The bronze statue of “Silent Sam,” a young Confederate soldier carrying a rifle while facing north (as if preparing to defend the South against that despicable invading horde of Yankee soldiers), had stood on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1913, when the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected the traitorous monument. It was one of hundreds of such statues the organization would erect all over the South during the era in their effort to sanitize and memorialize “The Lost Cause,” their mythical version of the Civil War that portrayed secessionists as heroes merely protecting their way of life, rather than traitorous brutes fighting to keep a race of people enslaved.
But last week Silent Sam was carted away to the dustbin of history in a dump truck after student activists finally toppled the monument to past injustice in a sometimes violent protest action; seven of the activists were arrested. Similar statues of southern turncoats have suffered the same fate all over the south, and often with similar controversy.
While I’m usually not a proponent of mob action — I’d rather such issues be settled in a court of law — but when a state legislature such as the one in North Carolina enacts laws, as it did in 2015, to protect bigotry by banning the removal of such racist statues, then the citizenry has no option but to take the law into their own hands in the name of common decency. Indeed, it’s the American way.
Nonetheless, there was a small group of militia types waving Confederate flags in protest as Sam bit the dust, and right-wingers have bemoaned the removal of these bronze stains on our national history in other instances around the South. But no other country in the world erects statues of — or names schools, bridges and public buildings after — traitors. This happens only in America, where a large percentage of the population is still fighting the Civil War.
The problem of the color line in America — which keeps us deeply divided — is that it’s ingrained in the psyche of many whites and not enough time has passed for the mental wound of racism — this sickness of the mind— to heal. Like it or not, it’s going to take at least another few hundred years before racism is put to rest and finally thought of as some ugly relic from our distant national past.
We actually thought that we were making progress towards that better and brighter tomorrow when we elected a black president, but the backlash — actually a “whitelash” — that resulted from that magnificent election outcome was literally stunning. We knew that lurking beneath the rocks of the Republic, breeding like cancerous, sick forms of a bacteria, was a virulent cadre of haters. But what we didn’t know (but alas, Trump did) was how large this population was and how deep their small-minded hatred runs.
These people are would-be fascists, and they’re on the march, gaining ground, in many parts of the world. They espouse a brand of nationalism that hinges on the hatred of foreigners (The Other), just as Trump uses Mexicans to gin up hatred here. But what all of these historical revisionists strive to forget — to erase from their memory banks — is that the countries of the world where most of the protests are taking place actually are responsible for their immigration “problem.”
Take the U.S., for example: Virtually the entire American West was part of Mexico until our nation enacted a specious policy of Manifest Destiny, which allowed us to take another country’s land by force. In other countries, centuries of brutal colonialism — where European nations raped and looted sovereign nations all over the world — have now resulted in the peoples of those countries showing up at the borders of the nations that engaged in the pillaging, essentially with bills in hand marked “Payment Overdue.”
My African-American ancestors were happy with their way of life until they were kidnapped from their homeland. But now we too are Americans, and have fought bravely for our country in every armed conflict since the Revolutionary War; we helped to build the infrastructure of the nation (often without compensation) and have remained loyal citizens in spite of the rampant disrespect and ill-treatment by government, as well as some other so-called Americans.
For those who argue that such monuments can’t be removed because they are part of our history, Maya Little, the black Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill who put her life on the line by continually protesting Silent Sam, states, “You can’t call something history without showing the real history of it. The blood of Black people is the real history of that statue. White supremacy was built on violence toward Black people.”
The sooner we completely purge such racist iconography as Silent Sam from our nation the sooner we’ll be able to move to that brighter tomorrow that is the birthright of all Americans. We black folks are solid citizens of this country, and in most cases, our ancestors were here long before the ancestors of those who would deny us citizenship. We’re here to stay, and other so-called Americans need to get used to this fact so that we all can prosper in peace.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.