Running racism in America thread

This one's not tough. A leader who dedicated much of his career to keeping segregation alive is unworthy of acclaim. The original sin was granting him that acclaim. It's time to rescind it. From the NYT obit:

As governor of South Carolina, he led the effort to abolish the state poll tax, but in Congress he fought efforts to ban it nationally. Running for president in 1948 as what the press called a Dixiecrat, he said that ''on the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line.'' And, he went on, ''all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.''

 

And Republicans want to keep them up?

 

I just don’t see the world as that black and white. I think we can safely say Thurmond was a horse’s ass, but we can also say he was a man of his time. You can’t judge historical figures based on modern sensibilities.
Do you condemn Thurmond because he was a jerk but give Washington and Jefferson - who were literally two of the biggest slave owners in history - a pass because they are straight up on Mount Rushmore?
People need to quit getting butt hurt at the past and figuring out how to make a better future. I say that as a history teacher.

 

If Strom Thurmond was a man of his time, his time was 1860.

 

100% true
This is 2020
Strom Thurmond is dead and molding in the ground.
Let’s worry about what we can do to make the future better for everyone instead of something he said before many of us were born.

 

Or, maybe stop celebrating and honoring people who were terrible human beings.

 

Reminded of one high school softball team I covered that had a Breanna, a Brianna and a Bria.

 

That logic only holds if everyone of that time behaved like Thurmond, though. Similarly, defenses of Christopher Columbus that say he was a man of his time are undercut by the existence of Bartholome de las Casas and others of the time who opposed slavery and genocide.

Why do we name buildings after people and erect statues of them? To honor and memorialize them. Societies change, though, and so do their values. Should a society be required to maintain and venerate in perpetuity statues of/buildings named after someone it finds abhorrent because earlier generations thought that person was worth honoring? No one (or at least no one serious) is arguing we should shove Thurmond, Columbus, et al down the memory hole and pretend they never existed; rather, we owe it to ourselves and to history to provide a full and frank accounting of all their deeds and not just shrugging off the uncomfortable stuff because it didn't happen to white people.

If we just throw up our hands and say "what's done is done", we treat as untouchable canon a history that was written of, by, and for white men and valorizes the deeds of white men while downplaying and/or ignoring all others. When I finished my high school history classes a scant 21 years ago, I did so never having heard the names of Cesar Chavez, Ida B. Wells, Harvey Milk, Marsha Johnson, Vincent Chin, etc. MLK was the good black man, Malcolm X (despite being a local) was the bad one. There was no mention of Columbus' treatment of the Taino people, the Founding Fathers owning slaves, Lincoln's role in the founding of Liberia, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and other thorny bits.

Maybe I just had a shitty history teacher -- he was primarily there to coach football, with teaching a necessary evil to keep him in a job -- but I'm willing to bet I'm hardly alone in this among those who came up through the US education system. If we do, in fact, want to make a better future, we need to do better than that -- and that starts with letting the scales fall from our eyes and asking uncomfortable questions about the mythology we as a country have built around ourselves and our history.

 

"Butt hurt?" Nice. A phrase commonly understood to mean excessive, theatrical and unwarranted anger caused by immaturity. Those who take offense at Strom Thurmond's 60-year career of bigotry, this logic goes, are too soft. Their outrage is unjustified. They need to lighten up, grow up and man up.

What statutes of limitations govern justifiable anger -- in both time and extent?

It's one thing to be influenced by your surroundings. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. We can chastise them for failing to right the wrong.
They had plenty of company.
What differentiates Thurmond is that when things were starting to change, he dug in and fought for years to preserve evil.

Born into a white supremacist society where the Ku Klux Klan kept African-Americans in line by threat of violence, Thurmond used his public positions to promote racist ends. As senator he, blocked national bills that would have granted blacks equal rights. In the 1950s, he even voted against statehood for Hawaii because its population wasn’t white enough. In 1964, he quit the Democratic Party and led Southern whites to the Republican Party.

Around 1970, Thurmond moderated his stands.

Translation: He didn't begin to accept black people until the Voting Rights Act, which he had opposed, made it politically wise for him to see the light.

Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina argued that passing the Voting Rights Act would make Congress “the final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Even in his final years, he literally whistled "Dixie" to torment Carol Moseley Braun in a Senate elevator.

He died in 2003 at the age of 100. That's 56 years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, 49 years after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools and 40 years after "I Have A Dream" stirred something productive in many people. It didn't do much for him.
In all those years, he voted for the MLK Day federal holiday. Not much else. He had plenty of opportunities to admit he was wrong. He almost always declined.

I'd wager that most of the best colleges in the country have named building for exceptionally flawed people. Most of these people and their flaws are unknown, either papered over with cash or never publicly revealed to begin with. Strom Thurmond was a public bigot for decades.

 

There's another thread about singular greatest SJ post ever. I nominate this one.

 

Always thought the problem isn't the statue, but the context its presented in. As long as everyone who sees the statue understands the full context of his or her Senate career - what the fought for, what they fought against - I think its fine that it stays. Still waiting for the Mitch statue which talks about the gun deaths on his watch that he actively ignored.

As for renaming stuff? - Most places will rename anything if the check has enough zeroes.

 

There is a difference between renaming a renovated (or totally reconstructed) building and removing an existing name from an otherwise intact structure. That's why taking Thurmond's name off this one will require some political acumen. And it may not be possible.