American History Tellers - America's Monuments | The Trouble With Confederate Statues | 7

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

In recent years, there’s been a movement to remove statues of Confederate leaders and other monuments that some see as celebrations of America’s racist history. But does taking down these statues help address the racial inequities that plague our nation to this day? Or is it just erasing history? In his forthcoming book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, author Clint Smith tackles these and other questions around what our public monuments say -- or, sometimes, fail to say -- about America’s past. He and Lindsay discuss such landmarks as Monticello, the Whitney Plantation, and the Statue of Liberty, and explore the different meanings they have for different Americans, especially in our present moment of racial reckoning.For more on Clint Smith: https://www.clintsmithiii.com/ Listen to new episodes 1 week early and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/historytellers.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's a humid afternoon in September 1924. You're in an artist studio near Atlanta, Georgia, surrounded by models of a Confederate memorial that is being carved into the face of Stone Mountain. You're an assistant sculptor down here from your home in New York to work on a big project with your boss, Gutzon Borglum. You scratch out some calculations. It's difficult work getting the dimensions right

as you translate small plaster models into a carving over 1,200 feet long. And it's been made all the more challenging by Borglum's sudden absence. A few days ago, he packed up and left in pursuit of his next commission, a monument you hear is going to be even bigger than Stone Mountain. You look up to see an elderly woman walk into the studio. You recognize her as a member of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, one of Stone Mountain's main stakeholders. Well, please excuse the mess, ma'am, but how can I help you? You extend a hand for the old woman to shake, but she doesn't take it. Instead, she sweeps her gaze across the

piles of papers and tools that litter the dusty floor. Where is he? Where is Mr. Borglum? Mr. Borglum? No, he's not in today. Not in? Yes, ma'am. He's in South Dakota. South Dakota? What in the world could he possibly be doing there? Well, I have heard some rumblings about the possibility of another mountain carving. His next project, I believe. But I assure you, his full attention remains with Stone Mountain. So much so that he's abandoned the project and traveled halfway across the continent at a time when this carving is over budget and behind schedule. Well, you know what it's like.

The man loves a challenge. The woman walks around one of the plaster models for the monument, brushing her fingers over the carved features of General Robert E. Lee. I have fought tooth and nail to get the United Daughters of the Confederacy to fund this memorial. We have given in to Mr. Borglum's whim time and time again. He promised that Stone Mountain would be the world's biggest sculpture, something fitting for the grand story of the Confederacy. He told us that our story would march across that mountain.

Gutson likes to do things on his own schedule, but I assure you this carving will get done. It's not just his schedule. He argues with us at every turn. He rejected my suggestion that the monument also depict some of our brave members of the Klan. I'm beginning to think we made a mistake trusting some Yankee sculptor from Connecticut with a project of this magnitude. You stare at her sheepishly, at a loss for what to say. Suddenly, she heads toward the door and throws you a glance over her shoulder. Tell Mr. Borglum I need to see him immediately upon his return.

I'll be sure to do that, ma'am. Yes. The old woman leaves, but you're left to wonder if both you and your boss are about to lose your jobs. Still, you're starting to think that might not be such a bad thing. When Borglum asked you to assist him on this commission, you thought it would just be a monument to old war heroes, fallen soldiers from the war between the states. But there's a more sinister agenda behind this project than you realized. A celebration of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow

that makes you uneasy. But for now, all you can do is go back to your drawings and calculations. If this monument ever gets completed, it will be a grand achievement for your boss. You don't want to let him down. But if the Daughters of the Confederacy should take you off Stone Mountain,

well, Gutson's next project in South Dakota sounds like it could be even grander. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In September 1924, sculptor Gutzon Borglum left behind work on Georgia's Stone Mountain

to travel to South Dakota, where he began planning a new sculpture on Mount Rushmore. His colossal Stone Mountain sculpture, depicting Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, would take another 50 years to complete. Stone Mountain is unique, the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world, but it's just one of hundreds of memorials created in the early 20th century as part of an aggressive campaign to vindicate the Confederate cause. Supporters say Confederate monuments celebrate Southern heritage. Critics say they reaffirm white supremacy. Recently, fierce battles over their presence in public spaces have exposed deep divisions within our society over what our monuments say

about our past. In our series on American monuments, we explored the complex and often controversial histories of several of our nation's most iconic structures, including Mount Rushmore, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty. Today, we'll look at another set of American monuments and landmarks with our guest, Clint Smith. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic and author of the forthcoming book,

