Telling the Whole Story
Native Americans lived in Georgia for hundreds of years. African Americans arrived more than two and a half centuries ago. The Civil War lasted for only four years, and the South lost.
But more than fifty county courthouses in Georgia have monuments to the Confederacy on their grounds, as do many other public lands. Only a handful of counties are installing monuments to African Americans who lost their lives in lynchings. And other than markers at the sites where native peoples lived before being driven off their land, the state has a single “official” monument erected to America’s Indigenous people.
Monuments are usually erected to express what a society reveres. When times and values change, controversy can result. In the case of Confederate monuments, as understanding and sensitivity have grown, so has the offense taken at stone tributes to the secessionist country that supported slavery and fought the union.
Efforts have been underway for several years to remove the statues from public places, along with eliminating the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag and banning the playing of “Dixie” at public gatherings. Calls for removal of the monuments increased even more with anti-racism protests in June following the death of an African American man, George Floyd, while he was subdued and in police custody.
Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center, works with the city of Atlanta and other jurisdictions to deal with the conflict over the monuments. A cradle Episcopalian and member of All Saints in Atlanta since the 1960s, he says his approach is rooted in “via media, the middle way,” which he calls “the Episcopal way.” That approach, he said, “recognizes the perspective of all involved and tries with humility to create synthesis. Humility is the critical thing, and frankly, right now, there’s damn little of it.”
The impulse of those who see the Confederacy only in light of slavery may be to topple a monument, breaking it into boulders. Those who idealize their Southern heritage may want to protect the statuary at all costs.
“It can be very cathartic to pull down a monument,” Hale said, “but that doesn’t help build community and move it forward.”
The via media, he said, is to engage people in learning about how and when a monument was erected and what it was meant to symbolize. “You’re not a bad person because you believe something,” Hale said. “You believe something because that’s what you’ve been told.”
“It can be very cathartic to pull down a monument, but that doesn’t help build community and move it forward.”
— Sheffield Hale
Atlanta has approached the problem not by subtracting the monuments from public view but by adding perspective. The city has erected large exhibit panels near monuments to put them into a broader context. A panel near the 1911 Peace Monument in Piedmont Park, for instance, states that the monument “should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood” but as a symbol of “a shared history in which millions of Americans are denied civil and human rights.”
Destroying, or even moving, a monument is against the law in Georgia, but “there’s nothing that prohibits you from telling the truth,” Hale said. “We’re turning an object of veneration into a historic artifact.”
Rewriting the story || Reinterpretation of Confederate monuments is only one side of the coin. The other side is depicting the people who have been a part of the region’s history and culture and whose experiences have been overlooked, intentionally or not.
The DeKalb NAACP, along with several other organizations and governmental entities, is bringing attention to the violence perpetrated against African Americans through lynchings. The group is installing a monument to the country’s lynching victims that was part of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
The national memorial opened in April 2018, “dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.” The memorial is made up of more than eight hundred six-foot-long rectangular monuments, each representing a county in the United States, with a list of its lynching victims. A duplicate of each monument is available for the county to claim.
As president of the DeKalb NAACP, Teresa Hardy (seen here standing on the freshly laid stones where the Confederate monument in Decatur once stood) spearheaded efforts to bring a memorial acknowledging lynchings to the county.
More than six hundred names of lynching victims in Georgia are memorialized outside the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta.
Some two hundred people turned out for an Interfaith Reconciliation Service in 2019 to begin the process of installing the DeKalb memorial. Participants heard the stories of DeKalb’s three known victims of lynchings. Five members of the Turner family were there to honor one of the victims, Porter Turner, a Black cabbie who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1945 for daring to pick up white fares. White participants were invited to stand and read a poem entitled “Prayer of Apology to African Americans,” acknowledging “the depth of evils that have been perpetrated against black people in America.” A choir sang a spiritual, “Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life.” And the service closed with a “call to commitment” with audience members filling out postcards promising to work to wipe out racism.
“Awesome, awesome, awesome” is how DeKalb NAACP President Teresa Hardy described the ceremony.
She acknowledges that African Americans “are still fighting the same fight—for life, liberty, and justice,” but she said she is encouraged by the response to acquisition of the marker.
“We’ve all been able to work together. We’ve been able to unite and do something.”
Addressing the past || Various groups have made pilgrimages to the national memorial in Montgomery.
The Absalom Jones Center memorialized more than six hundred victims of lynchings in Georgia in November 2018 by installing four bronze panels featuring the names of those who are known. The dedication service closed a three-year series of pilgrimages, memorials, and educational sessions sponsored by the diocese and the center.
“The purpose of this work is to help us make the connection between the intersection of slavery, lynching, the prison industrial complex, the death penalty, and twenty-first-century police killings, which are known as extrajudicial killings,” Dr. Catherine Meeks said at the time. “Along with this we create the possibility for healing to occur.”
Markers acknowledging the sins of the past, like this one in Decatur, can be a step toward building a beloved community for the future.
One approach to healing is to put old monuments into the context of their time and into the perspective of the larger community.
The Rev. Peter Wallace of the Day One radio and podcast program has become something of an activist for Native Americans in Georgia. Wallace, who is part of St. Bartholomew’s parish in DeKalb County, is conscious of the fact that people of the diocese “live, work, and minister on land that was the home of native inhabitants in the millennia preceding European contact.” The early inhabitants “suffered previously as a result of transmitted diseases, governmental rivalries, dishonored treaties, and the eventual forced removal from these lands within the borders of the diocese,” he said.
Wallace hopes that when the pandemic is in the past, the diocese can determine a way to pay respects to the people who once lived within the diocese and to address current issues affecting any Native Americans still within its borders.
Wallace said DNA tests show that he has no Native American blood but that the ethnic groups in his family tree “were, in many instances, perpetuating the injustices.”
History, he said, “is fraught with the lack of understanding of other peoples.”
To truly understand others, we must face them, ourselves, and the past that brought us to where we are. As President George W. Bush said at the opening of the African American museum: “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”
Putting Confederate monuments into context, erecting monuments to lynching victims, and acknowledging the wrong done to Native Americans—all are efforts to bring honesty to our history—an honesty that provides a foundation to grow into a shared future that is better for everyone.
- Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
- Community Remembrance Project
- Prayer of Apology to African Americans
- Ain't You Got A Right (To The Tree Of Life?)
- Why Build a Lynching Memorial?
- Lynching in America: Why are Memorials Important?
- Lynching in America: The Legacy of Lynching
- The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, tells the stories of lynchings in the United States.
