History or historical malfeasance?
July Fourth is the iconic American summer holiday celebrated with fireworks and speeches about history, freedom, liberty and American destiny.
But history can be a form of “fake news,” and celebrations can confuse fact with mythology.
Or as New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a recent speech “historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.”
In explaining why Confederate monuments were being removed from New Orleans, Mayor Landrieu delivered a powerful assessment of these monuments and the divisive ideology they extol.
Most of us have seen these or similar monuments to the Confederate. We see cars in central Illinois driving around with Confederate flags and we see pictures of rooms with a Confederate flag draped on a wall.
These are symbols of a white supremacist ideology that run counter to the Declaration of Independence signed July 4, 1776. This document announcing the founding of our country is a statement on human rights. It is a statement of what we value most and aspire to become, not what we are.
Mayor Landrieu said when people defend these monuments as historical, he pushes back, questioning why there are no public monuments to slave ships, no markers on public lands to commemorate lynchings or slave blocks.
“These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history,” he said. “These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”
He said, “To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.”
He quoted President George W. Bush who said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture: “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”
Mayor Landrieu’s speech was about much more than removing public monuments. It was about race relations, divisiveness and moving forward as a united, inclusive country.
“The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause,” Mayor Landrieu said. “This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”
The words of Frederick Douglass in his 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” apply today not just to African Americans but to Muslims, immigrants, Jews and other minorities:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
So while we celebrate the founding of our nation with barbecues, family picnics, the National Anthem and fireworks, July Fourth should also remind us that moving forward as a united, inclusive and peaceful society requires constant work and uncomfortable understanding of our past and current offenses against basic human rights. It will take united work to make President Barack Obama’s words true: “Our best days are ahead.” (Clare Howard)