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"Battles Over Public Memorials" is an installment in the DC History Center’s Context for Today series of online conversations with thoughtful and thought-provoking historians, activists, journalists, and community members.

Albert Pike. Andrew Jackson. Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park. Woodrow Wilson High School. These local memorial statues and institutions have drawn the ire of Black Lives Matter protesters and others who object to their messages and their iconography. The public is focusing, many for the first time, on these once nearly invisible features of our city. The current protests are fueling a new consciousness of what it means to erect a memorial and how the original intentions of the creators have been lost to time or no longer speak to the majority of the American people.

To understand how these monuments came to be—especially the ones found around the South and in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall honoring the Confederate States of America and the Civil War—we offer these resources. And to quote historian Kirk Savage, “If there is one lesson to be learned from studying how monuments get chosen and built, it is that they most certainly do not represent history in any straightforward or responsible way. They represent the agendas, obsessions, prejudices, whims, and, occasionally, the high ideals and aspirations of those people in society who happened to have the power to erect them in public."

Thomas Ball’s “Freedmen’s Memorial to Lincoln” (known today as the Emancipation Memorial) was already controversial when it was installed in Lincoln Park in 1876. Kiplinger Washington Collection, KC2627.

Recommended Reading

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Norton Kicks Off Black History Month by Introducing Bill to Remove Emancipation Statue from Lincoln Park
Press release, (February 1st, 2023).
Eleanor Holmes Norton's third introduction of a bill to remove Thomas Ball's Emancipation Statue, or Freedman's Memorial.
Dozens Of D.C. Sites Could Get Renamed Or Removed Due To Ties With Slavery And Racism
by Colleen Grablick, NPR (September 2nd, 2020).
Overview of the recommendations of and public reactions to DCFACES (District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions), the committee formed to review DC government owned facilities, buildings, and memorials.
DC FACES Exectuive Summary
Report published August 31st, 2020 detailing the goals, methods, and recommendations of DCFACES, the committee formed to review DC government owned facilities, buildings, and memorials.
Art at Capitol honors 141 enslavers and 13 Confederates. Who are they? [Paywall]
By Gillian Brockell, Washington Post (2022).
“Ground [the statues] into dust!” – The Downfall of Two District Memorials
by Karis Lee, WETA Boundary Stones (July 2nd, 2020).
On the 1958 Removal of two statues in front of the Capitol depicting manifest destiny and settler domination over Native Americans.
The complicated racial history of the high school D.C. is renaming [Paywall]
by Stefan Fatsis, Washington Post (December. 28, 2020).
Woodrow Wilson High School is changing its name. The best pick for a new namesake is the school's first female Black teacher, Edna Burke Jackson.
The U.S. Removed Over 160 Confederate Symbols in 2020—but Hundreds Remain
by Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine (February 2021).
Following mass protests against racial injustice, watchdog group records new push to remove racist monuments from public spaces.
Confederate Island upon the Union’s "Most Hallowed Ground": The Battle to Interpret Arlington House, 1921–1937
by Michael B. Chornesky, Washington History Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 2015).
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Chornesky’s essay details how proponents of the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War—that the noble, slave-holding South was destroyed by a tyrannical Republican government—kept their myth alive through lobbying and public relations that led to ubiquitous statues, memorials, and educational materials.
New Institutions, Better History
by Eric S. Yellin, Washington History Vol. 32. No. 1/2 (Fall 2020).
Black Freedom's Lincoln Spaces
by Derek Gray, Washington History, Vol. 32, No. 1/2 (2020)
Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s ‘The Freedman’ and the Meaning of the Civil War
by Kirk Savage, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Terrain of Freedom: American Art and the Civil War 27-1 (2001). Courtesy of DePaul University.
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Art Historian Kirk Savage produced these two works that detail how the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park came to be, clarifying the roles of the formerly enslaved who funded it, and the white committee that chose the design.
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America [Purchase Online]
by Kirk Savage (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2018), chapter 4.
What Frederick Douglass Had to Say About Monuments
by Jonathan W. White and Scott Sandage, Smithsonianmag.com (June 30, 2020). Understanding Frederick Douglass’s criticism of the Emancipation Memorial with a discussion of how to contend with problematic memorials.
The Costs of the Confederacy
by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler, Smithsonian Magazine (December 2018).
In the last decade alone, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory [Purchase Online]
by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2005).
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The Southern Past argues that the controversies over the Confederate flag, Civil War memorials, and renaming schools and streets are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.
MLK Boulevard: Material Forms of Memory and the Social Contestation of Racial Signification
by Guillermo G. Caliendo, Journal of Black Studies (October 2011).
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This article examines, from a memory studies perspective, the complex inter-connections between memory traces and race signification. Once a public space is dedicated, it connects the visual-factual to the sensual-emotional: a landscape-identity nexus. Drawing from the Martin Luther King, Jr. street renaming debate in Muncie, Indiana, this article analyzes how sites of memory influence individual and social constructions of black commemoration.
A homeless Confederate? Albert Pike’s complicated legacy leaves statue in limbo [Paywall]
by Jenna Portnoy, Washington Post (November 4, 2017). A summary of the Albert Pike statue story written in 2017 amid calls for its removal, three years before Black Lives Matter protesters tore it down.
Removing a slavery defender’s statue: Roger B. Taney wrote one of Supreme Court’s worst rulings [Paywall]
By DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post (2017).
‘Union’ tells the origin story of the United States through 19th-century voices [Paywall]
book review by David W. Blight, Washington Post (June 24, 2020). Reviewing Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard.
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“Master narratives” are versions of our history that are widely accepted, and often widely contested. Through five major American writers and public figures, Woodard traces the emergence of the competing visions of U.S. history. This review of “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood,” by Colin Woodard, looks at how the author, “succeeds in demonstrating the high stakes of master narratives, versions of the past that people choose as identities and stories in which they wish to live.”
Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood [Purchase Online]
by Colin Woodard, Penguin Random House (2020). The story of how the myth of U.S. national unity was created and fought over in the nineteenth century--a myth that continues to affect us today.

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