December 7, 2015
“At times the past explodes in the present,” began David Blight, Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at the MacMillan Center. In June, nine African American people were murdered in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The murders sparked outrage across the country and world, and the Confederate flag quickly became a focus of the outrage. Simmering discussions about the symbols of and memorials to white supremacy that dot the American landscape boiled over into full-blown controversies about remembering the past. In short order, the flag was removed from statehouse grounds in South Carolina, but has anything actually changed?
On Monday, September 21, the GLC hosted a panel of distinguished scholars to address this very question. More than 100 people listened to David Blight moderate a lively discussion among Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family and lecturer in the English department at Yale; William Jelani Cobb, Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Institute of African American Studies at the University of Connecticut; Glenda Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale; Jonathan Holloway, Dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies; and Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Yale, titled “Charleston and Its Aftermath: History, Policy, Symbols.”
Panelists expressed surprise about the focus on the Confederate flag. They agreed that its removal from state grounds was meaningful, but the fight over this symbol and others deflected energy away from addressing structural inequality and racism. “White supremacy is a very, very well-engineered system,” Jelani Cobb reminded the audience, “and it has managed to jettison its most ineffective parts when necessary in order to maintain the better functioning of the entire organism.” Taking down the flag offered “a false sense of progress” in the face of incarceration, sub-standard education, and socioeconomic disparities. “We are so continually seduced by the overt, blatant bigotry of a Dylan Roof,” emphasized Vesla Weaver, “that we fail to see black inequality right there in our midst.”
African American and white residents of Charleston described to Edward Ball living in separate worlds the day after the murders. Three months later, an African American schoolteacher told him “the reason Roof killed those people was that he had been taught through everything in his childhood that black people are his enemy and we are barbaric. The flag came down and that is wonderful, but it shouldn’t have been up there to begin with.”
“Now white people speak to you,” the schoolteacher continued, “but that doesn’t have anything to do with jobs.” Talking about and removing symbols matters. Remedying continued racism and inequality would matter much more.
The discussion at times turned to the ongoing conversation about Calhoun College. Charleston caused Jonathan Holloway to waver in his long-held belief that the Calhoun name should stay. Glenda Gilmore insisted that the name “drives students to feel hurt and cut to the core when they have to see this,” and that while it is a complex problem, the solution is simple: Yale can and should choose not to honor a tyrant. The tragic murders in Charleston made discussion of Yale’s symbols ever more pressing.