Earth | Food | Life: Covering the Climate Crisis and Our Broken Food System

Earth | Food | Life (EFL), a project of the Independent Media Institute (IMI), produces and publishes reports on climate change threats, provocative animal rights essays, and insights on the frontlines of the food revolution that is sweeping America—increasingly organic, increasingly sustainable, increasingly humane. In the past six months alone, EFL has worked with more than 30 authors—including IMI writing fellows, freelance reporters, consumer advocates, frontline activists and experts across several fields—to bring dozens of exclusive articles to readers across the globe.

In recent months, EFL has held both the Trump administration and the corporate sector accountable for malfeasance, unethical decision-making and promoting profit over public health, the environment and the rights and welfare of animals. EFL editor Reynard Loki recently talked to Emmy Award-winning director of “Gasland” Josh Fox about his new performance project, “The Truth Has Changed,” which reveals how big data and big oil are fueling climate denial and the right-wing misinformation campaign to get Trump reelected in 2020. Trump’s White House was also in the crosshairs of Elliott Negin, who denounced the administration’s sustained and repeated attacks on science, while Adam Kolton condemned Trump’s reckless push to drill in the Arctic.

Our broken food system also remains a central focus of Earth | Food | Life. David Coman-Hidy, Tia Schwab, Priya Sawhney and Taylor Ford each unveiled different aspects of the animal cruelty inherent in factory farms, while also spotlighting deceptive corporate practices that keep consumers in the dark, and Elizabeth Henderson uncovered the financial plight of small family farms facing the powerful forces of food sector consolidation, including unfair food pricing. Laurel Sutherlin, Michael Green and Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner explored various ubiquitous—and legal—substances in our food system, some of which, like PFAS, are toxic to humans, and others, like palm oil, which threaten biodiversity and endangered wildlife through rampant—and sometimes illegal—deforestation.

In 2020, EFL will continue to produce hard-hitting reports, exposés and op-eds to reveal how both the public and private sectors have been working to undermine advancements and protections in animal rights, food safety, and the environment. In addition, EFL will continue to produce weekly “Take Action Tuesday” newsletters, which give readers easy ways to have their voices heard through petitions, consumer pledges and letters to state and federal legislators.

About Earth | Food | Life:

Edited by Reynard Loki, Earth | Food | Life explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters, and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. Earth | Food | Life emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

To learn more, visit Earth | Food | Life on the web, on Twitter, or email EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected].

Jeff Bryant’s Commentary on Charter School Funds Waste Published in Chicago Tribune

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Chicago Tribune on December 17, 2019.

Click to read the full article online.

Commentary: Millions wasted on charter schools

BY JEFF BRYANT | TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE | DEC 17, 2019

Between 2006 and 2014, the federal government gave the state of Iowa millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to open 11 new charter schools. Ten of them promptly failed, after burning through more than $3.66 million of taxpayers’ money.

During the same period, Kansas received $8.9 million in federal grants to finance 29 new charter schools. Twenty-two of those schools 76% closed or never opened for even a day, wasting almost $6.4 million.

Georgia received 140 federal grants for charter schools, with more than half the schools closing, at a cost of $23 million. Delaware’s federally funded charter schools had a nearly equal attrition rate eight out of 14, a loss of $3.6 million.

These are just a few of the jaw-dropping findings in a new report from the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group started by Diane Ravitch and other educators to support public schools and oppose efforts to privatize education.

[…]

The above is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Chicago Tribune on December 17, 2019.

Click to read the full article online.

Art & Activism Guide Make It Right in Charleston This Fall

This fall, I was honored to spend time in Charleston, South Carolina, and to take part in three arts-focused events.

On the evening of October 1, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art hosted a conversation between me and local visual artist Colin Quashie. The museum is currently exhibiting Quashie’s latest series, titled Linked, in which the artist “juxtaposes images of well-known Black figures with other representations of artifacts to comment on stereotypes as they exist today.” The discussion covered a range of topics within that vast arena, including the meaning of monuments, their impact on our public spaces and what it would mean to remove those figures.

A few weeks later on October 29, I participated in a Halsey Talk—part of an ongoing series of discussions hosted by the museum around converging issues and topics within art. Led by the museum’s manager of exhibits and programs, Bryan Watson Granger, the theme of the night was “Art and Activism.” The Make It Right Project has made arts activism a centerpiece of our work, and the conversation began by looking back at some of the most powerful arts interventions we’ve employed in multiple genres and disciplines. We also discussed some other examples of artists using their work to create—or at the very least, nudge—social change. Many thanks to the attendees, who made this a genuinely compelling discussion.

