![]() ![]() And well, first, could you explain why this monument is very special in the context of Civil War monuments? Shaw was the white man who commanded the Black soldiers who made up the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts’ Volunteer Infantry. One that deserves mention right away, and you mentioned this in your book - there's a very special monument we have here in Boston, the celebrated Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston Common. ![]() Rath: And let's talk about this with some local examples here in Massachusetts. So you can't really be surprised that protests are going to turn more violent if there's no peaceful route to removal. No matter how many calls for discussion there might be. And when Americans in power keep statues up while ignoring calls for their removal or even for their debate or change, that's also undemocratic.Īnd as I explain in the book, there are many states where it's just simply impossible to remove a statue once it's put up. So when ISIS blew up statues of the Buddha, that was against the wish of the community. Thompson: Well, what I'm saying is that, if works of art are representing who we want to be as a community, if they're in our public spaces, they should really be a product of democratic discussion. Rath: Well, and you say it in a joke, but it's kind of referring to the fact that, at first, it doesn't seem to scan, right? Because you're somebody who's written about things like the Taliban destroying Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, and someone would think, “Well, you're a professor of art, and why are you one of the ones saying, “Burn baby burn,” basically, when these when these statues are coming down? So it's the exception, rather than the rule, to have a public monument come down peacefully, I would say. In fact, the very first metal statue put up in America, a statue of George III that went up in downtown New York, lasted only seven years before colonists rebelling pulled it down after hearing the Declaration of Independence read. I think it really is neither one or the other, in the end.īut I was fascinated by the debates people started having in the comments to this tweet, asking things like, “What's wrong with Columbus?” or, “Civilized people couldn't possibly be knocking down statues.” But as someone who has studied the history of deliberate destruction of cultural property, I know this is something that happens often. Various conservative commentators thought I was leading my students to revolution. Like, “As a professor who studies the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, I just have to say next time use chains instead of rope and it'll go faster.” Thompson: I saw a video of Indigenous activists in Minnesota throwing a rope around a statue of Christopher Columbus, preparing to pull it down. Can you describe that and tell us what your tweet was? You were reacting to one of these statues. ![]() Rath: Now, you got pulled into the controversy over this yourself nationally, and it was over social media. "It's the exception, rather than the rule, to have a public monument come down peacefully." And so protests began to focus on statues and really ask, “How can we, as a nation achieve justice if we can't even agree about what type of art should be decorating our public spaces?” And it was because a statue is a great place to focus your debates about abstract questions of justice and racial equity. Thompson: Well, suddenly it seemed like hunks of marble and bronze that nobody but pigeons that cared about four years almost came alive. Remind us what was going on in terms of attacking and defending monuments all across the country, in the middle of racial justice protests and a pretty ugly presidential election. Rath: So first off, remind us, take us back a bit to the summer of 2020. What follows is a lightly edited transcript. These scenes and many others like them, are described in critical detail in Erin Thompson's new book “Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments.”Įrin Thompson is a professor of Art Crime, the first such professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Just hours before Boston's Columbus beheading was discovered, protesters in Richmond, Virginia, pulled down a Columbus statue, burned it and dumped it into a lake. Across the country in that summer of racial justice protests, statues were being attacked - and also defended. But this time things were kind of different. It actually wasn't the first time that statue had been decapitated. How Christopher Columbus Came To Stand In Boston's North End ![]()
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