How the Word is Past, A Reckoning with a History of Slavery Across America. Here's our conversation. Clint Smith, welcome to American History Tellers. It's good to be here. So one of the reasons we reached out to you in particular was because you posted on Twitter that you're a fan of 1865. So I'd love to know why you're a fan of that podcast and might recommend it to others. Yeah, so I have a friend, Van Newkirk, who is a colleague at The Atlantic and is the host of the

podcast Floodlines, which is another excellent podcast. And he's kind of my podcast go-to guy, the podcast connoisseur, because I think he consumed so many for his own sort of journey to becoming a podcast host and a very successful one. And one of the first he recommended to me when I was like, Van, you know, like, what's another really good narrative podcast? I kind of historically oriented. And he immediately said 1865. And I hadn't heard of it. And so I was like, OK, 1865, like I love a good history podcast. And then I started listening. And I was like, man, these hosts, they get really into it. They have really a lot of presence.

And they're almost like actors. And then I realized that they were actors. And I never really, I think after the first episode, I was like, oh, this is a radio drama. So I had no context going in. And I hadn't listened to a radio drama, I don't think ever, really. I knew that they were incredibly popular decades ago, but I had never sort of experienced one in full. And I kind of just dove right in. And I loved getting to hear about how the writers in the bonus episodes and you all were thinking about what's the line

between creative license and fact and figuring out like how those decisions were made. And I also remember having learned that John Wilkes Booth was present at John Brown's hanging. And Van told me that that was something that came up in 1865, which also kept me going. And I was just completely enthralled by the entire thing. I thought it was so interesting, so compelling, and that the whole crew and cast really did an incredible job. Well, thank you. I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, the intersection of some of history's biggest figures like John Wilkes Booth and John Brown is fascinating. I mean, that was a kind of a radicalizing moment for Booth. You'll be glad to know that 1865 season two is coming out within just a month. So we're hard at work at that. And it goes into the Grant presidency. But speaking of Grant and other presidents, there are quite a few monuments to them.

And that's kind of the topic of today's conversation. I look forward to reading your book, which comes out this June, right? How the Word is Passed, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. From the title alone, we might not expect how tied this book is to places, buildings, and monuments. Could you give us an overview? Yeah, so I started writing this book in 2017, and this was when the monuments in New Orleans, the Confederate monuments were coming down. And in May, 2017, the final one, the Robert E. Lee monument,

which had been a statue on a 60 foot pedestal that I passed up almost every day of my life, it feels like. And these statues were coming down and this was in the sort of aftermath of the Charleston massacre that had happened two years before. And the city council and the mayor agreed that they needed to be taken down.

And there was a lot of back and forth, and it took a lot of time to get the sort of politics and logistics sorted through. But ultimately, they were taken down. And I kind of sat back and thought about just what it meant that I had grown up in a city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were enslaved people. And how does that happen in any city, much less a majority Black city? And what are the implications of that? And what are the implications of that in terms of the stories that a place tells about itself? What are the

implications in terms of how those story and those narratives shape the policies of a place that would shape the material lives of people every single day? And so I got really sort of obsessed with how different historical sites in different cities and different places across the country reckon with or failed to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. And so I go in the book to nine different places across the country and one across the ocean to try to understand how these different sites are telling the truth about their relationship to this history, are running from that truth, or doing something sort of in between. And one of the places that I go, for example, is Monticello. And Monticello is interesting to me because it's where Thomas

