Monuments, Museums, And Public Markers

By: James W. Loewen

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Monuments, Museums, And Public Markers

During the “Fusion” years after the end of Reconstruction (1877–1890) the U.S. Army offered opportunity to many African Americans. Wherever it campaigned in the West, mainly in mopping-up operations against American Indians, black cavalrymen known as buffalo soldiers participated. Many frontier posts had a short life span and were built of temporary materials; nevertheless, the saga of the buffalo soldiers is told at many sites today. Historical museums at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Forts Hays, Larned, and Leavenworth, Kansas; Fort Robinson, Nebraska; Fort Seldon, New Mexico; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Fort Meade, South Dakota; Forts Concho, Davis, and Richardson, Texas; Fort Douglas, Utah; and Warren Air Force Base (formerly Fort D. A. Russell), Wyoming contain exhibits on black military history in the West that celebrate black troops.

A small monument at Beecher Island Battlefield in Colorado tells of the rescue by the 10th Cavalry of fifty desperate troops in 1868. At Fort Union, New Mexico, a monument commemorates the 9th Cavalry. At Fort Missoula, Montana, the 25th Infantry became a bicycle unit in 1896, riding all the way to Saint Louis in 1897 to test the utility of bicycles as a replacement for horses; the historical museum here tells not only this story but also of the soldiers’ service in the later Spanish-American War and Philippines War.

The Nadir.

The nadir of race relations lasted from 1890 to approximately 1940. During this era, white Americans, North and South, joined hands to restrict African Americans’ civil and economic rights. Many states passed laws outlawing interracial marriage. African Americans had been working as carpenters, masons, foundry and factory workers, postal carriers, railroad firemen, and in other industrial jobs. After 1890, in the North and South, whites expelled them from these occupations. The expulsions were most glaring in sport, supposedly a field that rewards superior performance no matter who exhibits it.

Whites evicted the last African American ballplayer from the major leagues in the 1880s, and from the minor leagues in 1900. In 1911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys; at other racecourses this had been done even earlier. Only boxing offered relief, but Jack Johnson's 1910 victory over Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope, only confirmed whites’ stereotype of African Americans as dangerous fighters and prompted attacks on black neighborhoods across the country.

Isaac Murphy, perhaps the greatest jockey of all time, is remembered on his tombstone, which summarizes his career and stands next to that of Man o’ War in Lexington, and in exhibits in the Kentucky Derby Museum in Louisville and the Racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Saratoga museum also tells of at least one other black jockey, Willie Simms, who rode from 1887 to 1901, and a trainer, Edward Brown, who worked from 1874 to 1903. Both museums relate that African Americans were then shut out of the sport. Despite being barred from the League of American Wheelmen in 1894, Major Taylor won the world championship five years later; he is in the Bicycling Hall of Fame in Somerville, New Jersey, and the velodrome in Indianapolis, his home town, is named for him. Jack Johnson was a charter inductee into boxing's Hall of Fame, in Canastota, New York.

An exhibit in Tallahassee's Old Capitol Museum presents perhaps the most succinct description of this period:

"During the early twentieth century, white women and children began to win many social and political rights that had been previously reserved for white men. At the same time, African Americans were losing many of the privileges they had once enjoyed.  … [They] faced new laws that created segregated public facilities, which forced blacks, along with poor white men, to pay poll taxes that limited their ability to vote in elections."

Attitudes of the period are depicted most graphically in “The Good Darky,” a 1927 statue of an old black man bowing his head, inscribed, “Erected by the City of Natchitoches in Grateful Recognition of the Arduous and Faithful Service of the Good Darkies of Louisiana.” African Americans toppled this in 1968, but the Rural Life Museum at Louisiana State University now displays it as “Uncle Jack,” whites’ nickname for it in Natchitoches. Uncle and Auntie were terms whites had long applied to older African Americans because Mr. or Mrs. might connote full membership in the human family. Pittsburgh boasts a similar monument, erected in 1900, showing “Uncle Ned” seated at the feet of Stephen Foster. It honors Foster's song “Old Uncle Ned,” which celebrates in heavy dialect the passing of a loyal old slave: “He's gone wha de good niggas go.”

Strangely, the landscape contains almost no reference to the key Supreme Court ruling of this period, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Louisiana has no historical marker remembering Homer Plessy, and although Kentucky has four for John Marshall Harlan, none mentions his eloquent dissent in Plessy, vindicated in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education. In Simpsonville, however, stands Lincoln Institute—a tangible reminder of the Court's work. In 1904 Kentucky passed a law aimed specifically at Berea College, making integrated education illegal even in private schools. Berea, which had a large number of African American students, challenged the law in the Supreme Court, which found nothing wrong with it, whereupon the college was forced to separate the races; it spun its black students off to Lincoln Institute, which operated until Brown let Berea reintegrate.

The “science” that legitimized laws of this period, eugenics, is also largely missing from the public history, having been stigmatized by the use the Nazis later made of it. New York's American Museum of Natural History, though, a citadel of eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, does imply the ideology in a striking statue at its entrance of Teddy Roosevelt, on horseback, towering over an African and a Native American; to ensure that the message gets across, his hand rests on the African's head.

