"If we don’t push—nothing happens."
Ai Wei Wei
There are 113 Confederate monuments in the state of South Carolina honoring white soldiers who seceded from the Union in 1860 and fought to the death for the right to keep Black people " locked and loaded" in slavery during the Civil War.
There are 113 Confederate monuments that rise out of the red and sandy soil of South Carolina like sculpted displays of state sanctioned hate, in the state of my birth, the state my Black family—descendants of the enslaved—has called home for six generations.
I grew up with these physically imposing monuments of twisted history and race hatred.
I grew up seeing them and reading them. I read them because I read everything around me.
I read everything around me because that’s what curious free children do.
The monuments came in all sizes and shapes. They were enormous. Some had men on horseback. Some were sky-high obelisks. Most were commissioned by women. The Daughters of the Confederacy. The Confederate Ladies Memorial Association. They were everywhere—imposing—throwing shade and fear.
They came as landmarks at a very specific time in this country’s history. A time when white people wanted to savor and remember the "good old days." The days when they didn’t need a "Colored" or "Whites Only" sign because everybody knew their place.
These monuments were strategically placed in the public square in order to psychically adorn the whip of the sentimental, their great (fantastical) Confederate spectacle; the long-playing antebellum diorama, whose glass they did not ever want to break. The diorama they kept looking into the window of, so longingly.
The South Carolina-Confederate-white supremacist-spectacle was complete with "docile slaves and kind masters" because they hailed from a state so polite, so rich in manners and English-Barbadian aristocracy, that they therefore, saw themselves, in their private minds, as those who would never, could never, had never, placed an iron mask over any Black face, written any violent murderous Black codes, never whipped any Black body tied to any magnolia tree until that body fell away in pieces, and had only allowed their wives, to be feinting and in distress, never the harbingers and manipulators of great violence just behind the private doors of the big house.
There were no stone or bronze monuments in South Carolina to Truth and Justice when I grew up here. No rising obelisks to Kindness or the Tenderhearted. There was no monument to Captain Robert Smalls, who had wondrously fooled the Confederates of South Carolina, by wearing their own Confederate hat (pulled down Black man low and Kangol style) in order to sail his family out of port to freedom's door.
Robert Smalls, gallant, courageous, and ingenious, was indeed somebody’s hero in South Carolina. If these Confederate monuments are "only about history" then where is the Robert Smalls, forty-foot, sailing monument, made of Jet and Italian marble? And why isn’t it in front of the state house too?
No matter the size or shape of the Confederate monuments there were two facts that never changed about them. They always glorified the soldiers who "fought bravely" for the Confederacy (also known as the Lost Cause) and there was always the face and body of a white man to represent courage and honor.
In my hometown of Sumter, South Carolina, these larger than life marble and stone reliefs were the only public outside art in town. I loved art so of course I wondered why only white men, who lost the only war ever fought on American soil, and fought for slavery to continue, were rewarded and lifted up high above the rest of us.
There was one monument in particular that my oldest brother and I had to pass as we entered the gates of our new school in 1968. I was 11, and the segregated school laws were changing in South Carolina. My brother and I had to leave our tiny Catholic elementary school in our predominantly Black neighborhood. We were sent by our loving parents, who wanted a new world, to the newly integrated Washington Street School in the center of town.
To enter the school gate you had to pass by one humongous monument dedicated to the Confederate war dead. In the first week of school, a rather tall white boy, who in my mind resembled one of their "war heroes," called us "Nigger" as we entered the schoolyard. We had never been called this word before. This was our brave new world complete with white nationalist "heroes" chiseled in the round. I don’t remember hitting him. I do remember being on top of him in a flash and pummeling him with my book bag and wishing I could make his red face turn to dust.
The language written at the base of the Civil War memorial that my brother and I had to pass everyday to go to school was the language of glorification and honor. It was not the language of honest American history. It was the language of the losers of the Lost Cause who wished they had won. It was the language of women and men with broken hearts and bruised egos who had lost dearly beloveds. It was a cemetery language but not a public square language. It was the language of people who needed to believe that they were still the Master and someone was still the slave, in order to not lose themselves in the darkness of their one-sided history.
The people who put up these monuments and those who fight to keep them up today believe they need the old Civil War diorama to continue. They believe they can’t change. They don’t want to do the hard work that change requires. They don’t want to do the soul work that all thoughtful caring human beings have to do in this world. It is the work of moving on. It is the work of human transformation that so many of us protesting in the street understand.
In this place of my birth, this place of my raising, this place where my grandparents worked the land to feed us, the place where I learned to read the dictionary under great oak trees, where I learned to play basketball outside in the backyard until the mosquitoes ran me in, where I drove bump cars at the state fair and ate snow cones until my tongue was truly the color of a grape arbor, this place where I fell in love with the sight of black swans on a small town lake, where I first stuck a pencil behind my ear and imagined myself a writer, in this very place, there were always white men in chiseled stone Confederate uniforms, sometimes on horses and sometimes not, leaning down in contrapposto pose, trying with all their might to intimidate me, as they had tried to intimidate my parents, and my grandparents, trying to force me to believe that they were my heroes when instead they were the face of what I grew to fear the most. A hate-filled narrow mind.
This week engaged citizens of the Republic were maimed and killed in protests against the rise of the white supremacy movement in America, a movement tied to the raising of these statues. Involved city councils are now discussing and voting on new directions for their municipalities. Conversations about what to do with the 1503 symbols of hate planted all across the nation.
South Carolina refuses to even talk about their Confederate monuments. South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union has decided to lean back in its rocking chair and ignore other citizens of other states, throughout the country, as they lean in and engage, in order to make hard decisions that will move their communities forward.
South Carolina, the state where Dylan Roof massacred 9 Black churchgoers in hopes of starting a "race war." South Carolina, the state that invites gun manufactures, that have been thrown out of other states, to come and make a permanent home in the Palmetto state, and allows them to post glossy centerfold-like photos of AK-47’s on billboards all across town, and throughout the airport. South Carolina, the state where the speaker of the House of Representatives, Jay Lucas of Hartsville, said on Monday, "Debate over this (removal of statues) will not be expanded or entertained."
The governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster was asked about any such changes that might be planned for South Carolina. Governor McMaster said there would be no need for such changes in South Carolina. "We have been over these issues over the years —I think our people are different."
Our people are different? Is he saying the people of South Carolina won’t protest, don’t care, are used to living with their 113 Confederate monuments? Are used to living with a heel on their backs? Is he saying that once again South Carolina is seceding from the conversation that the rest of the country is struggling to have?
Perhaps Governor McMaster's feelings about change and growth for South Carolina are simply honest manifestations of his life; the thoughts and feelings of a man who has for many years, steadfastly and passionately, refused to withdraw his membership from the exclusive "White Only" Forest Lake Country Club, in the capitol city of Columbia, South Carolina.
We are what we call ourselves. We are who we say we are. We are who we refuse to say we are. We are what we won’t talk about. We are what we stand in front of and take a photo with but don’t really know the history of. We are what we do in "Whites Only" private clubs. And we can become the hate that has formerly been chiseled in stone, behind the wheel of a car, with darkly tinted windows, our foot flooring the gas pedal.
"If we don’t push— nothing happens."
Nikky Finney