On November 12—following a delay caused by Hurricane Dorian—I finally got to take part in Charleston’s 35th annual PechaKucha Conference. This year’s event was part of the Charleston Arts Festival and held at the Charleston Music Hall. PechaKucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) is a super-short-form storytelling format that invites speakers to present on pretty much any topic of interest—provided they show 20 images, and speak for just 20 seconds while each picture appears. I talked about the long and often hidden history of Black resistance to racist monuments in Charleston.

Thanks so much to everyone at the Halsey, particularly Bryan Watson Granger and museum Director and Chief Curator Mark Sloan. Thanks also to Charleston Arts Festival Co-Founder and PechaKucha Artist Liaison Terry Fox; Charleston Music Hall Executive Director Charles Carmody; and everyone who took part in this year’s event.

Kali Holloway
Director of the Make It Right Project

MIR Director Kali Holloway Interviewed in H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online

The following is an excerpt of an interview that was originally published on H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. Click to read the full interview online.

Confederate Symbols in Monument and Memory is an H-Slavery discussion series on monuments and memorials commemorating the Confederacy and historical memory. It follows ongoing contests over the placement of monuments to the Confederacy and other forms of commemoration on public grounds and examines debates over their purpose and implications.

This post features an interview conducted by H-Slavery editor Alex Tabor (Carnegie Mellon University) with Kali Holloway, Senior Director of the Make It Right Project—an Independent Media Institute initiative to “do more than just ‘raise awareness’ or ‘start a national conversation’” about Confederate monuments and statues that instead “aims to genuinely move the needle, creating measurable, visible change.” Ms. Holloway is currently a Senior Writer at the Independent Media Institute and the co-curator of the Theater of the Resist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; she has contributed to several HBO and PBS documentary films and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, TIME, and The Huffington Post, among several other outlets.

H-Net’s interview with Kali Holloway can be accessed here. Visit here to learn more about Kali Holloway and the work of the Independent Media Institute or Make It Right Project.

How does the Make It Right Project relate to other initiatives hosted by the Independent Media Institute (IMI)?

Great question. At the time of the Independent Media Institute’s founding in 1987, there was a clear and pressing need for greater public access to, and elevation of, progressive journalism that covered news often overlooked by mainstream outlets, and which engaged perspectives ignored by the corporate press. In the decades since, that need has grown exponentially. We’re at a point of staggering hyper-partisanship and disinformation in conservative media, and ever-increasing corporatism within mainstream media overall, both factors that have had devastating consequences on the political, social and cultural shape of this country. IMI’s approach to addressing those issues is essentially holistic. We serve as a platform—a clearinghouse of sorts—for independent journalism dedicated to addressing systemic issues across the board via projects/verticals dedicated to topics from voting rights, to education, to the economy, to climate/environment. The Make It Right Project’s journalistic output is part of IMI’s larger effort to produce crucial media that then appears in over a dozen major progressive and independent outlets in the U.S. IMI’s collective journalistic output shows how none of these issues are siloed—and IMI’s coverage of those topics illuminates their interrelatedness. We think of IMI’s work, which touches on so many areas, as offering a broad vision look at the critical issues we’re facing on every front and where they intersect, with incisive ideas on how to address them and create substantive social change. 

How does the Make It Right Project differ from other initiatives that seek to draw attention to Confederate monuments and inform different audiences about their history and meaning?

We frequently work in collaboration and coalition with other groups around the country that are either singularly dedicated to removing Confederate markers—and we also partner with organizations whose mission stretches beyond, but also includes, the removal of Confederate memorials. The latter includes local chapters of groups like Black Lives Matter, NAACP, DSA, the Women’s March and SURJ; the former describes partners such as local divisions of Take Em Down, Chapel Hill’s Move Silent Sam, and De-Confederate Austin. One slight difference between us and some of our collaborators is that, while we endorse every good-faith effort to take down tributes to the Confederacy—in whatever form those tributes take, including roads, schools, building and city names—Make It Right is focused specifically on the removal of monuments and statues. We also place an emphasis on journalism and media as a means of public outreach and engagement, a focus informed both by the fact that I come to this work as a journalist and IMI’s background is in independent media. That said, we are always more than happy to bolster the work of like-minded groups with differing targets. 

[…]

The above is an excerpt of an interview that was originally published on H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. Click to read the full interview online.