In 1898 a key event transformed North Carolina politics and race relations: the notorious Wilmington race riot, perhaps better termed a coup d’état. Blacks still voted in North Carolina, and in the 1897 municipal election, a coalition of black and white Republicans had elected six of Wilmington's ten aldermen and the mayor. Democrats fought back, intimidating many Republicans from coming to the polls, thus achieving a Democratic majority on 9 November 1898. The next day two thousand whites paraded through downtown Wilmington, demolished the office of the black newspaper editor Alex Manly, and forced every Republican officeholder to resign. White thugs then moved into black neighborhoods, shooting and looting. The federal government did nothing. For a century, white Wilmington lived with the riot by forgetting about it. But in 1998 blacks and whites set up an “1898 Centennial Foundation” that led to a play, a two-day seminar, and a historical marker for Manly, which states, “Mob burned his office, Nov. 10, 1898, leading to ‘race riot’ & restrictions on black voting in N.C.”

Many Americans do not realize that segregation was not just southern. But as race relations of the period worsened, many northern school systems segregated their black students into separate schools. Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, now a museum, tells this story, as do Booker T. Washington School in nearby Rushville; Ferry Street School in Niles, Michigan; Lincoln School in Edwardsville, Illinois; and George Washington Carver High School in Phoenix.

Lynchings.

Lynchings rose to an all-time peak during this period, and not only in the South. But until the 1990s they were also almost absent from markers, monuments, and museums. Even mass murders, like the killing of at least eighteen African Americans in Slocum, Texas, in 1910, remain unnoticed. A horrific but accurate display in the loft of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore has lifted this veil, as did “Without Sanctuary,” a display of postcards of lynching victims assembled by James Allen that broke attendance records at the New-York Historical Society and then rotated to museums across the country. Lynchings are also a theme of America's Black Holocaust Museum, in Milwaukee, whose founder, James Cameron, was almost a victim in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. A new memorial in Duluth commemorates the hanging of three black men there in 1920. One of the last multiple lynchings in America occurred at Moore's Ford, between Atlanta and Athens, Georgia; in the late 1990s a biracial Moore's Ford Memorial Committee formed, held a memorial service at the site, and eventually erected a marker providing an accurate account of the shooting of two young African American couples “by an unmasked mob on the afternoon of July 25, 1946.”

Sometimes triggered by lynchings, thousands of towns across the North, West, and “nontraditional South” (for example Appalachia, the Ozarks, and coastal Florida) expelled their black populations or determined not to let blacks in. Acts ranging from shunning to mini–race riots forced African Americans to retreat to urban ghettos; in Illinois, for example, before this “Great Retreat,” a smaller proportion of blacks than of whites had lived in Chicago. This past is now largely hidden. Two cities that failed to expel all their African Americans do, however, tell of the attempts. The “Greenwood monument” in Tulsa, erected in 1996, describes America's worst race riot, on 31 May 1921, in which whites even dropped dynamite bombs onto the black neighborhood from airplanes, trying to drive African Americans from the city. Eight markers in Springfield, Illinois, constitute a “race riot walking tour” that is both an apology and a statement of memory about that city's 1908 attempt at ethnic cleansing. An interesting memorial in the cemetery in Pierce City, Missouri, commemorates the death of three African Americans “killed by a mob Aug. 19, 1901,” when whites drove all black residents from that town. But at least forty other towns, and possibly hundreds, that did the same thing have no memorial.

Between 1915 and 1928 the “second” Ku Klux Klan had its heyday. At least fifty markers, monuments, and other historic sites across the United States laud actions and leaders of the first or second Klans, from the Albert Pike monument in downtown Washington, D.C., to the Walter Pierce Library in LaGrande, Oregon. Just four historical markers (and no monuments or historic sites) portray the Ku Klux Klan in a negative light. For the most part, the landscape is silent. The Klan briefly dominated politics in Denver, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and many other cities in the 1920s, and KKK rallies remain the largest events ever held in many smaller towns, but one would never guess that today. Of course, most historical sites omit blemishes that might reflect badly on the communities in which they lie.

Black Responses.

Throughout this storm, African Americans were not passive victims. When they were shut out of “white” institutions, they created black ones, from the Negro Leagues to independent black communities. Black towns are well noted in the landscape, with historical markers in Nicodemus, Kansas; Langston, Oklahoma; and Mound Bayou, Mississippi. A museum in Kansas City treats the Negro Leagues, as does the Black Americana Museum in Omaha. Many historically black colleges have markers, as do some now defunct, like Western University in Kansas City, Kansas. Still, many important black institutions go unmarked.

Individuals also fought against the racist tide. Memphis has erected a fine memorial to the most powerful single opponent of lynching, Ida B. Wells, author of The Red Record. In Detroit a marker tells of the life of David Straker, who won a “celebrated 1890 case” against the white owner of a restaurant who refused to serve African Americans, was active in Republican politics, and wrote several books. Paul Laurence Dunbar spoke out in poems like “We Wear the Mask,” although he also put up with the degradation of writing dialect poems; his life is remembered at his house in Dayton, Ohio.

Also noted are the accomplishments of many African Americans who managed to win distinction within the limitations of the era. Madam C. J. Walker's headquarters in Indianapolis, including its theater, is preserved with a historical marker in front; her Irvington, New York, mansion also has a marker. Inventors who are remembered include Jan Matzeliger, who devised a shoemaking machine (his monument is in Lynn, Massachusetts); Garrett Morgan, inventor of the traffic light (with an exhibit in Cleveland's African American Museum); and Elijah McCoy, who developed the first locomotive oiler—the “real McCoy” (with a marker in Detroit).

