Wrestling with History and Memory

As an Historian and Dean I have been watching with great interest the contested cultural and political debates surrounding history and memory. In our contemporary environment where the "Star Spangled Banner" has become a symbolic flashpoint around issues of equality and structural racism in the United States, where the American Alt-Right pushes for access to campus venues to spew provocative hate speech, and where monuments memorializing the Confederate cause and its leaders have become the foci of heated and impassioned debate and protest over both the nation’s past and its present (the “Silent Sam” controversy at the University of North Carolina being but one example), it is important that university communities across the country, especially those espousing the ideals of inclusion and mutual respect, embrace these tough conversations and employ them as tools for moving both their local communities and the nation as a whole forward.

A necessary first step, however, is a deep conversation about the differences between “History” and “Memory.” The “Silent Sam” controversy provides a case in point. This monument depicting an anonymous Confederate soldier sits in the heart of the University of North Carolina’s beautiful campus green in Chapel Hill. Dedicated in 1913, the monument has long been defended as a memorial to the honor and bravery of the UNC students who served in defense of their homes and their way of life. This read of the monument along with the fact that it does not depict any specific individual has long enabled its defenders to use “history and heritage” as reasons why the statue should not be removed. Others, of course, point to the fact that at the heart of that way of life was the institution of slavery and that the monument’s dedication in 1913 (at a time when Jim Crow and the debasement of African-Americans in the southern states was an established fact) stands as an intentional message to African-Americans that they are not welcomed in this space. Indeed, during the commemoration address given by Julian Carr (a North Carolina industrialist and former Confederate soldier) the speaker noted how he had, "horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds" near where the statue stood. The woman, he explained, had "publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady." How then do we disentangle the meaning/intent of this statue? Where do we draw the line between history and the memory that becomes attached to particular objects/sites?

A great deal of work has been done delineating the relationship between these two distinct ways of understanding the past—as they are different. My own understanding of these differences is beautifully captured in the work of the dean of historians exploring the Civil War and American memory, Yale Professor David Blight. In a 2006 essay included in the influential volume, Slavery and Public History, Blight wrote:

"History is what trained historians do, a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research; it tends to be critical and skeptical of human motive and action, and therefore more secular than what people commonly call memory. History can be read by or belong to everyone; it is more relative, contingent on place, chronology and scale. If history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community. Memory is often owned; history is interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised. Memory often coalesces in objects, sites, and monuments; history seeks to understand contexts in all their complexity. History asserts the authority of academic training and canons of evidence; memory carries the often more immediate authority of community membership and experience. In an essay about the slave trade and the problem of memory, Bernard Bailyn aptly stated memory’s appeal: “Its relation to the past is an embrace…ultimately emotional, not intellectual.” (p. 24)

These are very different ways, of course, to think about the past and they both offer different lenses through which to examine the current cultural landscape and they help us, I believe, to make better sense out of the various points of view manifest in the debate over “Silent Sam” and other similar sites/objects.

But why bring this up in a blog devoted to the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters at the University of Michigan-Dearborn one might ask? The answer is simple, because this campus too has its own legacy and history to confront. No, we do not have any Confederate monuments adorning our campus, but the campus does sit on property once owned by Henry Ford, an industrialist noted for his vehement anti-Semitism, strong ethnocentrism, and his outright hostility to organized labor. Moreover, students daily drive to our campus along Hubbard Drive, a road named for Dearborn’s notoriously racist mayor, Orville Hubbard, who prided himself on keeping Dearborn “clean” and who famously employed federally funded urban renewal funds to try to prevent an Arab-American presence from establishing itself in southeastern Dearborn. This historical reality and the memories attached to those realities have long shaped peoples’ attitudes toward our campus and their sense of feeling welcome or not.

It is a point of great pride that this university has done so much to overcome this legacy and to build a new narrative around inclusiveness and respect. I am particularly proud of the outstanding work done by the faculty and students of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters in advancing this work. Their thoughtful conversations, their applied research around issues of disparity and memory, and their commitment to a full exploration of these uncomfortable realities, speaks volumes about the excellence of the education offered here, about the power of a diverse student body and the many differing perspectives that such a student body brings to light, and about the profound value of a broad education.

As contemporary debates make abundantly clear, there is still much more work that needs to be done to facilitate a meaningful and thoughtful conversation around these issues and around the nation’s legacy of race relations. This is, in fact, the work that, above all else, needs doing. Unfortunately, the road ahead will be paved with much tension and most likely, sadly, violence/conflict. I am profoundly grateful to work on a campus where such conversations are woven into the fabric of who we are and where we are able to engage in these conversations with mutual respect and tolerance.