New Investigative Series Finds Systemic Corruption in School Leadership

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive. Click to read the full article online.

Investigations Unearth Systemic Corruption in K-12 School Leadership—and Students and Teachers Lose Out

Much of the blame lies with an education reform movement that has exhorted schools to operate more like businesses and mimic corporate hiring processes.

Revelations of corruption in business and government are becoming an everyday affair, with example after example of people in leadership positions using elevated status for personal gain rather than for the public good. The deluge of stories about lying and cheating politicians, industry lobbyists, and corporate executives can lead to easy cynicism about how things work in business and politics. 

But what about when corruption flourishes in public schools?

A recent series of investigative articles I reported for Our Schools, an education project of the Independent Media Institute, found numerous instances of school purchases and personnel being steered toward decisions that rewarded opportunistic leaders and well-connected companies rather than students and teachers. And even though a number of such exposés suggest systemic corruption, media accounts generally frame these scandals as singular examples of corrupt behavior.

[…]

The above is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive. Click to read the full article online.

Make It Right’s Kali Holloway on Controversy in Charlottesville in the Daily Beast

Charlottesville Confederate Statue Defender Sues Paper, Prof, for Reporting His Family’s Slaveholding History

Edward Dickinson Tayloe II is suing the city to save the statue behind the Unite the Right rally—and says the paper implied he is “a racist and an opponent of people of color.”

By Kali Holloway

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Daily Beast. Click to read the full article online.

Edward Dickinson Tayloe II is the descendant of a “First Family of Virginia,” a euphemistic way of saying white, rich, socially prominent before the American Revolution and—through the Civil War—slaveholding. 

The Tayloes’ legacy as one of the largest slaveowning families in the state is well-documented. Amidst nearly 30,000 historical papers donated to the Virginia Historical Society by the family itself are plantation ledgers detailing the expansion of the Tayloes’ enslaved work force over the 19th century, an evidentiary accounting of how the exploitation of free black labor allowed the family to amass wealth, land, and political power. 

Facts about the Tayloe family’s slaveholding past—including the regularity with which it engaged in the heartless practice of splitting up enslaved families—appeared in a brief profile of Edward Tayloe published this March by the Charlottesville, Va., newspaper C-Ville Weekly. In response, Tayloe employed a strategy once frequently used by those of means to silence critics that’s seen a resurgence in recent years: He filed a lawsuit alleging defamation and demanding a fortune in damages.

The profile of Tayloe was a brief section in a longer article about the plaintiffs in Monument Fund v. Charlottesville, another piece of litigation in which he is involved. In March 2017, roughly one month after the Charlottesville City Council voted to take down a local Confederate monument, Tayloe and 12 other co-plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the city to prevent the marker’s removal. That statue—a grand bronze depiction of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on horseback—would gain national notoriety in August 2017 when neo-Nazis (whom President Trump later called “very fine people… there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name”) descended on Charlottesville to violently oppose its planned removal. 

[…]

The above is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Daily Beast. Click to read the full article online.

Confederate Monuments: Where Are They Now?

According to the latest SPLC tally, there are roughly 780 Confederate monuments standing across the U.S.That’s a staggering number of tributes to the losing side of a treasonous insurrection; a war that ended not with a treaty, but with the South’s full surrender. More importantly, those statues honor people who fought for a nation founded to preserve black enslavement—a fact enshrined in its Constitution, its member states’ declarations of reasons for secession, its vice president’s most famous speech. It’s no wonder that white supremacists of every stripe—from the neo-Nazis who occupied Charlottesville to the man who currently occupies the executive office—are so fiercely defensive of them.

As Trump and the violent racists in his base contribute to an atmosphere of fear and hatred, one in which white racial terror violence is on the rise, the need to take down Confederate monuments has gained even greater urgency. Since the 2015 white supremacist murder of nine black parishioners in Charleston—a horrific meeting of America’s gun and race problems—114 monuments have been removed in cities from Brooklyn to Durham to Dallas. Yes, that’s a mere fragment of the total number of Confederate monuments. But communities across the country are currently embroiled in fights to remove white supremacist symbols from their public spaces, and few of those battles make it to the national press.

Below is an overview of the status of just a few Confederate monuments around the country.

Confederate-Named Army Bases: There are 10 Army bases in the South named for Confederate soldiers. Fort Gordon is named for General John Brown Gordon, the reputed head of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in Georgia; Virginia’s Fort Lee honors Robert E. Lee, the man who led the treasonous fight to maintain black enslavement. In late July, the League of United Latin American Citizens proposed that Texas’s Fort Hood—currently named for John Bell Hood, who ditched the U.S. Army to take up arms for the insurrectionist Confederacy—be renamed for Special Forces Master Sgt. Roy Benavidez, a Texas native who received the Medal of Honor and five Purple Hearts for his service during the Vietnam War. Military news outlet Stars and Stripes notes that LULAC’s proposal “will go to the secretary of the Army then to the appropriate committees in Congress.” In related news, an amendment to the House version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would prohibit the Pentagon from naming any assets after Confederates going forward.

District of Columbia: The statue of Confederate General Albert Pike in D.C. stands on National Park Service grounds. On July 30, Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced legislation to remove the statue from the plot of federal land it currently occupies. Instead, Norton is advocating for the rendering of Pike to be moved to a museum, or some other place it can be properly contextualized. She notes that the Freemasons, who funded the statue’s placement back in 1901, have co-signed her call for removal. A press release on Norton’s website declares that Pike “was a Confederate general who served dishonorably and was forced to resign in disgrace. It was found that soldiers under his command mutilated the bodies of Union soldiers, and Pike was ultimately imprisoned after his fellow officers reported that he misappropriated funds. Adding to the dishonor of taking up arms against the United States, Pike dishonored even his Confederate military service. He certainly has no claim to be memorialized in the nation’s capital. Even those who do not want Confederate statues removed will have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.”

Georgia: In 2010 the Georgia General Assembly passed a law that prohibits the removal of Confederate monuments. (Nearly identical “Heritage Laws” exist in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.) In April 2019, Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill that made relocation of Confederate statues, even to museums, illegal, and increased penalties for those caught protesting Confederate markers using defacement. Legislators in Atlanta—the blue dot in this Confederate-obsessed red sea—recently announced that they plan to put up plaques that add historical context about slavery next to four of the city’s Confederate markers. “This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood,” one sign notes; “rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights.”

Tennessee: In 2017, the lawmakers in Memphis undertook a brilliant political strategy to circumnavigate the state’s repressive “Heritage Law” that prevents the removal of Confederate monuments. The law prohibits removal of Confederate statuary on public grounds, so city legislators sold two downtown parks to a private nonprofit for just $1,000 each. This allowed for the successful removal of statues honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (a neo-Confederate group) are currently trying to convince a court to force the return of the statues. In the meantime, the statues are sitting in storage while a new site for them is chosen.

Louisiana:

New Orleans: Formed in 2014, Take ’Em Down NOLA was the primary organizing entity behind the movement to take down New Orleans’ Confederate statues. In June 2015, following the massacre of nine black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, Mayor Mitch Landrieu publicly called for the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee; the next month he officially tasked the City Council to begin the legal processes necessary to remove the statues. In December of that year, the Council voted 6-1 to remove four statues that glorified the Confederacy. They remained up until May 2017, their takedown forestalled by lawsuits filed by “preservationist” groups, as well as the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Those suits failed in federal court. The Confederate statues came down over 25 days in April and May 2017. Among the conditions of removal was a clause that the statues could never again be displayed outdoors on public grounds in New Orleans. The statues are currently in a city storage facility.

Shreveport: The Shreveport, Louisiana, chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) appealed a federal judge’s 2017 decision to dismiss their lawsuit to keep up a Confederate monument in front of a local courthouse. In April 2019, the UDC lost their case.

North Carolina:

Chapel Hill: North Carolina’s Heritage Law was passed in July 2015, roughly a month after the Charleston church massacre, a hasty and transparent effort to protect the state’s racist Confederate statuary from the groundswell of calls for removal. The law made efforts to remove the UNC-Chapel Hill Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam”—which student and local anti-racist activists had been legally trying to take down for over five decades—yet more difficult. Inaction by UNC administration added to student outrage. In August 2018, community frustrations boiled over and the statue was toppled by a crowd of protesters. Since then, the school’s chancellor has stepped down and its Board of Governors has repeatedly punted on plans for the statue’s new permanent placement.

Winston-Salem: North Carolina’s 2015 Heritage Law prevents the removal of statues from public land, but has no say over markers on private property. After Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines made public his intent to remove a local Confederate marker, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (the group who erected a local Confederate statue), which had previously claimed ownership of marker, denied ownership in court papers to establish it as a public object protected by the law. The UDC sued the city, which moved forward with plans for removal on March 12, placing it in storage until it could be erected in the Salem Cemetery. A UDC lawsuit to have the marker put back failed in court. “It is a symbol of oppression and the subjugation of the African-American people and so it’s hurtful to many in our community,” Mayor Joines told news outlets. The city has announced plans that it will move the statue to a Confederate cemetery.

Texas:

Dallas: After 81 years, an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was removed from a Dallas park in September 2017—one month after the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The statue sold in an online auction for $1.4 million to a buyer using the screen name “LawDude,” who was later identified as Texas law firm owner Ron Holmes.

Back in February 2019, the Dallas City Council voted 11-4 to take down the city’s Confederate War Memorial, a 60-foot-tall monument featuring statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Albert Johnston. In the months that followed, the city’s Landmark Commission and Plan Commission would both concur with the Council’s vote, and a win seemed just over the horizon for Dallas anti-racist activists, who’ve worked tirelessly for years to bring the monument down. Unfortunately, two lawsuits in two different courts have stalled progress on removal. In recently filed court papers, the city argues against the contention that the statue must remain standing for its “protection.” The city’s brief notes that it is “not threatening to sell or destroy the Confederate Monument” but “only to have the monument safely removed and archivally stored.” In other words, it’ll be as safe in storage as it is in the park, where it’s currently covered by a tarp.

San Antonio: In 2017, the UDC chapter in San Antonio, Texas, filed a federal lawsuit against local officials after the City Council, following the racist violence in Charlottesville, voted to remove a Confederate monument from public property. It’s been nearly two years since the Confederate monument was removed from Travis Park, taken down in the dead of night after a 10-1 City Council vote. The suit is still being litigated; the statue is now in storage.

Florida:

Gainesville: The Alachua County Commission voted 4-1 to take down a Confederate monument known locally as “Old Joe” in 2017. After both a local history museum and the county’s Veterans Memorial Park refused to take it, the UDC—which erected the statue in 1904—stepped in to “save” the marker by taking it back and paying for its removal. It was removed by a construction crew on August 14, 2017, roughly 48 hours after the Unite the Right rally. According to the Gainesville Sun, the statue was relocated to the Oak Ridge Cemetery, a private graveyard near Rochelle, Florida. 

Lake County: The National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building is a grand chamber filled with statues of noteworthy Americans, two submitted by each state. For the first time since the statue collection began in 1870, a U.S. state will be represented by a black American. Mary McLeod Bethune—educator, civil rights pioneer, antilynching advocate, adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach—will now be the figure depicting Florida. She will replace an outgoing statute of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith. In a highly controversial move, commissioners in Lake County, Florida, voted to take possession of the Confederate statue, despite intense outcry from residents. Per one local outlet, “Nine of the 14 municipalities in Lake County approved formal resolutions opposing the relocation of the statue.” According to the paper, “the Lake County Historical Society Museum intends to house the museum in a facility above the historic county jail.”

California: It’s a testament to the insidiousness of the Confederacy—if not the insurrectionist uprising, certainly the ideology—that California was once the home to many Confederate markers. Honorifics to Confederates included the Dixie School District just outside San Francisco (renamed Miller Creek Elementary School District just this past July) and the two sequoias in Sequoia National Park named for Robert E. Lee (both still standing, names unchanged). In 2004—again, 2004—the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected a nine-foot-tall monument honoring Confederates in Santa Ana Cemetery. The marker praised “the sacred memory of the pioneers who built Orange County after their valiant efforts to defend the Cause of Southern Independence.” In July, protesters showed their disdain for the granite marker using defacement, spray painting one side red and scrawling the word “racists” down its face. Less than a month later, on August 1, the monument was removed by the city and placed in storage. Orange County Cemetery District General Manager Tim Deutsch reportedly stated the protesters’ paint job had made the monument “an unsightly public nuisance.”

Missouri:

Kansas City: Days after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, protesters defaced the “Loyal Women of the Old South” Confederate monument. A local chapter of the UDC “gifted” the statue to Kansas City in 1934; following the defacement, the group accepted an anonymous donor’s offer to remove the statue to prevent further harm. Then-Parks Director Mark McHenry told press that the monument was placed “in storage in an undisclosed location, not on park property.”

St. Louis: After Mayor Lyda Krewson publicly declared in 2017 the city’s intent to remove a Confederate memorial put up by the UDC in 1912, a local chapter of the group signed over ownership to the Missouri Civil War museum. The museum then successfully sued the city for custody of the structure. The director of the museum has noted that the removed structure had been “painted by protestors and the city’s resulting use of paint stripper damaged the work. It will be undergoing restoration.” The museum is ultimately looking for the right property to place it in, such as “a Civil War battlefield, a Civil War cemetery, or a museum property.”

