The Washington Post has an interesting article on the problems Southern towns and cities are having finding a final resting place for the Confederate statues they are removing. From the article:
After many weeks of argument and frayed feelings, a solution emerged that many people on both sides of the monument debate could accept: Put Johnny Reb in a cemetery, in a setting where the Confederate war dead are honored but not celebrated — a place that didn’t carry the stamp of government approval.
One big problem: The people who controlled the town cemetery wanted nothing to do with any move that might import controversy into a place of eternal rest.
“No cemetery would take it — they’re afraid people will think the town is racist,” said Boykin, a private investigator and former police officer who has belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for decades.
So Johnny Reb sits, in 13 pieces, in Boykin’s yard, 150 feet off the road, waiting for somebody to put him back together again.
As Confederate monuments fall by the dozen in this time of refocused attention on the legacy of the Civil War and American slavery, cities and counties face a dilemma over what to do with the statues.
The path to compromise can seem easy: Tuck them away in a cemetery, where those who value them as markers of history or examples of political art can seek them out, while those who find their presence in places of civic honor disturbing no longer need pass them….
“I’m not sure cemeteries get us any closer to a solution” over what to do with discarded, disgraced or disregarded markers of the past, said Ryan Smith, a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University whose book, “Death & Rebirth in a Southern City,” details the role Richmond’s cemeteries have played throughout generations of struggles over the public memory of the Civil War.
Relocating monuments from the Jim Crow era into cemeteries “seems only to kick the can down the road,” Smith said. “It’s amazing — a common, ordinary stone statue of a soldier can tap into these big questions of history and social and cultural identity in such a visceral way.”
In one community after another, removed monuments reside for now in statuary purgatory. Richmond is storing some statues under tarps at the city’s wastewater treatment plant, waiting for a solution.
…On the surface, the battles over each statue’s fate center on where to plant a stone sculpture. The real conflict, however, is about the tales people’s families have told themselves for more than a century, and the picture they want the world to see now….
