Why Not Put Truth on a Pedestal? Richmond, Va. I’m a descendant of a soldier who served under Gen. Robert E. Lee and a resident of the Richmond metro area, where one can take very few paces without bumping into a reminder of the Confederate past. Yet I can’t work up much enthusiasm about Civil War monuments. My lackadaisical attitude has nothing to do with race or heritage and is quite widespread. Most people are far too busy worrying about losing their house, finding a job, making payroll and wondering why their dog’s tongue is turning blue to spend much time contemplating statues of guys who lost a war 152 years ago. The violence in Charlottesville last weekend is deeply distressing. In this neck of the woods it’s commonly held that thugs who run down people with cars should go to the crocodile pit (after a fair trial, of course). But it’s hard not to cringe over the way a growing list of American locales are responding to the rise of the dead confederates. In Baltimore, four monuments were purged Tuesday night in a scene reminiscent of the nocturnal vamoose of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984. (By contrast, three of the statues were parked at a wastewater treatment plant.) You didn’t have to be a soldier, or even a rebel, to get the hook: A statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Marylander who wrote the Dred decision and served on the U.S. Supreme Court until his death in 1864, was hauled off, along with a statue dedicated to Confederate women. Lexington, Ky., plans its own official purge, while a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., was toppled Monday and kicked by protesters after it bit the dust. Where will it stop? President Trump was widely mocked for saying Tuesday: “I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” He didn’t have to wait that long. The next day, a Chicago pastor demanded the removal of a Washington statue from a city park. Last October activists gathered outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History to demand the removal of a statue of “racist” Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Rider still stands, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Wednesday that “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the [City University] hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism.” Is anyone in public life not freaking out about Confederate monuments? Yes. Here in Richmond, once the Confederate capital, Mayor Levar Stoney is keeping his cool. He believes the rebel luminaries have important truths to teach our hysterical and miseducated era. “Whether we like it or not, they are part of our history of this city, and removal would never wash away that stain,” the mayor, who is African-American, said recently. He advocates adding “context” signage to the monuments, which will “set the historical record straight”—a record based on “a false narrative etched in stone and bronze more than 100 years ago not only to lionize the architects and defenders of slavery, but to perpetuate the tyranny and terror of Jim Crow and reassert a new era of white supremacy.” Mr. Stoney’s plan will not please the rabid right or their brawling partners on the left, who imagine Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis as rustic versions of Hitler, Himmler and Speer. But converting chaos into what Barack Obama might call “a teachable moment” will resonate with anyone who agrees that allowing street-fighting crazies to set public policy is a bad idea. Context contractors will be in deep clover along Monument Avenue, where Stonewall Jackson (erected in 1919) is joined by Lee (1890), J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart (1907), Davis (1907) and Matthew Fontaine Maury (1929)—plus Richmond native Arthur Ashe Jr. (1996). The tennis legend’s inclusion on the avenue was met with great criticism, in part because he appears to be beating a group of children over the head with his racket. Yet the Ashe placement might have been ahead of its time. “Integrating” the avenue by placing monuments to triumphant African-Americans among the defeated rebs could be highly educational. Worthy candidates would include local heroes Maggie Walker, the first woman to charter a bank in the U.S., and dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson —both of whom are memorialized on a smaller scale elsewhere in the city. Martin Luther King Jr. might make a nice neighbor for Jeb Stuart, while Mr. Obama, who carried Virginia twice, could keep Stonewall Jackson in good company. And how to answer Jefferson Davis, a vibrant bigot with a theological bent? He once said of blacks: “We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.” Since we’re looking for truth, we couldn’t do better than a monument to abolitionist Sojourner Truth. To my mind her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is more powerful than the Gettysburg Address: “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? And I have borne 13 children—13 children!—and seen most all of ’em sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” Few will have any trouble deciding who the superior being truly was, or drawing wider conclusions. If Mayor Stoney’s plan helps keep the lid on, he might end up in the governor’s mansion. And funding should be no problem. Pitch it to Mr. Trump as an infrastructure project. Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at DaveShiflett.com.
