George Washington reigned over his plantation at Mount Vernon, enslaving hundreds of people, when he took office as the first president of the United States. A cabinet position that abruptly uprooted him from his southern plantation and propelled him to Philadelphia in 1790. Despite northern practices and laws in opposition to slavery, Washington sought to keep people enslaved whatever the cost. In fact, Washington hide his ambitions as a slaveholder, and preferred to “deceive the public if necessary.”[1] The intervals in which he rotated out enslaved people in Philadelphia, was a concerted effort to subvert local law, ensuring that “his property” could never legally seek a path to freedom. Washington realized the danger of relocation and wrote that, “if his slaves knew that they had a right to freedom, it would make them insolent in the state of slavery.”[2] Despite Washington’s careful selection of those identified as “loyal and less likely to runaway”, the move to Philadelphia spawned their attempts to do exactly that. Washington’s unremitting pursuit of escaped enslaved women by the name of Ona Judge, reveals his cunning character, one he sought tirelessly to hide from the public.
This Washington, the man who stood as the first president of America and led the unrelenting crusade of Ona Judge until his very deathbed, is the Washington that stands on the campus of Miami University.
In order to understand how a statue of Washington ended up on the Miami campus, a fundamental dive into America’s fascination with Civil War imagery must be examined. The current debate over Civil War iconography may appear complex and hotly contested, but America’s fascination with Confederate imagery is simple: unwavering fixation to white supremacy.
If a visual representation in the form of monuments can be used as a tool to shape the public narrative, what happens when these statues pervert history? What happens to the American consciousness when its iconography serves as a deception to our past?
It is no coincidence that the saturation of confederate imagery occurred during two pivotal periods in American history. Confederate statues littering our nation’s landscape, immediately followed Reconstruction and again during the Civil Rights Movement. The acceleration of public architecture symbolized the concerted effort to reinsert and resurrect white supremacy, when public sentiment had witnessed it wane. Both eras confronted the legacy of racial animus and the devastating political, economic and social impact that it fueled in its wake. The thinly veiled principles that held African Americans as inferior were not erased from public memory after the Civil War, they flourished. Former enslaved man by the name of Frederick Douglass foresaw this danger and warned that white supremacist principles would endure, “in what new skin will the old snake come forth?”[3] These beliefs of white supremacy evolved into a national crusade to mask racist systems and structures upholding them. Monuments were displayed across our nation in jubilee, solely intended to inflame the racist convictions deeply rooted in the foundation of this country.
America had an opportunity to reimagine a society after the Civil War, to create a system outside of slavery,[4] but instead promoted it’s return. The political, social and economic gains African Americans made during the late 19th century threatened the very infrastructure of white power. A framework that, if weakened, could endanger both the power and status of Northern elites and the planter class in the South. Therefore, these gains had to be disemboweled. The backlash of Reconstruction and reversal of Black political power delivered state sanctioned violence and extralegal terror to enforce it.[5] An integral part of manifesting the principles of racial inferiority was to take control of the historical narrative of America; to conjure slavery and the confederate soldiers who fought to maintain it, as noble men. Spewing the myth of nobility into what became known as the Lost Cause had reverberating effects across the nation.
The cult of the Lost Cause gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and has fostered more than a century of racial violence and disenfranchisement of African Americans. It was a political message extolling the fable of confederate virtue. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates described the reunion after the Civil War as a “comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence” a story of the “white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport which could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor and elan.”[6]
The process of downplaying the horrors of enslavement spurred a new era of noble cause imagery. The reality of rape, torture and exploitation took a backseat to pictures falsely reimagining slavery. But, the revisionist images of slavery, nor the barbarous ways in which African Americans were depicted were not sufficient on their own, the corroboration of monuments proved indispensable to their mission.
Laws are just words written on paper if they aren’t upheld by society. The decades of Jim Crow, well-maintained by white communities at large, designed to strip African Americans of basic human rights were, once again, being confronted across America. This new surge of monuments was a direct retaliation for a number of legal victories Black Americans gained during the Civil Rights Movement. Because the legal battles challenging racial discrimination triumphed in court, manifestations of de facto practices materialized throughout the country. Historian Dr. Williams stated that these statues are not, “harmless remembrances of an honorable war but our deepest shame as a nation”… And we cannot “celebrate those who denied freedom to others.”[7]
The statue of George Washington at Miami University cannot escape this same historical scrutiny just because he didn’t live during the Civil War. He was inextricably tied to slavery as a slave owner and denied freedom to hundreds of people. These monuments must come down from our public landscape because, as Dr. Williams said, “there are no two sides about it.”[8] However, the principles fastened to their origins of construction cannot be erased. They must shape our pedagogical approaches to American history, spill out into the words of textbooks, and into the lesson plans of teachers. Removing these monuments does not remove our responsibility as educators, as citizens, and as individuals from our obligation to dismantle the racist structures and systems that erected them in the first place.
These racist tropes do more than muddle our national landscape, they preserve the very symbols of hate, terror and inequality[9] that America has struggled to resolve since the foundation of this country.
George Washington, founding father, first president of the United States, and avid slaveholder.
History must be told in all its complexities, not just the parts suitable for a particular audience.
[1] Dunbar, Erica A. Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
[2] Dunbar. Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.
[3] Why are there some many confederate monuments, season 2 episode 26, PBS, 2019.
[4] Why are there some many confederate monuments.
[5] “The Defining Moment: A Conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill and Bryan Stevenson”, Lecture, Legal Defense Fund, 22 Oct 2020.
[6] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
[7] Williams, Yohuru. “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down.” The Progressive, Aug. 8, 2017.
[8] Williams. “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down.”
[9] Williams. “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down.”
Challenge The Narrative 