Booker T. Washington is of course celebrated at Tuskegee Institute, where a statue shows him pulling “the veil of ignorance” off an African American crouched at his feet; a replica stands in front of Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta. His home in Hardy, Virginia, has been reconstructed as a National Historic Monument. George Washington Carver's birth site near Diamond, Missouri, likewise became a National Historic Monument, but without a reconstructed cabin. Carver is also the focus of a museum at Tuskegee that shows his art as well as his science. Both men had segregated black high schools named for them throughout the South, Oklahoma, and the lower Midwest; after desegregation, some of these facilities closed or became middle schools.

The unusual story of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, the only African American crew in the U.S. Life Saving Service, is told by staff members at the restored Chicamicomico Lifesaving Station in Rodanthe, North Carolina. A victory monument on the South Side of Chicago honors the 8th Illinois Regiment, “the first to be commanded entirely by black men,” which served with distinction in France in World War I. The 369th Historical Society has a museum in Harlem similarly honoring that regiment. Many other stories of African Americans who achieved much despite oppressive conditions remain to be told.

During the two decades before the 1954 Brown decision triggered the civil rights movement, race relations slowly improved. African Americans were making some progress in education in the South and in politics in the North. Most of the pioneers of these advances, however, go unremembered in the landscape today.

Segregation.

In the North, even the relatively few alive today who came of age before 1954 are amazed to learn of the extent of racial segregation. In the South, those who have come of age since 1970—a majority of the population—are often even more surprised to learn the extent of Jim Crow practices in that region. Segregation was a system of norms and definitions that expressed and locked into place white supremacy. When whites and blacks performed different tasks implying hierarchy, they could be as close as cook to food or nipple to baby. When they did the same things, such as learn arithmetic or eat, blacks had to be separate, inferior. Their mere presence in an equal setting was forbidden.

Despite laws passed between 1864 and 1890 in several northern states, most restaurants and hotels and many theaters (but not public transportation, such as streetcars or railroads) became just as segregated as in the South. Employment in the North was also restricted: in most cities blacks could not be department store clerks, for example. Only eleven of Milwaukee's more than two thousand manufacturers, and none of its breweries, hired black workers. Nevertheless, voting and physical safety were more assured than in the South, and in some cities so was employment. Thus African Americans swept northward after about 1915.

Tour bus guides in Philadelphia do tell how only one hotel there admitted Jackie Robinson in 1947, but the segregated pasts of northern cities are otherwise largely invisible today, even on markers treating private clubs that were segregated for decades, like the Union League Club in New York City. In the South segregation is remembered more openly, owing to sites that treat the civil rights movement.

With desegregation, African Americans lost many of their segregated business enterprises. Montgomery, Alabama, has a fine marker treating the history of South Jackson Street, as does Durham, North Carolina, for Parrish Street. Both were black business hubs. Jackson, Mississippi, has a marker recalling Farish Street as a historic district; today the area is almost abandoned. Idlewild, a black vacation community in Michigan that once hosted major black entertainers, similarly fell on dismal days after desegregation, but still exists and itself comprises a historic exhibit.

Attending to bathers at spas and bathhouses was often designated “Negro work.” African Americans were therefore rarely driven from this occupation, even under segregation. Today part of Hot Springs, Arkansas, is a National Park, and exhibits portray African American workers and tell how segregation meant two sets of bathing facilities, separate and unequal.

Mixed-Race Peoples.

What did “third races” trapped by this system of biracial segregation do? Dotted across the eastern half of the United States are mixed-race groups, often called “tri-racial isolates,” whose racial and cultural ancestry is African, European, and Native American. Often they lived in isolated hamlets, unwilling to be defined as “black” and unable to achieve other recognition. As segregation clamped down, their position grew more tenuous. Some were targeted by state eugenics programs; a 1924 Virginia policy made it hard for them to retain their “Indian” classification there.

But these peoples are no longer invisible in the landscape. A “Ramapo Valley” historical marker at a rest area on Interstate 87 north of New York City states:

"Following the [Revolutionary] war, some Tories, Hessians, Dutch, Negroes, and Indians sought refuge in the mountains. Their descendants [gap] lived in seclusion in the Ramapo wilderness, largely cut off until World War II from developments around them."

After “descendant” there is a gap where about twenty-five characters have been chiseled off; these probably said “called Jackson whites,” a pejorative term now replaced with “Ramapo Mountain People.”

At Pembroke State University in North Carolina, a museum tells of the Lumbee people, for whom the school was originally established; this contains a diorama of a famous 1958 encounter during which the Lumbees routed the Ku Klux Klan. In 1956 the United States had recognized the Lumbees as Indians (but not as a tribe; as of this writing Lumbees have yet to attain that recognition). Several tribes in Virginia have museums telling their stories, but public history still ignores many other mixed-race groups from Texas to New England.

Fighting Segregation.

The generation of pioneers for black rights before the civil rights movement is represented at a few monuments, markers, and museums. Between 1919 and 1925 mobs repeatedly surrounded African American families who had moved into white neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, and other cities, breaking windows and forcing the newcomers to leave. In 1925 Dr. Ossian Sweet bought a bungalow in such a neighborhood in Detroit and moved in, accompanied by relatives and friends who were armed. A mob gathered, stoned the windows, and then rushed the house. Gunfire from within killed one person and wounded another. Sweet and his brother were tried for murder, but Clarence Darrow defended them, achieving a hung jury. A historical marker in front of the house tells the story.

