memorials

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  3/1/2023
  

  Descendants of Slaveholder Donor Denounce Law School Name Change

  T.C. Williams donated a considerable sum to the University of Richmond's law school. He also relied on slave labor in his tobacco and manufacturing businesses. The university's new policy requires them to remove his name from a building. Descendants call this hypocritical and ungrateful and demanded an inflation-adjusted refund with interest of $3.4 billion.

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  2/8/2023
  

  It's Up to McCarthy to Remove Statues of Slavers from the Capitol

  A third of the artworks in the Capitol depict slaveholders. Whether they're replaced with other works, possibly those celebrating liberators, is largely up to the new House Speaker. 

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• SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
  1/10/2023
  

  Why I Vandalized Ole Miss's Confederate Statue

  Zach Borenstein explains why he painted "Spiritual Genocide" on the base of a campus Confederate memorial, and why he wishes he had talked with local activists first. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/9/2023
  

  Hundreds of Errors in Korean War Memorial Wall

  If the Korean conflict is often called a "forgotten war," the wall of remembrance added to the Korean War Veterans' Memorial doesn't meet the challenge of remembering the fallen. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/2/2023
  

  When White Contractors Wouldn't Remove Confederate Statues, a Black One Did

  Devon Henry didn't seek the job of removing a dozen Confederate memorials in Richmond, but local white-owned vendors refused the contracts. He has received death threats and wears a bulletproof vest at job sites. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/31/2022
  

  Restored Victor Hugo Statue Vandalized by French Rightists Claiming "Wokeism" Run Amok

  The statue in the author's birth city of Besançon has become a lightning rod for controversy after a restoration aimed at returning to the vision of Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow was seen as presenting the author as Black.  

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• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  12/14/2022
  

  Philly's Columbus Statue is Out of the Box—So is the Discussion About His Legacy

  Historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries talks about controversial statues: one removed in Richmond, and one uncovered in Philadelphia.

• 
• SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
  7/4/2022
  

  Philly Plan for Tubman Memorial Draws Fire: Were Black Artists Excluded?

  The city awarded a commission for a permanent statue to Wesley Wofford, who designed a traveling memorial that had graced City Hall. Local artists, many Black, argued that the call wasn't fair and open. 

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• 6/12/2022
  

  "Our Best Memorial to the Dead Would be Our Service to the Living"

  by Allison S. Finkelstein

  An overlooked cohort of American women who served in the first world war worked to establish service, instead of statuary, as a mode of memorialization. Their example offers a path out of the heated politics of commemoration. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/26/2022
  

  The Monument Controversy We Aren't Discussing

  by Cynthia C. Prescott

  Outside of the former Confederacy, efforts to replace "Pioneer Mother" statues with depictions of Native American women have sparked a backlash including outright theft.

• 
• 5/29/2022
  

  We Need a National Emancipation Monument at Point Comfort – Where American Slavery Began, and Began to End

  by Steven T. Corneliussen

  While parts of the site are honored as the Fort Monroe National Monument, Point Comfort should be made a national monument to emancipation. 

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  5/24/2022
  

  An Exclusive Look at the New WWI Memorial

  Sculptor Sabin Howard's ambitious design for the memorial relied on the modern power of digital photography to capture motion and the old-school forming of clay to freeze it in time. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  3/12/2022
  

  Erin Thompson's "Smashing Statues": Tear 'Em All Down

  How does taking down a statue relate to the more complicated work of eliminating the racist ideas and structures that put it up? 

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• SOURCE: Nashville Tennessean
  2/8/2022
  

  Confronting Confederate Heritage is Necessary to Understand White Supremacy

  by David Barber

  Everyday social life in the Confederacy required white Southerners to close their eyes and hearts to terrible cruelty. No reconciliation today is possible without acknowledging it. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/24/2022
  

  Post Editors: Statue or No, Teddy Roosevelt's Complex Legacy is Still with Us

  It's appropriate for Theodore Roosevelt's statue to be removed from its position as a figurehead for the Museum of Natural History, but just as appropriate for the statue to be housed in the new Roosevelt Presidential Library where TR's complicated legacy can be more fully addressed, say the Post's editorial board members.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/23/2022
  

  Confederate Groups are Keeping the Lost Cause Myth on Life Support

  by Erin L. Thompson

  "Confederate heritage" groups have used their financial resources to bring lawsuits before sympathetic judges to thwart the public's desire to remove monuments to the white supremacist pro-slavery government in public spaces. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  1/20/2022
  

  Museum of Natural History in New York Removes Theodore Roosevelt Statue

  While Roosevelt's support of natural history has been noted, museum officials acknowledged that the statue "communicates a racial hierarchy" that constitutes a darker side of the former president's legacy.

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• SOURCE: AL.com
  1/12/2022
  

  Alabama's Capitol is a Crime Scene, with a 120 Year Coverup

  The Alabama Capitol in Montgomery was the first seat of the Confederate government and the place where white Democrats ratified a Jim Crow constitution in 1901. You'd learn little of this by touring the museum-like building. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/30/2021
  

  Richmond's Lee Statue, other Confederate Memorials Could go to Black History Museum

  Marland Buckner, interim executive director of the Black History Museum, said in the release that his institution “takes very seriously the responsibility to manage these objects in ways that ensure their origins and purpose are never forgotten: that is the glorification of those who led the fight to enslave African Americans and destroy the Union.”

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• SOURCE: Protean
  12/17/2021
  

  Dead Man Running (Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Jim Crow Blues Again)

  by Ryan Zickgraf

  Mobile's current municipal elections combined the bizarre with the bureaucratic and institutional politics of racism.