that was as close as there was to a sort of monument or marker of events that would forever change history, however grimly.
One can understand German skittishness about there being any such plaque. The possibility that contemporary neo-Nazi groups might rally there cannot be discounted. Nor can one fairly say that Germany seeks to hide the Nazi past, not when it has mounted the brilliant Daniel Libeskind Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
But there is no doubt that something is missing in Bückeberg. No one is directed to visit there, to take in the scale of what occurred, to see, perhaps, a small grouping of photographs of those chilling rallies that precipitated catastrophic events.
If the choice is between no monument and one that places the past in context, such as that dedicated to Tom Lee, the choice seems clear: Don’t topple, but explain. To suppress history is to risk repeating it.
This piece first appeared at the Washington Examiner
______________________
Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he directs the Tocqueville Project, and author of the new book, Who Killed Civil Society?
This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner