Banning books, tearing down statues, and erasing history

William Northcutt is a writer for the State Gazette and former Professor of English at Dyersburg State

I am against taking down the Confederate Statue on the Courthouse Square, but not for reasons that you might imagine. I’m for leaving it up there but for adding a plaque that not only mentions Civil War involvement and losses of life but also motives for the war, including keeping the institution of slavery intact. Sure, Tennessee’s secession had to do with states’ rights and with long standing struggles between industrial and agricultural states. Slavery was part of secession, undeniably so. According to one report on the 1850 census, Dyer Countians owned at least 175 human beings as slaves.

In my 30 years of teaching, I never shied away from teaching the truth. I taught the greatest books both for the stories and for the history. Among them, I taught Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved,” Anne Frank’s “Diary,” Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” and books by LGBTQ authors, including homo-erotic poems by Walt Whitman.

My goal was to teach great writing, even when ideas in the books were repulsive. Take Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” One character repeats the “n-word” over 20 times in just a few pages. The narrator presents Robert Cohn and bases his character on racial stereotypes often repeated by those condemning Jews.

It’s both a masterfully written book full of pathos and a historical document of accepted racism. Why insist on teaching such a book? Because a part of that book’s history is that in 1925, readers saw the racism and had no complaints. A best seller, no one protested. I pointed that out to my students. I also discussed how before the Holocaust, Europeans and Americans did not hesitate to express their antisemitism. As a great work of art, “The Sun Also Rises” is worthy of study, and its ugly side should be discussed too.

I took a stroll around the Courthouse Square/Veterans Square in Dyersburg. Signs and monuments have been erected on all sides. I’m glad that we honor those who sacrificed. No matter whether we think a conflict just, the folks who served did so in the belief that they were protecting freedom. They gave all.

The Confederate statue is different from the other memorials. It deserves more explanation. It’s not just about glory; it’s about the worst of what our ancestors did to other humans.

Slavery should be seen as a war. African-Americans were in a total war, and their weapons were whatever it took to survive—submission, charm, internal rebellion. Refusing to work would have meant certain punishment, sometimes death. Families were broken apart and sold like livestock. Read slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s autobiography if you want a first-hand story of what it was like for many. Even when the treatment was benevolent, African-Americans still had no rights to their destiny.

We know that it took a century after Emancipation for the U.S. to codify civil rights. Before then, Dyersburg legislated segregation, and one of the cruelest lynchings in the country took place here. Downtown. Merely feet away from the State Gazette office. Spitting distance from the Courthouse Square.

Is that history of struggle not worthy of a monument on the Courthouse Square? Would it be too much to add a plaque to the Confederate statue explaining its significance for better and worse? Or is it more important to idealize that history and erase the darkness?

In 2000, I had a three hour, each way, train commute to work from Stolberg, Germany to Wuppertal, Germany. There was a plaque on the platform in my town telling of a Jewish family who had been transported from that very platform to a death camp, where they were killed. Germany didn’t erase its history. It declared it publicly with the hope that such inhumanity never happen again.

During my final years of teaching at DSCC, a student submitted an essay in which he said that slavery was a positive thing—it built America, and African-Americans were and are too simple minded to take care of themselves, and slavery gave them Christianity. He said African-Americans were happier then than they are now. I took him aside and explained how that wasn’t true. His work showed the rot he’d been taught his whole life. I educated him. Many of us need education about history and rights. Our Courthouse Square is a good place to start that lesson, and so is that statue. Leave it up…but use it for good.