This is part of the Political Philosophy and Race Speaker Series.
The location will be posted closer to the date.
Title: Forging (and Challenging) “a Tyrannical Public Opinion”: Du Bois and Terrell on Confederate Faithful Slave Monuments
Abstract:
What is lost when Confederate monuments are removed? Whose civic standing is diminished by their defacement or removal? Opponents of Confederate statue removal claim that their goal is to preserve history. Yet in 1935, in Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois identified Lost Cause historiography as “pure propaganda”: a deliberate disinformation campaign to enshrine white supremacist fictions as official history. While they could not prevent Confederate monuments from being built, African American intellectuals challenged the distorted Lost Cause version of US history enshrined in both the written record and the visual rhetoric of Confederate monuments. None embody this struggle over how to teach US history and who to publicly commemorate more than the attempt to build so-called “faithful slave” monuments. In this talk, I focus on the arguments marshalled by Mary Church Terrell and Du Bois to successfully challenge the proposal of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to build a national monument to the ‘Black Mammy’ in the 1920s, and the eventual contextualization of the Haywood Shepherd memorial installed at Harper’s Ferry in 1931. Terrell and Du Bois recognized that the battle over the written and visual record are inextricably linked, and that both can be harmful forms of racist demagoguery that threaten freedom of opinion, displace African American collective memory, and subvert national history. Contemporary attempts to safeguard statues, whitewash the teaching of US history, and ban books demonstrate that struggles over the kinds of monuments an egalitarian multiracial democracy requires are ongoing. How should we commemorate today?
