Our various histories: complexity meets MAGA

Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin alerted me to an important unveiling in our nation's (currently occupied) capitol.

... a 6-feet tall, 600-pound statue of President Abrahan Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation was installed on the steps of the soon-to-be opened African American Civil War Museum in the Shaw neighborhood of DC. “Liberty and Union” is inscribed at the base. 

The statue will officially be dedicated on September 22, the day Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation and the museum will hopefully open to the public after years of renovation and delays in November.

This historic Black neighborhood, named in honor of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, has its roots in the Civil War, when thousands of enslaved men, women, and children flocked to the city for shelter and freedom. The military established Camp Barker in this neighborhood early in the war, a contraband camp that was eventually moved to the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

Here the creators of the statue and museum officials proudly describe their new work to DC local news.

Levin brings forward a less boosterish view of Lincoln put forward in 1900 by Archibald Grimké, son of a South Carolina slaver and the slaver's "property," Nancy Weston. Archibald Grimké grew up to found the NAACP. 

In Howard’s American Magazine, Grimké wrote:

It seems to me that it is high time for colored Americans to look at Abraham Lincoln from their own standpoint, instead of from that of their white fellow-citizens. We have surely a point of view equally with them for the study of this great man’s public life, wherin it touched and influenced our history. Then why are we invariably found in their place on this subject, as on kindred ones, and not in our own? 

Are we never to find ourselves and our real thought on men and things in this country, and after finding them are we to deny to them expression, for fear of giving offence? Are we to be forever a trite echo, an insignificant ‘me too’ to the white race in America on all sorts of question, even on those which concern peculiarly and vitally our past, present and future relations to them?... 

I hope not; I do most devoutly pray not. For if we are ever to occupy a position in America other than that of mere dependents and servile imitators of the whites, we must emancipate ourselves from this species of slavery, as from all others. And the sooner a beginning is made in this regard the better. With whom then can we more appropriately begin this work of intellectual emancipation than with Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator?

…. Was Abraham Lincoln a great American? Yes, certainly. Was he one of the greatest of American statesmen? Yes, assuredly. Was he a great philanthropist? No. Was he a great friend of human liberty and the Negro, like Garrison, Sumner, and Phillips? No, a thousand and one times, no! For the sake of truth let us answer ‘yes’ every time where ‘yes’ agrees with the facts of history and ‘no’ where simple honesty forbids and other reply. And then let us be done, once and forever, with all this literary twaddle and glamour, fiction and myth-making, which pass unchallenged for facts in the wonder-yarns which white men spin of themselves, their deeds and demigods.

The several views represented here -- those of the museum builders, of Grimké, of Levin -- demonstrate why surviving the Trump regime is going to require, among other priorities, struggling to preserve complexity in our understanding of our past. Over the last few decades, historians of the American experiment have drawn a nuanced picture of where we come from. MAGA would reduce our story to simplistic patriotic bluster.

That's not good enough. Recognizing complicated history enables us to live and grow into an ever more complex, free, and equal nation and society. Disestablishing the crushing burden of past lies enables us live together in present truths. 

To live in the light of truth is hard, but to survive without truth is ultimately impossible.