By 1944 whites were relying on restrictive covenants attached to deeds—sometimes to all residences in a suburb—restricting occupancy to “members of the Caucasian race.” In that year the McGhee family moved into another white neighborhood in Detroit, only to be attacked legally by their next-door neighbor. With Thurgood Marshall as their attorney, the McGhees four years later got the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that governments could not enforce such covenants without violating the Fourteenth Amendment; another marker tells their story. At the same time, however, the Detroit area features a historical marker celebrating Orville Hubbard, reelected mayor of one suburb on the platform “Keep Negroes out of Dearborn.” This, standing next to a statue of Hubbard, says not a word about segregation, instead proclaiming, “He made Dearborn known for punctual trash collection, speedy snow removal, Florida retirement facilities, and a free recreational area … .”

Surely the greatest single fighter for black rights in this era was W. E. B. Du Bois. A park where his childhood home stood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, honors him, and the library at the University of Massachusetts is named for him and holds his papers. A plaque in Philadelphia marks where he lived while writing The Philadelphia Negro, the first community study in American sociology. On the other hand so pervasive was segregation by 1905 that blacks and whites could not meet in a Buffalo hotel, and went to Niagara Falls, Ontario, to found the Niagara Movement. Even Buffalo was not far enough north! Several plaques in New York state mention the Niagara Movement, including one honoring the cofounder Mary Talbert, but none explains the choice of Canada.

The headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey, is marked in Philadelphia. Mary McLeod Bethune, a founder of Bethune-Cookman College, is the subject of an impressive statue on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; her home at the college in Daytona Beach is a museum. Bethune was a leader of Negro women's groups in the 1930s and 1940s and of the NAACP. Paul Robeson, famed as an athlete, singer, and actor as well as a fighter for black rights, is remembered by monuments at the Paul Robeson Arts Center in his hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, and in Greensboro, at North Carolina A&T University. Statues of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Pullman porters’ union and the man most responsible for forcing President Roosevelt to create the Fair Employment Practices Commission during World War II, greet passengers arriving in Washington's Union Station and Boston's Back Bay Station. In front of a baseball stadium in Daytona Beach stands a sculpture of two boys—black and white—looking up to Jackie Robinson, marking the site of the “first racially integrated spring training game,” on 17 March 1946. This goes on to say, “Marking an historic event in the struggle to achieve equality of opportunity in modern major league baseball.” The word modern is important, since African Americans did play in the major leagues before 1890.

However, this era is largely forgotten in the landscape. In Mississippi no historical marker recalls Dr. T. R. M. Howard, who helped would-be voters prepare to register and organized a boycott of gas stations that did not provide restrooms for African Americans. In Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, there are no public remembrances of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. The Highlander Folk School, founded in 1932 and later attended by Martin Luther King Jr. and many other leaders of the civil rights movement, is not memorialized in Grundy County, Tennessee. Neither are the sites of most of the pre-Brown legal battles, nor the strike by conscientious objectors that ended racial segregation at the Danbury federal penitentiary in Connecticut in 1943. Much remains to be done.

Change is possible, however, as is shown by Decatur, Alabama, famous in American history for one event: the trial in the Scottsboro Case, known around the world. In 1931 nine black youths were riding a freight train through northern Alabama when they had an altercation with several white boys. This led eventually to their arrest, and in the process, two white women were also found on the train. Perhaps to avoid suspicion that they themselves had been up to no good, the women claimed that the African Americans had raped them. All-white juries soon found all nine guilty of rape. Eight were sentenced to death and one, thirteen years old, to life in prison. For nearly twenty years their cases bounced around the legal system, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all-white juries illegal. Eventually all nine went free, but only after they had spent a total of more than one hundred years in jail for a crime that never happened. After decades of silence Scottsboro put up a historical marker in 2004; a historical society leader said, “In 2004, we cannot change the course of human events, … but we can unite to heal long-standing wounds.” Even more impressive is the Harry T. Moore Cultural Center, opened in 2004 on the site in Mims, Florida, where the Moore family once lived. Moore organized the first NAACP chapter in Brevard County in 1934, and helped “tens of thousands” of African Americans register to vote throughout Florida. Moore and his wife died when a bomb exploded under their bedroom on Christmas evening 1951.

A plaque at the home of Ralph Bunche in Los Angeles recalls the scholar and diplomat who was the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, who has a better claim than perhaps anyone to being the first non-Inuit at the North Pole, is the subject of a plaque at the Maryland state capitol. Howard Thurman, who became a dean at Boston University and introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to the philosophy of Gandhi, is remembered at his childhood home in Daytona Beach. Charles Drew, the physician who had much to do with the development of blood transfusion and blood banks, is remembered by a small granite monument where he was killed near Burlington, North Carolina:

"Died in Alamance General Hospital, 1 April, 1950, after an automobile accident at this site."

This marker rebuts a legend spread widely about Drew's death—that Alamance General Hospital refused to admit him because of his race—but this was true in many other instances at southern hospitals.

African American cultural creators are often remembered, including the musician Louis Armstrong (with a statue in Armstrong Park, on the site of the former Congo Square, in New Orleans); the actor and dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (a statue in a black neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia); and the historian Carter G. Woodson (remembered at his home in Washington, D.C.). In Texarkana, Arkansas, a park, mural, and accurate historical marker tell of the ragtime composer Scott Joplin; the marker was vandalized at least twice in the 1980s but has since been left alone. Alice Walker created a monument to her fellow writer Zora Neale Hurston in Fort Pierce, Florida. A marker in the center of Drew, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, mentions only one person, a black bluesman:

"Incorporated on September 23, 1899, at the former site of the Yazoo Delta Railroad and depot. The railroad has been immortalized in the song “The Yellow Dog Blues,” composed by W. C. Handy."

