Removing racist relics from America's past

Get the Point!

One weekend this past summer, I was surfing YouTube when I happened upon a documentary about Adolf Hitler's last days in the “Fuhrer Bunker,” a massive facility that was built beneath the Reich's Chancellery, narrated by Professor Mark Helton.

To my history nerd's delight, I soon discovered that Prof. Helton has a treasure trove of ten to 15 minute historical segments that chronicle the fates of Hitler and the Nazi High Command, a miserable lot that included such infamous figures as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, and Herman Goering, Hitler's beloved second in command—each of whom committed suicide rather than face judgment and death sentences from the victorious Allies. 

The last known picture of Adolf Hitler (hands behind his back), surveying the damage outside of his Bunker in Berlin, days before he killed himself on April 30, 1945…

But it was one Felton documentary in particular, the one which shows exactly what happened to Hitler's underground Bunker in the decades after the war, that truly piqued my interest.

Why?

Well, to put it simply, the bunker was destroyed and replaced by an apartment complex with a fully paved parking lot, a development which ensures that no Neo-Nazi sympathizers or other assorted degenerates will ever be able to make a shrine out of the very place where Nazi tyranny literally died in late April and early May of 1945! 

Soviet Red Army soldiers, deep in the “Fuhrer Bunker,” inspecting the couch where Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide only days earlier in 1945. If you look to the left, Hitler's blood from his bullet shot to the head stains the arm and pillows where the soldiers are collecting evidence…

To their enduring credit, from the time when the Allies divided a defeated Germany into East (Soviet controlled) and West (American and British controlled) factions, to the time when Germany was reunified during my senior year of high school four decades later, while the Cold War raged and caused much enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union, one area that both superpowers agreed upon was in exposing Hitler and the Nazis for what they were, which was a viciously murderous lot whose twisted beliefs in Aryan white racial superiority led to the deaths of over 10 million Jews and Roma (Gypsies) during the Holocaust—and over 15 million soldiers and civilians who died during the bloodiest war in recorded history. 

Indeed, if you travel to Germany to this very day, while there are a few buildings and homes still standing that were used or owned by Nazi leaders, there are NO vestiges of public adoration or veneration to any of the men (and women) responsible for the Nazis World War II era genocide. That's right, no streets named for Adolf Hitler, no schools named for Heinrich Himmler, and no parks in fawning memory of Josef Goebbels or Herman Goering can be found anywhere in modern day Germany. 

Red Army soldiers near the very spot where Adolf Hitler's body was torched in the garden outside of the Fuhrer Bunker in 1945…

The buildings and paved roads that cover up the infamous Fuhrer Bunker and Hitler's original final resting spot today…

Juxtaposed to this anti-Nazi reality in Germany is over a century of public adoration and veneration of rebellious Confederate leaders in the United States of America!

Never mind that the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War, was fought to settle what's often called America's "Original Sin"—the enslavement of Africans—no, to let late 19th and early 20th Century historians tell it, those rebellious Southerners who formed the Confederate States of America explicitly to preserve and expand slavery into the west were "heroic figures" whose “Lost Cause” was to preserve the "superiority of the white race" for all eternity. 

This statue in honor of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest was erected not far from where civil rights marchers led by the late Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga) in 1965 were beaten to a pulp during “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama….

Sounds alot like Nazi ideology, doesn't it?

When you consider that millions of Africans died in chains along the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas, and that millions more were worked to death, beaten to death, or tortured to death for refusing to "humble" themselves and passively accept their subservient positions, it is sickeningly bizarre that in the years after the Civil War ended and Jim Crow segregation began, that many (not all) whites in the United States developed a love affair with the likes of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the last of whom was among the founding members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. 

In fact, until just this past decade and a half, if you traveled anywhere in the South, there were myriad schools, streets, and parks named for the very men who placed their lives on the line in a war to keep Black people enslaved—and in check!

This statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, cast in Memphis, Tennessee circa 1901, was taken down and given to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2017…

To be clear, when Black people started demanding equal rights in the 1930’s and 40’s, the U.S. government curiously responded by naming military bases like Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Gordon, and Fort Pickett after slavery supporting Confederate leaders! To add further racist insult, in Washington, D.C. and in Arlington, Virginia, monuments to the very Confederates who aimed to destroy the United States were found on Capitol Hill, in Arlington National Cemetery, and yes, even at the National Cathedral.

In fact, it was just this past week that the National Cathedral held a ceremony heralding their decision to replace the old stain glass monuments to Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson, affixed in 1953 when Jim Crow segregation was still very much a thing in Washington, D.C., with new stain glass treatments that honor Black civil rights protesters! Designed by artist Kerry James Marshall, the new glass, titled "Now and Forever," begs Ol' Hobbs to ask one question: what took so damn long?

In a ceremony that included Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, reading excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King's classic Letter From Birmingham Jail, the memory of the formerly enslaved oppressed was placed into contrast with their former oppressors in a way that makes the intelligent among us realize that the oft elusive goal of racial harmony is deeply complicated when the historical oppressors are celebrated and not castigated!

Generals Lee and Jackson at the National Cathedral…

The civil rights stain glass windows that replaced Lee and Jackson…

The very idea that at this very moment, that there are many right wing political figures who not only admire the former Confederate oppressors, but that the two leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump and Ronald DeSantis, have gone on record to express their disdain for “woke” and the accurate teaching of who those Confederate leaders were and, most crucially, why they do not deserve public praise and raucous applause, is deeply disturbing to me.

As a historian, I do not mean to ever suggest that history should be erased—it should not! But there is a distinct difference between reading about evil men and women in books, or seeing their artifacts in museums or via documentaries, as opposed to honoring them in the public square by naming our public parks, schools, streets, and military installations in their honor. 

Lest we forget...