Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light. – George Washington
Monuments continue to fall
By Carolina A. Miranda for the Los Angeles Times. June 27, 2020
Last week, the City of Ventura announced it would remove a statue of Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who helped establish the California missions, from its plinth outside of city hall. In the days after, protestors in San Francisco and L.A. tore down statues of the Spanish priest.
Serra remains a painful symbol among indigenous people, says Tatavium/Chumash elder Alan Salazar, who led a blessing at the Los Angeles action. “My family was brought to the San Fernando mission in 1799,” he told me. “So when I talk about Native people who lost their culture, their language and their lives — and were worked like slaves at the missions — I’m talking about my great-great-great-great-grandparents.”
As organizer Jessa Calderon told L.A. Taco: “This is just the beginning of healing that needs to occur amongst our people.”
Some indigenous activists have said that the statue of Serra in Mission Hills (which shows the Catholic saint with his arm around an indigenous boy) needs to come down. The historic missions are now on guard over the possibility of further topplings of Serra monuments.
For the first time, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has expressed support for the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces. Makeda Easter spoke with the organization’s president Paul Edmonson, who said “it was about time … that we took a second look at the positions that we’ve taken in the past on Confederate monuments.”
Hanif Abdurraqib has a stirring essay about the fate of the statues of Christopher Columbus in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and what it means to get rid of old monuments as we consider new ones.
New York Times art critic Holland Cotter says that some monuments definitely need to go — but others may require context.
Case in point: a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., standing over a kneeling Black man, a monument that was intended to honor emancipation. Some protestors say it should be removed. But its legacy is complicated: The statue’s design was overseen by an all-white committee, but it was paid for by African Americans (including former Union soldiers who had been enslaved), and Frederick Douglass attended its unveiling.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting that President Trump wants to deploy U.S. marshals to protect monuments. Marshals, who are part of the Department of Justice, typically provide security for courthouses, apprehend fugitives and protect witnesses.
“What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past.” An essential essay from Caroline Randall Williams on the difference between rewriting and reframing the past — and how her fair Black skin is evidence of the ways of slavery and Jim Crow.