The nearby Clarksdale Blues Museum celebrates many famed bluesmen from the Delta.

Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., is noted on a historical marker in Epworth and a stone tablet at Mays Crossroads, South Carolina. Whitney Young Sr., president of Lincoln Institute, is noted in Simpsonville, Kentucky, as is his son, who became president of the Urban League. Other black pioneers, exceptional simply for becoming successful against the odds in a segregated society, are beginning to win recognition in our public history.

The Age of Martin Luther King Jr.

Every year brings new historical markers, museums, and monuments remembering the civil rights movement, as well as less permanent remembrances like tours, reunions, and pamphlets. In 2004 four-fifths of Americans were unborn or had been younger than six in 1964, the movement's peak year. The movement is poorly taught in high school, where many U.S. history courses dwindle to an end shortly after World War II; thus most people who did not live through it know little about it. Even in places where famous events occurred and important leaders emerged, many residents can name only “Dr. King” as a civil rights leader, and do not know that the civil rights movement happened here.

Much has been done to change this—to tell the history of the movement on the ground. Alabama has done the best job. A historical marker, “Selma Movement,” stands near the Pettus Bridge, scene of the notorious police attack on marchers trying to walk from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Browns Chapel AME Church, the starting point of the march, has a lengthy marker about its role in the movement, and also boasts a granite memorial to three martyrs who “gave their lives to overcome injustice and secure the right to vote for all Americans”: James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and Jimmie Lee Jackson. On the route to Montgomery, a granite marker remembers Liuzzo at the place where she was shot for the act of driving an “integrated car.” In Montgomery stands the famous Civil Rights Memorial by Maya Lin, a moving tribute to forty people murdered by white supremacists. Diagonally opposite the state capitol stands an accurate marker on the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and King's service there. Jonathan Daniels is memorialized near where he was shot in Hayneville. Birmingham's Kelly Ingram Park provides what may be America's only public representation of segregation: It has several thought-provoking sculptures, including “Children's March,” which shows young African Americans behind bars if viewed from on the grass; “Ministers Kneeling in Prayer,” whom the visitor must join in kneeling in order to photograph; and references to iconic photographs of African American protesters facing fire hoses and lunging dogs. These images, televised images of which in 1963 shocked the world, proved instrumental in overturning segregation. Nearby are the Civil Rights Institute, a museum with a statue of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, leader of the movement in Birmingham; and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which has a memorial to the four little girls killed by a bomb on 15 September 1963 while they attended Sunday School.

Mississippi has much less on the ground, but visitors can still grasp the extent of the movement if they obtain pamphlets describing sites in Jackson and in Neshoba County. At the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County stands a granite memorial to the three civil rights workers—Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—who were murdered there in 1964 after talking with parishioners about the violence and arson visited upon them by white supremacists. The three men are also remembered in a small monument at Miami University in Ohio, where Freedom Summer volunteers had trained before going to Mississippi. The brochure “African-American Heritage Driving Tour” lists the jail where the three were held after their arrest by a deputy sheriff, the murder site, the swamp where a Choctaw Indian found their burned station wagon, Mount Zion, and several other sites. Jackson's “Civil Rights Movement Driving Tour” lists an astonishing fifty-five sites, with an accurate account of what happened at each. More superficial is the statewide “African-American Heritage Guide,” but this leads visitors to interesting shops, “naive” artists, and blues sites as well as museums. The Old Capitol Museum in Jackson takes pride in “the first permanent civil rights exhibit in America.” Local people—key to the movement—are memorialized at the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden in Ruleville, Amzie Moore Park in Cleveland, and the Aaron Henry Federal Building in Clarksdale. A statue of Medgar Evers stands in an out-of-the-way location in Jackson.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, the historical museum displays a section of the lunch counter at Woolworth's where the sit-in movement began in 1961, as does the National Museum of American History in Washington; the entire Woolworth's is now becoming a museum. A memorial on the campus of South Carolina State University remembers the three students slain by police in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968; at Jackson State in Mississippi a tablet remembers the two students slain there in May 1970. Harvey Gantt, whose lawsuit desegregated Clemson University, is the subject of a historical marker in front of Tillman Hall. A memorial fountain at Liberty Square in Charleston remembers the civil rights leader Septima Clark; the home of Modjeska Simkins, her counterpart in Columbia, tells her story. Four granite slabs in Albany, Georgia, tell of that important movement (1961–1962) in detail. The Gilbert Civil Rights Museum uses the building that formerly housed the NAACP in Savannah.

Across the nation, far too many historical markers, monuments, and museums to be listed here treat the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. is memorialized in many cities where he never set foot, a point made by detractors when his statue went up at the University of Texas in Austin. Supporters pointed out that the campus already featured statues of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who also made no history on the campus, so why not King? Avenues everywhere have been renamed for Reverend King. Most ironic was the renaming in Seattle, where King County (named for the slaveholder and U.S. vice president William Rufus King) became King County, after Reverend King. In front of Washington's Lincoln Memorial, a plaque now marks where King stood when he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oration, and the National Park Service video shows excerpts of it. The most moving remembrance is the room and balcony where King was murdered, visible at the end of tours through the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Also important is the King Historic Site in Atlanta.

