6 Symbols Experts
Consider engaging experts who can offer new ideas, anticipate the ramifications of new or changed symbols, and counteract false rumors about the history connected to existing symbols and public spaces.
POSSIBLE STRATEGIES
Take into account the goals, context, and likely results in selecting experts, who might come from disciplines such as: architecture, anthropology, history, art, psychology, sociology, dispute resolution, political science, and more.
IN MORE DETAIL
In general, planners can expect certain competing viewpoints to emerge at the prospect of changing the environment. Proponents of change will be optimistic about the goals that can be achieved by changing the environment and earnest about the need to remove offensive and hurtful reminders from the public landscape. Opponents will have emotional attachments to places of memory and cultural icons. They will cite the slippery slope (“If we change this, what else do we have to change? Are we renaming our cities?”). They will downplay the positive effects of change (“Wouldn’t it accomplish more to invest these resources in education?”). But consulting with experts can help planners to anticipate and prepare for these and other potential reasons for opposition and offer imaginative ideas for making progress, even during conflicts.
Historians
Historians can give context for older symbols and for the current feelings of some members in the community. They can also offer evidence to correct inaccurate “emotional truths” that people might otherwise innocently believe or cling to for other reasons. In defense of various Confederate monuments, some have argued, for example, that the Confederate states’ secession was not about slavery. Historians have re-published the declarations of secession issued by all the Confederacy states, each of which mentions slavery as a prominent cause of their secession.[1]
Artists
If planning a new monument, consider bringing the artist into the process early enough to develop an understanding of not only the specific goals of the project, but also the related current and historical community issues.
Symbols experts
Changing the environment will cause ripples that those studying symbols can flag for planners. Their scholarly work, for example, suggests that:
- A symbol has little effect unless it is placed, set up, or accompanied by programming so that the public will interact with it. For that interaction to be memorable, it may need to engage more than just the visual perceptions of visitors.[2]
- Symbols play an important role in individual and group identities, intimately linked to the emotional aspects of group identities (race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc.).
- The meaning of symbols and effectiveness of public spaces to gather people will change over time and be perceived differently by various individuals and groups. For example, people may stop using a public space if they drive past a line of other visitors’ parked cars displaying bumper stickers which they view as threatening.
- The meaning of symbols is dependent upon the physical, political, and cultural context in which they exist.
- The context of symbols is linked to the type and regularity of the rituals in which they are used. For example, torches may be perceived as providing lighting at outdoor night-time memorial services while torches carried by marchers shouting anti-Semitic slogans convey threat.
- New or removed symbols sometimes traumatize people or incite them to violence.
- It is important to remember that contestation over a symbol is likely to represent more underlying social issues. Symbols, even if demanded, may be seen as a gesture – no more – if not accompanied by programmatic or legal changes.
- The process of creating or dealing with symbols may sometimes have a more important impact than the symbol itself, as sustained collective efforts to transform symbols can also lead to discussions about changes in policies and practices (but consider the counterweights to that statement discussed in Process Design).
- Commemorating injustice may unwittingly give the “oxygen of publicity” to the hateful persons if the focus is on the perpetrator rather than the victims.
- Planners need to provide for upkeep if they expect the symbol to achieve its goals in the future.
- Changing symbols has been a tradition itself. The Monument Lab reports, “[T]he first recorded monument removal in the United States was on July 9, 1776 (statue of King George III of England, New York, New York).” The report adds that over the years many monuments have been removed for non-political reasons, such as “aesthetic updates, the dedications of new parks, moved roadways, and scrap metal drives during World War II.”[3]
ILLUSTRATIONS
Changing public understanding
Marc Howard Ross, a Bryn Mawr political science professor, has studied symbols as a counter to the tendency of those living in the northern United States to forget collectively that slavery was common in the North. With few visual reminders and for other reasons, those in the North may inaccurately view slavery as a “Southern problem” and therefore feel less responsibility to respond to its aftermath.[4] A potential counter to this excuse for Northerners not getting involved in advancing racial equity might include changes in the public and commemorative landscape that remind the public of the North’s role in slavery for two centuries. One outgrowth of Ross’ work is the plan to construct a new cemetery to honor the lives of 8,000 Black persons whose remains were discovered buried under a Northern city playground.