Jefferson lived. And Jefferson, I think, is someone who embodies the sort of contradictions of America and who embodies the sort of inconsistencies of this country in which America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unfathomable, sort of unimaginable opportunities to previous generations for millions and millions of people, and has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people, right? That it is both this place of incredible opportunity and this place of intergenerational oppression. And I think Jefferson similarly is somebody who was incredibly smart and also deeply racist, that he wrote in one of the most important documents in the history

of the Western world in the Declaration of Independence and also enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children, that in the Declaration of Independence, and also enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. That in the Declaration of Independence, he wrote that all men are created equal. And in notes on the state of Virginia, which is his memoir, manifesto of sorts, he writes that blacks are inferior to whites in, quote, endowments of body and mind. And so I got curious to think about how does a place like Monticello tell the story of Jefferson in its fullness, in its complexity, in its contradictions? How do you hold these multiple truths of a person and a place at once? And also, how do you tell the story of Monticello not simply centering on Jefferson?

Right. Because Jefferson was somebody who for large portions of his life was away from Monticello. He was in Paris. He was in Paris. He was in Philadelphia. He was in D.C. And it wasn't until he retired that he actually spent most time there. And it was really the several enslaved families who lived on that land, who that land belonged to almost more than it did to him. And I was curious, like, well, what does it mean to honor that this was also their home and that they built Monticello the home itself, that they built the columns,

that they cultivated the land, that these 5,000 acres were as much theirs as they were his. And so the book begins, the prologue is in New Orleans, and the book first chapter is in Monticello. And sort of from there, I go to a range of different places to try to make sense of how they all do this. These dualities, these contradictions, they're rife in any study of history. In one of my earliest interviews for this show with author and historian Audre Wolfe, she took some time to delineate the difference between history and heritage. And it feels like your book is an investigation into the intersection of these two concepts. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's part of what I'm trying to do is understand the sort of Venn diagram of those two things, if you will. And so

one of the places I go is Blanford Cemetery. And Blanford Cemetery is in Petersburg, Virginia, and it is one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. The remains of 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried there. And I went during a Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration. And as you can imagine, as a Black person, I was really conspicuous at this event. And part of what I was trying to do was to get a sense of what the contemporary manifestation of the lost cause looks like and how the folks here who were adorned in Dixie flags, who were wearing Confederate regalia, who were singing songs, longing for this period of time that to me

meant something fundamentally different than it did to them. Why do they feel that way? How do they make sense of it? And part of what I learned is that so much of history is the story that we tell ourselves about our own family and our own lineage and our own community's relationship to that history. And it's the stories that are passed down to us that shape who we are and that shape how we navigate the world. And so for so many of these folks, this land represents something fundamentally different to them than it does to me. You know, when they are

here, they are thinking about their great grandfathers and their great, great grandfathers. And, you know, one person that I spoke to, he told me about how he loves to come to the cemetery at night and watch the deer from the gazebo and loves to come in the evenings with his granddaughter and like walk through the cemeteries and tell her about the people in their family. And when I'm on this land, I think about an army, a traitorous army who fought a war that was predicated on maintaining and expanding intergenerational chattel slavery and continuing to enslave my ancestors. And I wanted to engage in conversation with these folks about how both of our lineages shaped how we understood what this place was. And for a lot of folks, that lineage and that loyalty often took precedent over empirical evidence, right? Because I can go to them and say, well, in 1861,

in the declarations of Confederate secession, the state of Mississippi, for example, said, you know, in essence, our interests are thoroughly aligned with the institution of slavery, the greatest material good in the world. You know, and that is a primary source document. That is what they said. We don't have to wonder

why they seceded from the Union and began fighting the war because they said it for themselves. But for a lot of people, it's not about evidence. It's not about primary source documents. It's a story. And these stories become so powerful and these narratives become so powerful and they embed themselves into our social and familial and community lives that anything else kind of doesn't matter. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother.

But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy.

Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true-form listening. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business

leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey, and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation and Robert's determination to succeed

turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. In your journeys to these different areas, were you confronted with anything that, a fact perhaps, that you had to reckon with? I mean, there were plenty of things that surprised me, and that's what I want for the reader. You know, this is not a polemic. This is not me attempting to teach the reader

things that I've always known that I believe they should know. Part of the joy of writing a narrative nonfiction book that is literally a trip to different places is that you kind of don't know what you're going to find until you get there. And at each of these places, I was learning new information and having set of experiences that shaped me and changed me in real and profound ways. One of the experiences that stands out to me was going to Angola. And so Angola prison is the largest maximum security prison in the country. 75% of the people held there are Black men, 70% of them are serving life sentences, and it is built on top of a former plantation.

And what I tell people is that if you were to go to Germany and you had the largest maximum security prison in Germany that was built on top of a former concentration camp in which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would be a global emblem of anti-Semitism. It would be so clearly an affront to our moral and ethical sensibilities. It would be abhorrent. It would be disgusting. We would never allow for a place like that to exist, and rightfully so. But here in the United States, we have the largest maximum security prison in the country,

18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island of Manhattan, in which 75% of the people held there are Black men, the majority of them serving life sentences, people who go out into the fields for virtually no pay and work in the same fields that were once a plantation, while someone on horseback to this day watches them with a gun over their shoulder. And part of what I'm trying to explore is what are the ways that white supremacy and history both enact violence against people's bodies, but also sort of collectively numb us to certain types of violences that should otherwise be wildly unacceptable? Like what is it that has happened in our sort of collective memory and in our collective understanding of history that allows that prison to exist, much less exist

on that land? And what is the relationship between the institution of slavery and the contemporary prison system? And it's not to say that they are the same thing, right? I'm not somebody who says prison is the new slavery, because I think that those things deserve to be interrogated on their own distinct terms. But what is clear is that the remnants and the residue of enslavement has shaped the landscape of that place physically and the nature of how that prison and many other prisons across the country operate. And I always remember just like watching the men go out into the fields. I remember standing in the execution chamber at Angola and I've always been against the death penalty for as long as I

can remember. But standing in a room where the state would take people's lives in our name with our tax dollars, standing over the bed, you know, upon which somebody would take their last breath. I can't remember a more sort of haunting experience than that. But Angola was full of those types of experiences. I went to death row. I went to the Red Hat cell block, which is, you know, one of the most infamous, the former death row chambers. But even stepping inside of there into this place where the temperature inside was governed by what the temperature was like outside. So it was either freezing in the winter or it was boiling hot during the day in the summer. There were no toilets, so you had to use the

bathroom in a bucket that they didn't take out sometimes for more than a week that they came and fed you with wheelbarrows holding your food just kind of slop as if you were a pig, as if you were eating like a farm animal. So that experience is one that on so many levels just left me struck in so many ways. As you relate your experience in these places, it reminds me that places do have a very large impact, and it is entirely dependent upon the relationship the observer has with the land, the artifact, the monument. What other places did you visit? Yeah, to answer both of those, I mean, I think the first part of your comment is really important

because this book, and I say it in the very beginning of the book and then at the end, but like my experience going to all of these places is inherently tied to who I am as a person, right? I think about the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, Ulysses, all the time in which he says, I am a part of all that I have met. And that's who we all are as humans, right? Like I bring a set of experiences. I bring a set of identities that shape how I'm engaged with when I go to these places and how other people engage with me, how I make sense of this place and how other people might make sense of it in a different way. So you might go to Monticello or you might go to Angola or you might go to any of the other places that I go. And based on your experiences, your sensibilities, your politics, your identity, have a very different set of experiences than mine.