The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which did much to trigger the civil rights movement, is examined at Park Service museums in Topeka, Kansas, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, where a walkout by black students eventually led to one of the five cases consolidated in Brown, has an accurate historical marker and is becoming a museum. Thurgood Marshall, lead attorney in Brown and many other cases, is the subject of a monument on the grounds of the Maryland State Capitol, a counterweight to the statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose 1857 Dred Scott decision famously held that blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Ironies in the Landscape.

Some extraordinary twists of fate are marked in the American landscape. In Tallahassee the bus terminal is named for Charles Steele, a black minister who led the boycott that desegregated the city's buses from 1956 to 1958. The National Voting Rights Museum in Selma is located in the very building that once housed the local White Citizens Council. At the University of Southern Mississippi, a prominent building is named Kennard-Washington Hall. Most Americans know of James Meredith, first African American to attend the University of Mississippi; few realize that a series of brave young black people tried to enter white universities in Mississippi and across the South before Meredith. Surely the most heartbreaking story is that of Clyde Kennard, who sought admission to Southern in 1956, 1958, and 1959. While he was in the admissions office applying for the last time, five half-pints of illegal whiskey were planted in his car, leading to his arrest. He was then charged with “accessory to burglary” for buying five bags of stolen chicken feed, also a trumped-up charge, and sentenced to seven years in Parchman Penitentiary, where he was later diagnosed with cancer, was denied medical attention until it was too late, and was finally released to die in a Chicago hospital in 1963. By naming the building for him three decades later, Southern's president said, “We're saying to the world we apologize for the indignities he suffered.” The building's name also honors a second African American, Walter Washington, who earned his doctorate from Southern in 1969 and went on to become president of Alcorn State University. He was the first black ever to obtain a PhD in Mississippi; African Americans simply could not do so when only the white universities, which would not admit them, gave doctorates.

Public remembrances also may incorporate censorship and display various ironies. The marker at Martin Luther King Jr.'s house in Montgomery does not mention its bombings, despite an attempt to include them. Nothing marks the Chicago apartment where the Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by a 4:00 AM police raid. The Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was killed, is also unmarked, but historical markers stand at his birth site in Omaha and his boyhood home in Lansing, Michigan, and plaques mark the booth he liked at the Harlem Restaurant and the place at Barnard College where he gave his last public speech before being murdered. Rosa Parks is honored by a fine marker at the spot where she was denied integrated seating on a Montgomery bus—leading to the famous boycott—but a nearby property owner blocked this until a compromise was reached that put the country and western singer Hank Williams on one side of the marker, Parks on the other.

African Americans Elsewhere in American Life.

No bright line separates African Americans who played major roles in the civil rights movement from those who made their names in other areas. When Nina Simone sang “Mississippi Goddamn,” she simultaneously practiced her art and made a statement about needed change. As the movement progressed, African Americans broke into the mainstream of the American arts. To be sure, in music this had happened even earlier—in jazz, ragtime, minstrelsy, and all the way back to the Fisk Jubilee Singers during Reconstruction. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, whites usually got the lion's share of money and attention, if not the credit, when “black” music went mainstream. But after World War II, jazz performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker sold many more records to whites than to blacks. Soon black singers, instrumentalists, and composers became part of mainstream popular music.

Some of these figures are now celebrated in the landscape. Jazz is treated most prominently by the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, one of the places where it developed; in Harlem a competing “National Jazz Museum” is getting off the ground. Some states, including Alabama and Oklahoma, have established jazz halls of fame; many others have similar remembrances on the web. Some broader museums of history also preserve and present jazz history; the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans claims to have the largest collection in the world of instruments owned and played by important jazz figures. African Americans who made a major impact on popular music are a theme of the Motown Museum in Detroit, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, and Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Margaret Walker, author of the poem “For My People” and the novel Jubilee, an important rejoinder to Gone with the Wind, is remembered at the Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center at Jackson State University. But most black writers of the King era are still alive, as are most actors and visual artists. Those who run historical marker programs and put up monuments usually wait until their subjects are dead—in some states, until fifty years after death—partly so that nebulous phenomenon, “historical perspective,” can set in, and partly so they can be sure that no misbehavior will emanate from an honoree after a marker or monument is in place.

As in earlier periods African Americans who excelled in warfare are publicly celebrated, but with a change: now they are included in monuments, in keeping with the integration of the armed forces in the 1950s. The segregated army of World War II is symbolized in a way by the mysterious memorial at the levee in Greenville, Mississippi, which was meant to list the names of all men from the area who had served, until the more racist local whites realized that black names would be on the same panel with white names, and erupted in protest. In the end, a “Roll of Honor” went up with no names at all. African Americans are included among the bronze figures in the Korean War Memorial and the “Three Servicemen” of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Washington's Mall, as well as being fully represented among the names on the wall. In the nearby Vietnam Women's Memorial, a black nurse looks heavenward for relief as two white nurses care for a wounded GI. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a black infantryman holding a wounded comrade similarly searches for the medevac helicopter as another GI crouches in front. In Wilmington, Delaware, a shocked black soldier carries his fallen white comrade, while in San Antonio a white soldier assists a fallen African American. As in the armed forces themselves, race is not a major issue in military memorials erected after the era of Martin Luther King Jr.

Contemporary America.

