Confederate monuments physically enshrined the lie that black people were unfit for freedom

Evidence

In so many ways, the people who promulgated the lie, those Frederick Douglass called the “apostles of forgetfulness,” helped build monuments to their willful amnesia. They turned their backs on the promise of emancipation and rejected the idea that black people could be full-fledged citizens in the United States. Even America’s bard, Walt Whitman, expressed such sentiments in 1874. “As if we had not strained the voting and digestive caliber of American Democracy to the utmost for the last fifty years with the millions of ignorant foreigners,” he declared, “we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and caliber (in the mass) as so many baboons.” The Confederate statues represented the triumph of this sensibility in public space. The history that justified their construction banished, once and for all, the horrors of slavery (or simply reduced them to a mistake) and fortified the assumptions that black people were not fit for freedom. In both cases, American identity was left safe and secure. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Whitman’s 1874 baboon quote is a striking counterweight to his canonized democratic voice — useful ammunition against the romanticized ‘poet of democracy’ image. — connects to: Confederate monument construction spikes track eras of white political reassertion. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 342; Mississippi had fifty-two Confederate monuments but two civil rights memorials in 2001 — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 560; White supremacists erected monuments casting a massacre of Black officials as noble. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 84
• CANDY: Walt Whitman, America’s beloved democratic poet, calling Black people ‘so many baboons’ in 1874 — a grim, tweetable fact that shatters the sanitized canon.