On a recent gray morning, John Brown Gordon sat astride his horse outside Georgia’s capitol building. Gordon, a Confederate general, was Georgia’s governor in the eighteen-eighties. Today, tax dollars pay for the upkeep of his large bronze likeness. A temporary barricade stood between the century-old statue and Richard Rose, a seventy-two-year-old Black man in a suit. When Rose was younger, he would walk an extra block to avoid statues like Gordon’s. Now he raised his phone and took a photograph. Gordon was thought to be the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. “A particularly cruel person,” Rose said. “And that makes him the hero here.”
Rose endeavored to learn more about problematic local landmarks in 2014, after being elected president of Atlanta’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter. “The more I walked around, the more incensed I became,” he said. “I remember this monstrous portrait of Robert E. Lee in full Confederate uniform on the third floor of the capitol.” (A statue of Lee was removed from the U.S. Capitol just last week.) The Georgia building also houses a bust of Alexander Hamilton Stephens, despite, Rose said, “his belief that Africans are inferior to white people.” Rose recalled giving a speech, in 2015, about his anger at the celebration of “these traitors to America.”
Two years later, a company called 22Squared pitched the Atlanta N.A.A.C.P. an idea that Rose called a “Christmas present.” Using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s map of more than eighteen hundred symbols of white supremacy around the country—street names, flags, park benches, statues—22Squared created a Web site called Invisible Hate. Its purpose, Courtney Jones, a twenty-eight-year-old 22Squared employee, said, is “identifying and dismantling symbols of systemic racism.” She stood on the sidewalk with Rose, providing tech support.
“You open up the map and zoom in,” she said. “Find the closest monument. Read some fact-checked history about it. Take a pic. Add a sticker. Then post to social!” The site’s digital stickers bear slogans such as “Silence is Compliance”; “Shame on You”; “Hate Is Not Heroic”; and “Statue of Non-Liberty.” Jones said, “Our main one, of course, is ‘Tear Them Down’ ”—Rose affixed it to his picture of Gordon. “We’re talking to Snapchat about custom filters,” Jones added. “And trying to get more influencers on board.”
“There are six monuments to the Confederacy within two miles of here,” Rose said, peering at his phone. He walked along the capitol’s lawn. “This is Governor Joseph Brown and his wife,” he explained, stopping before a bearded man and a seated lady. Jones pulled up the monument on her phone. “He was quoted saying that interracial marriage was evil,” she read. “Erected 1928.”
“It’s infuriating,” Rose said. “But, again, it’s educational.” Jones took a picture and added a ‘Shame on You’ sticker.
They continued on. “I had a white guy tell me once that Alexander Hamilton Stephens was being satirical in his Cornerstone Speech,” Rose said. “Are you kidding me? He gave an hour-long satirical speech on how the war really was about slavery?” He laughed. “And this business about how there were a hundred thousand Black Confederate soldiers. It just didn’t happen! Think how that would’ve gone: Slave master says, ‘Hey, I know I been kinda tough on you, but take this gun and defend this arrangement.’ ” He laughed again. “ ‘Because it could be worse if they win the war!’ ”
“It’s never left,” Jones said, of that argument. “Listen to Trump.”
“He’s the worst racist in office since Woodrow Wilson,” Rose said. “The worst President in the history of America. I don’t think he’ll get a statue on government property. ”
“They’ll have to put it outside one of his hotels,” Jones said.
The two walkers squeezed through a gap in a fence, passing a statue of Eugene Talmadge, a governor in the nineteen-thirties and forties. “The best thing I can say about Talmadge is that he wasn’t as racist as Richard Russell,” Rose said, citing an earlier governor, also memorialized on the lawn. Rose pointed across the street: “See those buildings? They’re named for this legislator they called Sloppy Floyd. Sloppy Floyd Towers. Well, those buildings face Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive, but the address is on the side street.” He continued, “They didn’t want Sloppy Floyd to have an M.L.K. address. That’s how insidious this is.”
Around the corner, a Black man and a white man were working on a fence. “Ebony and ivory,” Rose said. Nearby stood a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., dedicated in 2017. “Right by the back door,” Rose said.
“Half the size of John B. Gordon,” Jones added.
But the arc of the moral universe? “The DeKalb County Confederate Monument was just removed,” Rose said. “Henry County came down. Rockdale County came down.” On the Invisible Hate map, these sites had become red “X” marks. “We’re working on one in Newton County.” He kept walking. “We’re working.” ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/toppling-the-statues-virtually
2020-12-28 19:57:59Z
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