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Monuments
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2020-06-15 16:12:10
In the wake of the police killings of Black men and women — George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and most recently, Rayshard
Brooks — protestors in the United States and around the world have begun removing monuments and other symbols of a
racist past. Among the statues to tumble onto the ground or into the water are those of Christopher Columbus, slave traders,
and Confederate generals. NASCAR is the latest sports organization to ban the display of the Confederate battle flag. The
emblems that some consider “heritage” symbolize a painful past for so many others. Why do we glorify people who owned
other human beings, stole their loved ones and their labor, and tortured them to death? If, as in the words of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the symbols of a barbaric past do not
belong on pedestals in the centers of our communities today. Leaving them there honors and legitimizes the moral and
political universe that those individuals helped to create. It doesn’ t mean we get rid of the statues and flags altogether but
the former Gestapo headquarters i in Berlin. There, people can visit and learn about a troubled past, with the goal of making
sure those atrocities never happen again. [caption id="attachment_14193" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
The 25th of April Bridge in
Lisbon, Portugal{/caption] There are other ways to acknowledge a painful past without glorifying it. Public works that serve
as vanity projects for dictators often receive new names after their regimes have fallen. For instance, Lisbon’s iconic 25" of
April Bridge, which resembles San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and was built by the same company, was originally
called the Salazar Bridge for Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled Portugal with an iron fist beginning in 1926. The bridge
kept Salazar’s name for eight years until the Carnation Revolution toppled the regime he established (Salazar himself
became incapacitated in 1968 and died in 1970) and ushered in a democratic government that continues to this day. The date
of the Carnation Revolution: April, 25, 1974. Today, the bridge honors not one person but an event that brought freedom and
self-determination to the Portuguese people. At the same time, Salazar’s role has not been erased completely. When the Pilar
7 bridge museum opened two years ago, I took a tour of the structure that included a short, informative film about its
construction. The film concludes with the replacement of the dictator’s name shortly after the April 25" revolution. While
the film acknowledges the role Salazar and his regime played in expanding public works in Portugal from the 1940s through
the 1960s, one can also see why the arrival of democracy in Portugal led to removing his name. As the country’s economy
grew and flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, the bridge, too, has been expanded, with wider lanes and a lower level added
for rail traffic. This experience of change and improvement, both physical and political, can offer a teachable moment about
the naming of monuments and how a society replaces or adapts monuments over time.