Trust in disinterested historians
The Supreme Court of Virginia unanimously cited as rationale for its ruling to permit removal, despite contractual language to retain the statue, an expert’s testimony that “the [Robert E.] Lee Monument was erected as a symbol of defiance to Reconstruction, and as an unapologetic statement regarding the continued belief in the virtue of the ‘Lost Cause’ and in the Confederacy’s pre-Civil War way of life, including the subjugation of people of African descent. The post-Reconstruction proliferation of Confederate monuments was contemporaneous with and closely related to the passage of racially discriminatory policies….”[5]
Drawing on outside resources to help a community memorialize, educate, and promote discussion
Symbols experts can guide a community to draw on resources such as the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a national nonprofit that has expertise and a commitment to collaborating with communities to memorialize, educate, and promote discussion of racial justice. The initiative, for example, offers ideas that communities can implement without substantial resources, such as its brochures and videos, a “History of Racial Injustice Calendar,” help in gathering soil at lynching sites for exhibits, erecting historical markers, and a general guide to local communities, The Community Remembrance Project Catalog . EJI’s own Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery provide examples of engaging education, commemoration, and discussions about the past and future.[6]
Providing for upkeep
Already graffiti mars the Black Lives Matter signs painted on streets across the nation in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. For some, the continual upkeep might be expensive. For example, the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery commissioned 16 artists to create the street mural below.
“Black Lives Matter” murals have already been damaged by vandals,[7] raising the question of how they should be maintained. In addition to physical defacement, cities may also face legal or political challenges; in 2025, Washington, D.C. removed its Black Lives Matter street mural following a threat to withhold federal funding, illustrating that communities pursuing symbolic expressions should be prepared to defend them not only against graffiti, but also through legal and political channels.
Using Historical Context to Inform Public Dialogue
In Jacksonville, leaders brought in a University of North Florida history professor to prepare a report on the city’s Confederate monuments, offering participants historical context ahead of a series of public forums. The report noted, “If the history of Confederate monuments tells us anything, it is that the dominant narratives about the meaning of the Civil War depend on who wields political power in the South at a given time. This pattern seems to hold true for Jacksonville as well.”[8] This perspective helped surface underlying concerns and gave the community a shared point of reference for deeper conversation.
- Adam Serwer, The Myth of the Kindly General Lee, The Atlantic (June 4, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/. See also, Tennessee v. Gilbert, No. M2020-01241-CCA-R3- CD, at 24-25, Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals (August 10, 2021) (in reversing the conviction of a defendant because of Confederate symbols in the room where the jury deliberated, a Tennessee courts of appeals listed articles by historians and archival materials and concluded that the Confederate states identified the right to enslave Black people as paramount among their justifications for secession). ↵
- Duane Jethro, Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power 158–159 (David Howes ed., Routledge 2020) (2019). ↵
- Monument Lab, National Monument Lab Audit 15 (2021), https://monumentlab.com/monumentlab- nationalmonumentaudit.pdf. ↵
- Marc Howard Ross, Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory (2018). ↵
- Taylor v. Northam, No. 210113, 2021 WL 3918940 (Va. Sept. 2, 2021) (unanimous). ↵
- Public interest lawyer and best-selling author Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative as a nonprofit organization in 1989, https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/. ↵
- See, e.g., Phil Helsel, Red Paint Splashed on Black Lives Matter Mural in Front of Trump Tower, NBC News (July 14, 2020) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/red-paint-splashed-black-lives-matter-mural-front-trump-tower-n1233735. ↵
- James B. Crooks, “Confederate Monuments: Whose History?,” document delivered to the Jesse Ball duPont Fund, Jacksonville, 2018, 17. ↵
