The Monument Purge and Artistic Intent.

There is a solution to the monument vandalization wars hinted at here in this piece by Professor David W. Blight, author of a recent and well-received biography of Frederick Douglass.

Blight defends the continued placement of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington D.C. And while I disagree with the declaration that the statue is inherently racist, he makes some excellent points about chronological superiority.

Memory is always about the politics of the present, but the righteous present is not always right.

Do not tear down this monument. I fully understand that protests are not forums for complexity; current demonstrations are the results of justifiable passion and outrage. It is reasonable to clear our landscape of public commemoration of the failed, four-year slaveholders’ rebellion to sustain white supremacy known as the Confederacy, even if it doesn’t erase our history. But the Freedmen’s Memorial is another matter. For those contemplating the elimination of this monument, including D.C.’s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), please consider the people who created it and what it meant for their lives in a century not our own. We ought not try to purify their past and present for our needs.

A huge parade involving nearly every black organization in the city preceded the dedication of the monument on April 14, 1876. The procession included cornet bands, marching drum corps, youth clubs in colorful uniforms and fraternal orders. Horse-drawn carriages transported master of ceremonies and Howard University law school dean, John Mercer Langston, and the orator of the day, Frederick Douglass, a resident of that neighborhood. Representatives of the entire U.S. government sat in the front rows at the ceremony; the occasion had been declared a federal holiday. President Ulysses S. Grant, members of his Cabinet, members of the House and Senate and justices of the Supreme Court all attended.

The $20,000 used to build the monument had been raised among black Americans, most of them former slaves. A former slave woman, Charlotte Scott, had donated the first $5. The sculptor, Thomas Ball, lived and worked in Italy. The model for the kneeling slave, Archer Alexander — a former slave — was photographed numerous times and had his pictures sent to Ball. Ball believed he depicted Alexander as an “agent in his own resistance,” an assumption of course roundly debated to this day.

. . .

 Rather than take down this monument to Lincoln and emancipation, create a commission that will engage new artists to represent the story of black freedom from one generation to the next. Let today’s imaginations take flight. Perhaps commission a statue of Douglass himself delivering this magnificent speech. So much new learning can take place by the presence of both past and present. As a nation, let’s replace a landscape strewn with Confederate symbols with memorialization of emancipation. Tearing down the Freedmen’s Memorial would be a terrible start for that epic process.

I think Bright's argument that we need more monuments is a superb one, and worth implementing. And in-housing it for American artists is ideal. I wish that had been done for the King Memorial, whose Chinese origins are obvious in a stern, distant sculpture more fitting for a Maximum Leader.

Where I think he trips up is in arguing that the sculpture was racist in conception. That seems flatly-wrong, not to mention unfair. It indicts the scupltor, first as a liar, and then with the damning label by assigning motives--and that only after viewing the piece with contemporary (and dare I say academic?) lenses. At a minimum, the emancipated slave is depicted with dignity, preparing to rise to the freedom he received from emancipation.

To assume racism is to give the game away to the vandals.

It reminds me of the discussion of some of the works of one of my favorite American artists, Thomas Hovenden. Hovenden was a 19th Century painter of Irish extraction, and he did a large number of portraits on subjects historical and contemporary. He is most famous for "The Last Moments of John Brown," which has become iconic. Portraits of African-Americans became popular at the time, and Hovenden did his share. Below are ones called "Contentment," and "Dem Was Good Ole Times." Remember to click for better detail.

I can hear you cringing at the title of the second one, and I do, too. And there are those who got tense with the first one:

"Contentment"? In a time of increasing legal restrictions and the reversal of the gains of Reconstruction?

But let's bracket those reactions for a moment and look at the subjects.

The persons in each portrait are that--persons, depicted in moments of domestic life.

The cringe-inducing Joel-Chandler-Harris-esque titles (yes, plural--there are others, alas, in Hovenden's oeuvre) aside, there is nothing dehumanizing or caricatured about the figures themselves. Their garb is different, but it was accurate for the time. And each one appears like a real person--caught in a quiet or happy moment.

You can argue that they were depicted in poor, threadbare clothes, but Hovenden portrayed Breton peasants similarly. Poverty is no respecter of color.

And even though explanation and context are usually met with righteous howling, I'm going to give you them anyway:

Hovenden's black models were his neighbors in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. It was the home of his wife's family, and a renowned hotbed of abolitionist sentiment before the War. Which would neatly explain the presence of African-American neighbors. And Hovenden instructed, among others, Henry Ossawa Tanner, a pioneering African-American painter, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

So while the horrid caricature of the happy black man or woman who allegedly fondly remembered the allegedly-benevolent age of slavery would grow and be eagerly spread by the same folks who gave us Lost Cause historiography, that's not remotely what Hovenden did.

Nor was it remotely what Thomas Ball did with the sculpture based on Archer Alexander. By calling each artist's work "racist," there's really no reason to spare their works from the dustbin any more than there is to spare a Confederate monument.

And say what you will about Confederate monuments: every last one of them is innocent of the charge of racist depictions of black men and women.