DEALING WITH HISTORY
We southerners, particularly we Episcopalians, are having to confront our history now more than ever. What has brought this up at the moment is how we see our Confederate past. What to do with all the statues and various memorials to the civilian and military leaders of the old Confederacy? There are thousands of them. They are everywhere. After all, the Confederate States had two major purposes: to divide the old union into two nation-states and to keep four million people in slavery. This is a blatantly racist past that is now shockingly contradictory to the values of egalitarian democracy in modern America. It is hard for a lot of white southerners, but we must, we must condemn and repudiate racism. It was wrong on so many levels, and it remains wrong to hold up the errors of the past now as right and good.
I had to deal with the memory of slavery in a small way recently. My local church, built in 1856, had never acknowledged its debt to enslaved African Americans. The church, built from Richard Upjohn's pattern book, Upjohn's Rural Architecture, came in well under budget. This was because all of the manual labor was performed by the slaves of the founding families. They were paid nothing. Not even their names were recorded. I saw to it on the new historical marker that at least the enslaved laborers were remembered as a group.
Whether to remove the monuments glorifying our Confederate past has become a major controversy as we all know. In Alabama, the state legislature passed a law making it illegal to remove historical statues and monuments erected more than a half-century ago. The city council of Birmingham said OK, then built a tall wall around their downtown Confederate obelisk. The monument is still there but no one can see it.
St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Montgomery, the oldest Episcopal parish of the city, recently decided to deal with this issue. Jefferson Davis had been memorialized there. Read the article in Episcopal News Service about this here .
We cannot escape our past, nor should we. It is always in us. It is always with us. But, we have to learn to deal with it as we evolve our understandings of how to improve the relationships among ourselves as American citizens. The state of South Carolina rightfully removed the Confederate battle flag from the state house grounds, but they did not destroy it. They put it in a museum, where it, and all of our Confederate past, belongs.
I for one am proud that St. John's church is doing the right thing. We southerners, especially we Episcopalians, ought to take to heart the reasons why we have to change our relationships to the past to make a better world. We must condemn racism, and the conditions of our history that produced it. If we do not, we are not being true to our ideals as Americans and principles as Christians.
