Segregation in a World War Monument

Nearly two years ago I blogged about Governor Romney's talk of how monuments unite us in his RNC acceptance speech.  Just to jog your memory he said: 

Everywhere I go in America, there are monuments that list those who have given their lives for America. There is no mention of their race, their party affiliation, or what they did for a living. They lived and died under a single flag, fighting for a single purpose. They pledged allegiance to the UNITED States of America.

And back in August 2012 I added:

Or, in the case of many monuments in the South, to the "Confederate States of America," I suppose he might have added.  Is it possible that Romney stops and visits monuments the way I do?!  At any rate, I find it very exciting that monuments -- particularly war monuments -- made their way into a major political speech.  This is further evidence of the continuing relevance of monuments to our culture.  And it is an invitation to talk about how the monuments are often -- though not always -- about uniting us.

What I didn't put in that post is that I've seen some monuments that are segregated by race.  There's a North Carolina monument at Appomatox that segregates the white and enslaved population of the state.  

I recall a few other monuments that segregate.  When I was last in Alabama I made a special trip down to one rural county because I thought there was a World War I monument in front of their courthouse that was segregated by race.  Alas -- or maybe I should say at last? -- it's not there anymore.  There's a recent war memorial that lists everyone from the county who died in any of our wars.  I'm against this erasure of the historical landscape -- this is one place where I part with some of my friends, like Steve Clowney.  I think such re-memorialization facilitates forgetting, so I'm by and large against it.

But I do have a picutre that I want to share of a World War monument in Yanceyville, North Carolina, that is segregated on the basis of race.  I've used it to illustrate this post.  I understand that there's a movement afoot to take it down and have an integrated monument.  There's talk of changing a WWI monument in Salem, Virginia, too.

One thing that occurred to me after I wrote this post -- which given the role of African American veterans in the Tulsa race riot should have been at the front of my mind -- is that perhaps the specific mention of black soldiers lent credibility to the struggle for equality.  That is, people who read the monument then knew that African Americans fought and gave their lives in the war.  More likely, this may have been a secondary benefit of the segregation -- but at any rate I want to know more about this.  All of which reminds me that sometime soon I want to post a picture of three adjacent cemeteries in Danville, Virginia -- the National Cemetery that houses US servicemen, most of whom died in the Confederate prisons in Danville, the Freedmen's Cemetery, and the white cemetery.

Update:  There's a debate on the UNC campus these days about renaming a building named for William Lawrence Saunders, a notable Klansman.  Insidehighered.com has a nice story about this up today.  I'm generally against renaming for a whole host of reasons, but I would have thought that if you were going to rename something you might start with Ruffin Hall.  I think I have a picture of Saunders' gravestone, which I need to dig up out of my old picture files.

Comments

[Bill Turnier]

If Saunders is renamed, there should be a large prominent plaque recording the history of the names bestowed on the building and the reason for the change. That will keep us from forgetting the times through which our society has passed and how it once lionized Klansmen. That way we avoid sanitizing the bad times through which we passed.