So my trip is not at all a definitive account of what these places are like, but it is putting my life and my ideas and my sensibilities in conversation with so many of the other people there. The other places that I go, I start in New Orleans. I go to Monticello. I go to the Whitney Plantation, which is a plantation in Louisiana as well. That's really fascinating because it's surrounded by almost this sort of constellation of other plantations that engage with the public in a fundamentally different way,

right? There are places where people hold weddings, where bridesmaids are taking Instagram selfies in front of the homes of former enslavers, where people continue to have these lavish events. And the very premise of the Whitney sort of fundamentally rejects that a plantation should operate as anything other than a museum to what was once a torture site, right? Which was once the site of like intergenerational bondage

and torture of Black people. And that there's nothing to be celebrated there. That is a place that must reckon with and commemorate the lives and the stories of the people who were held in bondage on that land. And it's not perfect. You know, people have a range of different experiences there. But I also don't know any museum that's perfect.

But what they're doing is making a really concerted effort to tell the story, to center the lives of enslaved people, because they recognize that enslaved people are the center of the story. Right. Like you can't tell the story of a plantation by just saying, look how beautiful the architecture of the house is. Look at the patterns on the windows. Look at the fine china that was imported from France that this family used. And then say nothing about the people who cultivated that land and the people who were held and whose children were held and their children were held in bondage on and on and on. And so the Whitney is a place where I'm exploring what does it look like for a plantation to do the opposite of what many plantations across the South continue to do today. As I mentioned, then I go to Blanford Cemetery.

I go to Galveston, Texas, which was where Juneteenth was founded. And I go to meet the man who was the state legislator who founded Juneteenth in the state of Texas and try to, you know, it represents almost a sort of juxtaposition. It comes right after Blanford in the book. And I went there, I think, only two weeks after Blanford. And the difference between what a sort of celebration and commemoration those who came before us looked like when it was being done by the Sons of Confederate Veterans versus when it was being done by, you know, descendants of people who were formerly enslaved and who created this

holiday to commemorate their emancipation. You know, I mean, it's been a conversation that people have been having more so over the past year or so, especially since this past summer. But like, why is this not a national holiday? Like, why do we not have a holiday, a federal holiday that commemorates the end of one of the worst things this country has ever done. And really having conversations with folks who've been leading what the commemoration and celebration work has been like in Galveston was really illuminating. And then I go to New York to try to understand how New York City, a city in the North, what their relationship to slavery was,

understanding how New York City was, I think, the second largest slave port in the country after Charleston, South Carolina. And to what extent does that city move past the sort of veil of cosmopolitanism and racial egalitarianism to think about how for so long it was a place that was the opposite. And the Statue of Liberty was a place that for so long I didn't know was meant to, in part, commemorate the abolition of slavery. And so I go there and then I go to Dakar, Senegal to understand how people in West Africa make sense of what the slave trade was and what their role in it was. Go to Goree Island to understand how people commemorate that side of the transatlantic slave trade and how we remember and find symbolism in the places where folks were

taken before they crossed the Atlantic. And then I end the book with a trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture with my grandparents. And my grandfather born in 1930, Jim Crow, Mississippi. My grandmother born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida. And walk through this museum with them and I am just struck by how they are walking through a museum that is documenting so much of the violence that they experienced themselves

and that their own proximity to slavery is very close. My grandfather's grandfather, from what I can tell from our family records, was enslaved. And so I'll have these moments where I think about my three-year-old son sitting on my grandfather's grandfather, from what I can tell from our family records, was enslaved. And so, you know, I'll have these moments where I think about my three-year-old son sitting on my grandfather's lap, and I imagine what it would have been like for my grandfather to sit on his grandfather's lap. And I'm reminded that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago, wasn't in fact that long ago at all. And that's kind of how I conclude the book, sort of thinking about how so much of the history of the places

that I've explored is that history is really recent. And in the scope of human civilization, it was just yesterday. I'm Tristan Redmond, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined.

Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies and is a Best True Crime Nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder

what his true intentions were. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Let's spend a little time with the Statue of Liberty. That's a monument that we studied in particular in this series.

