[Last week my
sons and I returned to my hometown of Charlottesville, pretty much exactly a
year after the white
supremacist/neo-nazi rallies there last August (which took place on the day
we arrived in town last summer, because apparently that’s just life as an AmericanStudier
these days). So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy a few contexts for this exemplary
American city’s unfolding histories, leading up to this special weekend
post reflecting on where we are in August 2018.]
On two distinct spaces
where Charlottesville seeks to remember, and one hope moving forward.
Just over a year
after the chaotic and violent rally in (if not to my mind truly focused on)
Cville’s Lee Park, the statue of Robert E. Lee (and a neighboring one of Stonewall
Jackson near the town courthouse) remains where it has stood for
about a century. The city has changed the park’s name to Emancipation
Park, a largely symbolic (and perhaps relatively unknown, at least outside of
Cville itself) gesture but certainly a change nonetheless. For a time, the Lee
and Jackson statues were covered by tarps; protesters kept removing
the tarps under cover of darkness, however, and eventually a
judge ruled that the tarps could not stay on indefinitely (since their
stated purpose was “mourning,” which he ruled has an expiration date) and so
they have been taken away. Now the statues are surrounded
by metal fences that both keep visitors or vandals from getting too close
and change the view from simply that of a marble memorial to a Confederate
officer to something more overtly fraught and contested. In all those and other
ways, Lee Park’s construction of public memory has continued to evolve over the
last year, although I don’t know whether the park, Charlottesville, or we all are
any closer to a truly meaningful reckoning with the questions and histories at
play there.
On the other
side of Charlottesville’s historic
Downtown Mall is a very different and much more inspiring public memorial. In
the worst moment of the August 12 violence, 32 year old paralegal and social
justice activist Heather Heyer was killed when white
supremacist James Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters (at
least 19 others were injured by this act of domestic terrorism). Just over four
months later, the city
renamed the portion of 4th Street where Heyer was killed Heather
Heyer Way, and in the months since the space has become an impromptu but very
moving memorial to Heyer. The brick walls on both side of the street are
covered with chalk messages, many paying direct tribute to Heyer (or expressing
condolences to her family) but many others advancing broader thoughts and ideas
that echo and extend the ideals for which Heyer fought and was still fighting
when she was killed. I don’t doubt that the site has seen incidents of
vandalism or hate speech, but on the two separate occasions when I visited (in
May and August, respectively) I’ve encountered only those more commemorative
and celebratory kinds of statements. While of course the very existence of the
Heather Heyer memorial reflects fraught, tragic, and horrific histories and
realities, the space itself offers some of the best of what both public memory
and collective voices can offer.
So where does
Cville go from here? It’s far too simple to say that we can or should just
follow the lead of or focus solely on the Heather Heyer memorial, for many
reasons including the fact that Lee Park (whatever we now call it) continues to
exist and demands our engagement as well. No amount of chalk messages, however
thoughtful, can suffice for that historical, cultural, and contemporary
dialogue. But at the same time, I’d say that the Heyer memorial is a pretty
compelling example of critical patriotism and critical optimism—building off of
a dark history, demanding that we remember it, but also using that place of
public memory as a space to argue for the best of what we’ve been and are and
can be. I’m not going to pretend that there’s any use of Lee Park that would
satisfy the types who came to Cville last August to spread their hate and
violence, nor for that matter do I have any interest in appeasing (or even
talking with) that group of white supremacist neo-nazi assholes. But for the
more thoughtful and sane of us (a group that the critical optimist in me still
believes outnumbers the assholes, although I have my moments these days…), I
can see great value in using such historical spaces in precisely that way—commenting
on the prior histories, to make sure we acknowledge and engage with their presence
and effects; but adding layers of collective voice and inspiration, to make
sure we recognize that we are not bound by the worst of our past. If that can
be one legacy of August 12th, it would be a potent and crucial one.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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