Los Angeles - Across California, the massive anti-racism
protests that have followed the police killing of George Floyd have
led to an unprecedented reckoning with public symbols of slavery and
oppression.
This month, statues have been toppled. Mascots have been changed. A
coastal town's Confederate-linked name has been reconsidered.
At this moment of global outcry against racism, Californians are
saying en masse that, for too long, the state's history has been
whitewashed, the ugly parts ignored.
Marcus Hunter, chair of African American Studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said he thinks the statues are falling at
such great numbers and with less pushback than in years past because
white people and others who are not Black are joining the protests
and helping pull them down. He also believes that people being forced
to stay home during the pandemic could not ignore Floyd's killing and
the movement it sparked.
"I've been calling this the the great pause," Hunter said. "It wasn't
just a slowdown. It was 90 days of shelter in place. Either people
are going to change America, or it's going to remain the same."
In the Antelope Valley, a high school dropped its Rebels mascot, once
depicted as a soldier with a Confederate flag. In Kings Canyon
National Park, the name of the 255-foot Robert E. Lee Tree, a giant
sequoia that is one of the world's tallest trees, was removed.
Protesters in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park felled statues of
Father Junipero Serra and two slave owners: Francis Scott Key, the
writer of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and President Ulysses S. Grant.
The name of the Squaw Valley Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe is being
reconsidered. So is Negro Bar State Recreation Area in Sacramento
County.
In downtown Los Angeles' Father Serra Park, Indigenous activists tied
ropes around a statue of the Franciscan friar - his bronze form
holding a cross and bearing a model of a Spanish mission - and yanked
it off its pedestal. In Ventura, where protesters unfurled a banner
reading "Father Genocide," local officials agreed to remove a Serra
statue outside City Hall.
Nationwide, protesters are targeting statues of slave-owning
presidents. A statue of George Washington in Portland, Oregon, was
covered with a burning American flag and torn down. Protesters
painted the word "Killer" on the base of an Andrew Jackson statue
near the White House.
President Donald Trump tweeted that he had authorized the federal
government to arrest people who deface monuments on federal property
and threatened 10 years in prison. On Wednesday, the Army activated
400 National Guard troops to protect monuments in the nation's
capital.
Workers from the Recreation and Parks Department paint over graffiti after a statue of Francis Scott Key was toppled from its pedestal in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Picture: Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group via AP
Scholars say it is fitting that statues would fall so quickly now -
amid protests over the death of Floyd, a Black man killed by a white
Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly nine
minutes, and in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has
disproportionately killed nonwhite people.
Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, said the
country is "in the midst of the largest social movement about rights
and racial justice in half a century" and that many of the people
Americans have long held up as heroes are flawed.
"The truth is, we do have a racist history," Orfield said. "We stole
all our land from the Indians, we took half of Mexico over, and we
kept African Americans in an extreme form of slavery for generations,
followed by extreme segregation using the power of law."
That this is happening now across a state regarded as a symbol of
liberal America is not a surprise, said Kevin Waite, a professor at
Durham University in England with a focus on the American West,
slavery and imperialism.
"I think part of the reason that this history is hidden for a lot of
Californians is because it doesn't really sit well with the stories
we like to tell ourselves about this free state that's now on the
leading edge of cosmopolitan liberalism," he said. "It seems like
anybody with an association with colonial rule and slavery is now a
target for removal."
Earlier this month, Quartz Hill High School in the Antelope Valley
dropped its long-debated Rebel mascot after the body of Robert
Fuller, a young Black man, was found hanging from a tree near
Palmdale City Hall, 12 miles away.
Authorities quickly labeled Fuller's death a probable suicide,
drawing intense criticism from his family and community members who
said they did not do enough to determine whether it was a homicide.
The case remains under investigation.
Amid the George Floyd protests, school officials seemed to take
years-long efforts to change the mascot more seriously, said Joshua
Collier, former president of the Black Student Union, who graduated
this month. Collier, 18, said his group's email account has received
numerous racist messages in recent days, as well as messages from
angry alumni.
"They have to realize that times do change and the mascot did change
and you have to adapt to the change," he said.
California has grappled with symbols of past racism and cruelty for
years.
In 2009, officials changed the name of Malibu's Negrohead Mountain
(which was itself a 1960s refinement of the N-word, which formed its
original name). In 2017, after a counterprotester was killed during
the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. -
planned in part to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue - a
six-foot granite monument to Confederate soldiers in Hollywood
Forever Cemetery was carted away in the dark of the night.
No state beyond the South has had as many monuments and place names
honoring the Confederacy and its soldiers as California, Waite said.
Though it was a Union state far from the major battlefields of the
Civil War, white Southerners flocked to California and "basically ran
the show in Sacramento," passing numerous pro-slavery resolutions,
Waite said. Public monuments popped up decades after the war, as part
of a movement known as the Lost Cause, a fictitious rewriting of
Civil War history that glosses over slavery as its root cause.
The current protest movement is also confronting California's
historic cruelty toward Native Americans, with statues of Serra, the
architect of the state's mission system, falling and the removal of a
statue of John Sutter, a Gold Rush colonizer who enslaved Indigenous
people, from a Sacramento hospital named after him.
"People aren't taking things so much as a given part of the landscape
anymore, and they're imagining what places would feel like without
this assertion of power, this asserting of dominance over certain
people," said Beth Piatote, a professor of Native American studies at
the University of California, Berkeley. "Native people, African
American people, Asians, immigrants _ people are all coming together
and saying, 'We don't want that message asserted in our public
space.'"
In Fort Bragg, a Mendocino County town of 7,400 named after
Confederate army general and slave owner Braxton Bragg, the City
Council this week considered several options for its name, including
placing a name change on the November ballot or re-dedicating the
town to honor another historical Bragg.
On Monday, the Council decided to create an ad hoc committee to
discuss next steps but not to put a name change on the ballot.
Fort Bragg was founded in 1857 by Lt. Horatio G. Gibson, who
established a military post to control the Native American population
in Mendocino County. Gibson named it after Bragg, his former
commanding officer in the Mexican-American War. As the story goes,
Bragg never set foot in the town.
A recent biography of the general, who resigned his post under
pressure halfway through the war after decisive losses and is
regarded as an unsuccessful military leader, is subtitled "The Most
Hated Man of the Confederacy."
The town's name has been challenged before. In 2015, after white
supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine Black worshippers at the
Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., the California Legislative
Black Caucus asked city leaders to consider a name change. They
declined.
Ryan Bushnell, who started an online petition to keep the name, said
he does not want to see it removed as a "knee-jerk reaction" to
current events. The name, he said, ideally could be used to teach the
history of the area.
"This is not about Braxton Bragg. Those of us who want to keep the
name don't go home and worship a statue of Braxton Bragg each night,"
Bushnell told the Los Angeles Times. "It's about a tight-knit
community. It's a damn good community, and for the most part we all
just get along."
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