The civil rights movement did not achieve the “beloved community” that it sought and did not end racial discrimination, but it did transform public history. Now African Americans were recognized as tourists, historians, and participants in civic life. Communities across the United States therefore put “African American history” (really “American history”) into the landscape—not only as good politics, but also as good for business. Many museum exhibits, monuments, and historical markers went up in this post–civil rights movement era. Whether such exhibits or markers antedate or postdate the movement often determines not only their tone but also their content, even when they describe events that occurred centuries earlier.

Removing Statues and Monuments.

Although they share a Latin root, “remember” and “commemorate” can have very different meanings. Synonyms for “commemorate” include “honor,” “glorify,” and “revere.” The bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, in the Tennessee state capitol, his statue in Forrest Park in Memphis, the obelisks at his birthplace in Chapel Hill and Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park, and the thirty-two different Tennessee state historical markers—far more than those devoted to Washington in Virginia, Martin Luther King Jr. in Georgia, or any other person in any other state—are not intended solely to teach us about the man, but to honor him. African Americans—as well as whites who supported the United States in the Civil War or believed blacks should have civil rights—hardly shared this motivation. Now that they or their heirs participate in determining public history, they have an interest in setting the landscape straight. In Selma, Alabama, for example, after the election of a black mayor, the city council moved a Forrest statue, put up in 2000 on city property, to a Confederate cemetery. Sons of Confederate veterans were outraged, charging “heritage violation,” although the statue remembers the Confederate cavalry leader at least as well, surrounded by Confederate dead, as it did at its former location in a black neighborhood.

The point, to neo-Confederates, is not to put the Confederacy into historical context but to maintain its symbols for homage in the present; thus they charge “heritage violation” every time people in a community want to remove a monument to white supremacy or to rename a school named for Forrest, a slave trader before the Civil War and a Ku Klux Klan leader after it. History gains by such a change, because students can afford to look more objectively at a person after his or her name has been removed from over the school's front doors. The process of making the change, especially if some record remains of the prior monument or name, can help the public develop a more sophisticated understanding of history. The “heritage” lost is the decades of distorting an event or glorifying a person; losing this “legacy” is precisely the point.

Not only Confederate symbols are coming down. At Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C., a memorial formerly stood to George P. Marshall, who brought the Redskins National Football League franchise to the city from Boston in 1937. An “implacable racist” in the words of a Washington Post reporter, Marshall was the last NFL owner to hire a black player, and did so only when threatened with eviction from the stadium. His memorial has now gone to the private Marshall Foundation.

The most overt monument to white supremacy in the United States, an obelisk to the White League in New Orleans, exemplifies the new period of contestation. It celebrates an armed insurrection by white Democrats against the interracial city and state governments in 1874. Erected in 1891, its white supremacist lineage was made explicit by language added in 1932: “United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” Between 1989 and 1993 the monument was in storage, but it then reappeared with new wording honoring those “on both sides of the conflict.” Since then, vandals have torn out at least three of the four columns that, along with a central shaft, support the obelisk. In retaliation, a man representing the “Monument Preservation Army” put white paint on a bust of Martin Luther King Jr., saying he would continue to deface such monuments “until they leave ours alone.” In 2004 the monument was further defaced by anti-Nazi slogans, which prompted the white supremacist David Duke to cancel a planned rally at the site.

Renaming Buildings and Landscape Features.

Some cities under black control have renamed schools, streets, and other features that had been named for people now deemed offensive. New Orleans took this to an extreme when it renamed George Washington Elementary School because the first president had owned slaves. The city also renamed Nicholls High School for Frederick Douglass, and here it chose a more deserving target, for Francis Nicholls was a thoroughgoing white supremacist who helped legitimize segregation as chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court around the time of Plessy v. Ferguson. There seems to be little sentiment for renaming predominantly white Nicholls State University, in Thibodaux, but black students in 2004 protested its mascot, a Confederate colonel, and most white students surveyed agreed that he should be retired.

In the late 1980s the U.S. Board of Geographic Names required at least 102 places in 34 states with “nigger” in their names to be renamed. Protests in Vermont had achieved the renaming of Niggerhead Mountain a decade earlier. Nig's Pond in Milford, Connecticut, did not receive a name change until 1995, when it became Walker Pond, in honor of a prominent deceased black minister.

Some issues are subtler. At the University of Alabama a plaque on Foster Auditorium reads:

"Site of the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door / On June 11, 1963, Governor George C. Wallace fulfilled a pledge to prevent court-ordered desegregation at the University of Alabama by standing in the schoolhouse door…  . Vivian J. Malone and James A. Hood became the first African American students to enroll successfully at the university."

The Student Government Association put this plaque up in 1991, and it is factually accurate, but some students and faculty wanted it changed, noting that it emphasizes how Wallace kept his word, rather than how he went to extremes on behalf of white supremacy.

Most often, African Americans leave “white” monuments and plaques alone, focusing their energy on remembrances of their own. After years of protest against the heroic statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney at the Maryland State Capitol, African Americans compromised when a monument to the first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, was placed on the opposite lawn.

Confederate Flag.

After World War II, as civil rights became an issue across Dixie, the Confederate flag—the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—went up all over the South. It became the unofficial symbol of the Dixiecrats in 1948; the University of Mississippi adopted it that same year. In 1956, in reaction to Brown, the Georgia Legislature made it part of that state's flag. At about that time Hillsborough County, Florida, incorporated it into its seal. In 1962, the Confederate flag started to fly atop the South Carolina capitol. The next year, to make a point to U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy, who had come to discuss civil rights issues, Governor George Wallace raised it over the Alabama capitol.

