Taking Down Confederate Statues to Tell a Fuller Story

By Sarah Pobee | August 16, 2023

In 2017, four statues were taken down in Baltimore, the Confederate Women of Maryland statue, the Roger B. Taney statue, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors statue, and the Lee - Jackson statue. Three of these statues had Confederate ties while the other one, the Roger B. Taney statue was made to honor the Supreme Court justice who ruled that Black people didn't count as citizens.

Eventually, after the Lee - Jackson statue was taken down in Wyman Park Dell, the park and community had to decide what to do with the space. A year after the statue was taken down they decided to rededicate it to Harriet Tubman and name it Harriet Tubman Grove. They put a sign up in honor of Harriet Tubman after receiving a grant from The Baltimore National Heritage Area.

The Baltimore National Heritage Area works with different cultural organizations to help people learn about and preserve the history of an area. They do this through providing grants to museums and historic sites, and by working with schools to provide educational programs to students.

Shuantee Daniels, the executive director of the Baltimore National Heritage Area, thinks that the best way to remember the bad side of our past is through education. Daniels says that if you remove a statue, to remember the horrible things these people did, you should provide information on why it was removed.

“You don’t give them bronze statues and things like that. What you do is you put the literature and information out there,” said Daniels. “You put that information out there in a place where they can obtain it and let them come to their own conclusions that this was a horrific travesty against humankind.”

Daniels says that education is the way to make reparations for slavery. If people are not educated about the terrible things that happened then they will not learn the truth of these horrible events. Daniels also brought up something that we often hear, that if we forget history we will repeat it.

Not only is it important to remember the terrible things that happened but we need to remember the positive. Daniels emphasized how important it is to tell the stories of great Black people like Frederick Douglass, Frances Watkins Harper, Thurgood Marshall, and Harriet Tubman.

“You have certain people that want to erase the history, they don't want to just erase the negative history, they want to erase the positive as well,” said Daniels.

The sign that was put up in Harriet Tubman Grove acknowledges both the negative and the positive. It includes both information about the removal of the Lee - Jackson statue and information on Harriet Tubman.

Daniels admits that no one really noticed the Confederate statues. Eventually, they became just a part of the landscape. The only real impact they have on us is that it gives us a bad image. Nevertheless, it is still important to take Confederate statues down.

“Those statues were put up by those people that have money to say, ‘yeah you may have won the war but were still here,’” said Daniels “So that's why it was important that they come down because even if you’re here we’re not going to give you the recognition that you need to keep that mindset going.”