A couple weeks back I spent a couple of days in lovely Tennessee, where I had the chance to talk a little bit about monuments and memory with Spencer Crew's students at Middle Tennessee State University. The extraordinary Jim Campbell was there to talk about his work as chair of Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. As always, I learned a ton--and came back inspired to do better work.
As close readers of this blog will recall, I'm interested in what a few of us are calling "monument law"--that is, the law regarding the placement, repair, alteration, payment for, and removal of monuments. This is a mighty broad and amorphous field--so it includes everything from building names to the Ten Commandments monuments. At least in my mind it includes those things.
I had a little bit of spare time while in Nashville, so I went by the statehouse. What a beautiful building it is, by the way. And on my way there, I noticed what looked like an early twentieth century monument. And, sure enough, that's what it is! A monument to Ben Davis, Confederate hero of the war. (Want to impress your friends? Here's a crib sheet for dealing with statues on courthouse squares throughout the south.)
I put a picture of the Davis statue above, at right. But what else was there? A much smaller granite monument, put up in 1999, commemorating the trans-Atlantic slave trade! Ninety years after Davis was put up, there's another monument, in its symbolic shadow, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial. The picture at left shows the granite monument in the foreground and the Davis statue in the background (it's on the white pedestal above the granite monument).
The competing monuments on the Tennessee Statehouse grounds, however, was not the only memorial I visited in Nashville. (This was a mighty productive trip!) I also went over to Vanderbilt's campus to get a picture of Confederate Memorial Hall. There's a great story to be told about the attempted renaming of Confederate Memorial Hall as just plain old "Memorial Hall." I'll tell that story shortly.
Want to see the writing on the small monument? It's below. Click on the picture to enlarge it.
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