You mentioned it wasn't originally intended as a tribute to emancipation, but quickly became a broader symbol of liberty and freedom. You know, it took a lot of politics and money and social wrangling to erect, internationally even. But even in its inauguration, even in its unveiling, two groups recognized immediately the same sort of tension that you do in Jefferson, that this is a symbol to American aspirations in a moment in which women can't vote and only a decade or so after emancipation. What does it mean when monuments and landmarks are a symbol of rights and freedoms that are denied to people who walk

past them every day like you did with the Robert E. Lee statue? Yeah, I mean, this is something that Black writers and thinkers have been wrestling with for a long time, as well as, you know, Indigenous writers and thinkers and so many others. It's hard because, I mean, the Statue of Liberty is, you know, I grew up understanding that it was meant to represent opportunity. It was meant to represent democracy. It was meant to represent that this place was purportedly the greatest experiment in democracy and freedom and liberty in the world. And that anyone from anywhere could come here and build a life. You could come here with nothing but four cents in your pocket. And you worked hard. And if you play by the proverbial rules, and if you just did what you were supposed to do, then you could make a life for you and your family. And so many generations of Black folks who were already here know that that wasn't true,

right? Like, I mean, all you have to think about is World War II, you know? I mean, I think about World War I, World War II, really any war in which Black Americans were going across the world to fight these wars on behalf of the United States, to free other persecuted communities, and coming back to a country in which they were subjected to different iterations and levels of persecution from the very people who they were fighting alongside. So that dissonance has always been a part of the Black American experience, whether it's the Statue of Liberty, whether it's a statue of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis. Statues are interesting because part of what I've come to think about over the past three, four years of working on

this book is how can we even imagine statues and memorials in a different way than we do now? What does it mean? The historian David Blight has talked about the notion of like creating statues to ideas, to concepts, right? Like what does a statue to abolition look like that is not being personified by a person? How can we have more statues to collections of individuals and groups of people

rather than to sort of singular figures for whom there will always be varying degrees of faults. I think about one of the things I write about in the book is like, what does it mean for a young indigenous child to walk past the statue of Ulysses S. Grant or Abraham Lincoln, people who were heroes of the Civil War for the Union, but also who enacted policies that were profoundly, I mean, detrimental. They were profoundly violent against indigenous American communities. And so, you know, even somebody who I admire a lot, Frederick Douglass, who I think is in many ways one of the greatest Americans we've ever had, also said and wrote things that were pretty horrible about Native Americans. And it's, I guess, focusing on people rather than collectives or rather than aspirations, to me, is less and less compelling.

Like, I'm much more interested in placing monuments like that to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry in Boston, you know, the collection of Black soldiers who were among the first to fight in the Civil War and whose service represented a fundamental turning point in the war in terms of what it was being fought over and how Abraham Lincoln and so many others would come to understand the role that Black Americans could play in the country as it was attempting to be reborn. So yeah, I think statues are also just never, they're never just statues. As I said, symbols shape the narratives that we create. The narratives we create shape the policies that we make, and the policies we make shape people's lives. And that's not to say that taking down

a statue of Robert E. Lee is going to make the racial wealth gap go away, but it is one part and one contribution to telling a fuller and more honest story that allows us to create fuller, more sustainable, and honest solutions to some of these monuments, Confederate statues in particular. The question of should they be taken down or should they stay up is a difficult one. It again points at the complexity and duality of these moments, the heritage versus the history. How do you feel about the argument that taking these statues down is perhaps in some way an erasing of history. I tend to not think that the question of the Confederate statues specifically is a complicated one. I think, you know, Confederate statues to me are almost the low-hanging fruit of this sort of larger discourse and debate. Because, I mean, the Confederacy, as you know, was a treasonous army who seceded from the Union and they said it.

They said all 11 of these places said it in their declarations of secession or in their speeches when they were leaving or after they had already left. They said over and over again, the reason that we are leaving is because the election of Abraham Lincoln has led us to believe that the radical Republicans and the abolitionist Lincoln are going to take away our slaves. And slavery is central and fundamental to our economic and social well-being and our hierarchy and that sort was predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of human bondage over millions of people, that we would put those people on pedestals, which is very clearly to anyone an implicit means of showing reverence to something, simply runs counter to any sort of notion of justice or the aspirations that America purports to hold at all. You know, some people will say we should put plaques on them or we should, you know, maybe put up another monument alongside it that's telling the other side of the story.