After the rise of the civil rights movement and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, though, the flag became controversial. A later governor ordered it off the Alabama capitol in 1993, and protests got it removed from the Hillsborough seal. After a long campaign the flag was moved from the South Carolina dome in 2000 to a flagpole near the Confederate monument in front of the building. The next year Mississippi voters failed to remove the Confederate flag from their state flag, but Ole Miss now disavows it and bans the song “Dixie” at home football games. In what proved to be an involved two-step process, Georgia officials removed it from their state's flag.

Groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Southern Party have grown increasingly distraught after losing battles to keep the Confederate flag flying at courthouses and city halls across the South. In 2000 they sued then-governor George W. Bush for removing the flag from Texas Supreme Court building plaques, declaring that the building was “Dedicated to Texans who served the Confederacy.” The historian and civil rights leader James Forman has pointed out that for governments to fly the Confederate flag sends a message of public support for white supremacy. For the flag to come down reveals a new level of African American influence derived from black voting, a need to recruit black athletes, or a desire by whites not to offend.

Athletes and Musicians.

In the aftermath of the civil rights era, African Americans made history in a wide range of fields; eventually, the public history will recognize many of these people, from Alice Walker to Colin Powell. Generally this cannot happen until after their death—as noted above, in some states, fifty years after. Athletes and musicians are often memorialized even before their death, however—perhaps because their careers are usually not politically controversial and in the case of athletes have ended years earlier. The bluesman B. B. King is honored with a beautiful mural in Indianola, Mississippi, and Jimi Hendrix, the guitarist who died at the height of his career in 1970, is remembered with a three-cornered dome in Greenwood Cemetery in Seattle. Statues or monuments celebrate Hank Aaron in Atlanta; Althea Gibson in Columbia, South Carolina; Michael Jordan in Chicago; Joe Louis in Detroit (twice); Willie Mays in San Francisco; Jesse Owens in Cleveland; and Jackie Robinson in Jersey City and Daytona Beach. None of these provoked much dispute except one of the Louis memorials, a black fist donated by Sports Illustrated that is said to have put some on edge. In 2004 two whites defaced it by covering it with white paint, leaving calling cards from “The Fighting Whities,” but were soon apprehended.

Some more controversial stars like Jack Johnson have apparently not been memorialized. One sports monument nevertheless sparked debate: the 1996 statue of tennis star Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Virginia. Unlike Richmond's memorial to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Ashe monument was controversial from the start, partly because Ashe had challenged white society, which Robinson had not. More contentious was the statue's location on Monument Row, a broad street with statues of Confederate leaders erected as a real estate ploy after the turn of the twentieth century. It is incongruous to see Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate leaders, most on horseback, and then come upon Arthur Ashe with a tennis racket. But desegregating the avenue proved to have been important. Since Ashe went up, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) no longer celebrates “Our President's Day” at the Jefferson Davis monument nearby; they have moved the event to Davis's grave in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery. Ashe thus changed the nature of Monument Row from “our space” to “the space,” or even “their space” so far as the UDC is concerned—even though he and Davis are not even within eyesight of each other.

Monument Row shows how the tide is turning, even in the Confederate capital. In 2003 a statue of Abraham Lincoln and his young son Tad was dedicated at the Tredegar ironworks. The head of Virginia's Sons of Confederate Veterans denounced it as “a slap in the face of brave men and women who went through four years of unbelievable hell fighting an invasion of Virginia led by President Lincoln,” but could not stop it. At its nearby Visitor Center the National Park Service (NPS) tells that slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War, in response to language added to the NPS appropriation in 1999 at the initiative of the Illinois congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. No longer does the Visitor Center play funereal music when discussing the “fall” of Richmond.

Monument Row, however, exemplifies many places in America that have come to display an array of white antihumanitarians like Davis, Jackson, and Lee, “balanced” by black humanitarians like Ashe. The Arkansas State Portrait Gallery, for instance, displays images of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who never did anything of note in Arkansas, while omitting Powell Clayton, the Reconstruction governor who favored civil rights for African Americans. The problem is not that white humanitarians never existed in the past, but that they seem to have no constituency today. Indeed, almost every town across the South (and many in the North) had white leaders during the Reconstruction and Fusion periods (1865–1890) who worked for justice for all—but whose efforts failed. Today's Republicans would only be embarrassed by their example, while many of today's white Democrats—scarce in the South to begin with—are unlikely to honor even a Reconstruction Republican. The same spirit that moved African Americans in 1911 to put up the statue of John Brown in the Quindaro neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, is needed today. It is hard for young white southerners to emulate or even know of their predecessors who enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Civil War or fought for black rights during Reconstruction, so long as every southern courthouse town not only ignores them but also boasts a monument conflating the Confederate cause with “freedom” and “states’ rights.”

Many events and people relevant to the black experience in America still cry out for monuments and markers. History was made in Valparaiso, Indiana, for instance, in 1970, when two black families moved into town, aided by faculty members and students at Valparaiso University, thus breaking the city's policy that blacks had to be outside the city limits by sundown. Charles Caldwell, a black state senator during Reconstruction, was shot in Clinton, Mississippi, on Christmas night 1875. When the British evacuated New York City, more than 3,000 slaves went with them, from Manhattan island.

All history is local. When we tell what happened regarding “African American history,” we help make all citizens more knowledgeable about American history. The battles over the presentation of this history in our landscape have important consequences for the future.

[See also Civil Rights Movement and entries on people, events, and locations mentioned in this article.]

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