And I'm kind of like, well, there might be two sides of the story, so to speak, but that doesn't mean that both sides of the story are correct or that both sides of the story, so to speak, but that doesn't mean that both sides of the story are correct or that both sides of the story are right. And this is obviously animated by being a Black child and Black person having grown up surrounded by a city in which there were hundreds of monuments and street names and schools and buildings named after people who were either Confederates themselves or slaveholders or supporters of slavery, right? Even in New Orleans, after the statues have come down, after some streets have been renamed, there are still over a hundred schools, roads, and buildings named after people who in one way or another supported

or held people in chains. And that to me, we can have them in a museum. I think it is fine to have a statue of Robert E. Lee in the museum where you can have a tour guide discussing it, where you can have a plaque that someone can actually see, right? Because the question of plaques are like, oh, put a plaque on Robert E. Lee. It's like, no one's going to see the plaque as they drive around a traffic circle. They're going to see a 60 foot statue of this person on a horseback on a pedestal. So, you know, I do think there is a larger conversation to be had around monuments more generally. And I know that different cities across the country are having this conversation. And there are questions about statues or buildings

named after Grant. And there are questions about statues and buildings named after Lincoln and so many others, right? Because history is messy. It certainly is. But I think the Confederacy specifically, that is the easy part of the question. I think there are statues that lend themselves to more difficult, complex questions that I don't know have easy answers, but I don't think the Confederate statues, for me, are included in that. You've mentioned already a desire, perhaps, to move away from direct personification in monuments to a greater depiction of groups or even ideas. I'd like to wonder just perhaps academically, what is the purpose of monuments? Is it something that we could avoid altogether or is it necessary in building a national narrative? Yeah, I mean, I think that there are all sorts of ways to commemorate things, right?

I think a statue is just one way that we have been made to feel that that can happen. But I think that artists and sculptors and visual artists of all kinds have all sorts of ways of creating and erecting physical pieces of art, physical contributions to our natural landscape that can tell really powerful stories about places and people and ideas. And I'm not that sort of artist. And so

I can't say what specifically those should look like and what specifically should be done. But I can say that there are examples of people trying to reimagine what monuments are, can do, that are happening all across the country. And as Blight says, how can we push ourselves to think about monuments that are as much oriented toward the future we want to build as the past that we've had? What do monuments that move toward the sort of aspirations of who America says that it is or who it wants to be, what might those look like? How might symbols of who we dream of being and who we imagine being and who we hope to become, how might those inform our policy debates? How might those inform our political discourse? How might seeing daily reminders of who we say we want to be, shape who we actually become. And I think there's a lot of room and a lot of space

to sort of imagine memorials doing different work than commemorating what's happened before, which I think they should absolutely continue to do in a range of different ways. But I also think there's room to say, well, what are we moving toward? And how can we put up reminders to ourselves and to each other of what that goal

looks like? And then have discussions about what is the right way to get there? How do people feel about it? I think they are meant to serve as catalysts for discussion. They're meant to serve as catalysts for dialogue, reminders of the values that this country purports to have. And I think that that could do a lot of work in facilitating and serving as a base upon which the conversations around building a better and more just country and more just world might look like. So, Clint Smith, thank you so much for joining me on American History Tellers. It was a pleasure. That was my conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the upcoming book, How the Word is Passed, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. It's available June 1st.

Next, on American History Tellers. In an Ohio church in 1837, a man named John Brown stood up in front of his congregation and declared, Here before God in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. His vow and the violent actions he From Wondery, this is Episode 7 of America's Monuments from American History Tellers. In our next series, in an Ohio church in 1837, abolitionist John Brown stood up in front of his congregation and declared, Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. His vow and the violent actions he took to uphold it would change the course of American history and set the stage for the Civil War. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey

at wondery.com slash survey. Hernan Lopez for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still have urged it. It just happens to all of us.

I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitink of extinction.