Montana: Disgusted by the murderous violence in Charlottesville, members of the American Indian Caucus of the Montana Legislature drafted an open letter to appeal to state legislators to remove a Confederate memorial. “The fountain was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that openly supported the white supremacist views and mission of the early Ku Klux Klan,” the letter noted. “This is the only Confederate monument in the northwestern United States.” The memorial—a fountain that sat for 101 years in the city’s Hill Park—was removed in on August 18, 2017. A group called the Equity Fountain Project put out a call for new designs to replace the old monument and raised the funds needed to build and maintain the marker. Citizens of Helena chose, via vote, the final fountain design, titled the “Sphere of Interconnectedness.” Equity Fountain Project head Ron Waterman expressed hopes the fountain will showcase the “values of equity and equality, diversity, respect, generosity and compassion, tolerance, service, peace and justice.” Once the new monument is placed, Montana will become the first city to remove and replace a Confederate marker.

Tennessee: The city of Franklin, Tennessee, has an ongoing lawsuit against the UDC to determine who owns the land in one local public park containing a Confederate monument erected by the UDC in the late 19th century. The UDC threatened legal action when Franklin city leaders announced plans to add markers recognizing African-American historical figures to the park. Despite those threats, the city is going forward with construction of the markers.

Maryland: For months, Baltimore’s political leaders debated the fate of its Confederate statuary. After the white supremacist violence at the Unite the Right rally, the city acted swiftly to remove those monuments, taking down four markers on the night of August 15 and the wee hours of the morning that followed. Those statues were placed in storage. A recent New York Times investigation notes that city officials are “asking for a detailed plan from anyone interested in acquiring” the monuments.

Virginia:

Charlottesville: The equestrian statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—rallying points for the neo-Nazis of the Unite the Right rally—still stand in two Charlottesville parks. The Charlottesville City Council voted to relocate the Lee statue in 2017 (a move the white supremacists cited to justify their violence), but the removal has been stalled by a lawsuit filed by 13 plaintiffs, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The judge in the case, who at intervals has made clear his Lost Cause-influenced view of Southern history, has often sided with the plaintiffs at critical points throughout the case. It is very likely that whatever the final decision in the case, the lawsuit will end up in the Virginia Supreme Court.

Hampton: In 1956—two years after the Supreme Court decision that legally desegregated Southern schools—the UDC funded an archway at Fort Monroe Army base in Hampton, Virginia, that decreed the area “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park.” As Virginia officials have more recently noted, the peninsula on which Fort Monroe is located was originally known as Point Comfort, where the first Africans enslaved in this country arrived in 1619. (Fort Monroe was decommissioned as a military base in 2011.) On August 6, “Jefferson Davis” was removed from the archway. The letters were donated to the Fort Monroe Casemate Museum.

Make It Right Project Brings Social Dance, Theater, and Storytelling to Charleston’s Confederate Monuments Struggle

The third event in the Standing/Still series was a special celebration on two fronts. First, the program was held on Juneteenth, the day commemorating the end of legalized black chattel slavery in the U.S. Secondly, the evening’s performance honored Millicent E. Brown, who was one of the first black students to integrate South Carolina’s all-white schools.

Dance Matters, a Charleston-based contemporary dance company, performed an exquisite series of selections from “Coming to Monuments,” which uses social dance, theater, and storytelling to unpack the history of Confederate monuments. The score includes text and music by Charleston poet laureate Marcus Amaker.

Later, the architects behind Charleston Reconstructed offered a beta tour of their new app, which allows users to reconfigure public spaces, with a particular emphasis on the Confederate monuments in Marion Square. The app employs “narrative film techniques and augmented reality to flip the power structures of the past, hoping to expose users to a range of perspectives about the value of monuments as they currently stand.”

Following the performance, the attendees walked to the Emanuel 9 Commemoration Committee’s “Prayers for America” candlelight vigil in the green space of the Gaillard Center.

Huge thanks to Bryan Granger and Mark Sloan of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, who allowed us to host the event in the Hill Gallery, located in close proximity to the night’s vigil. Thanks also to Redux Contemporary Art Center, our partner in the Standing/Still series.

Photos and video of the event and the vigil that followed are below:

Calhoun Statue Effort Bolstered by TV and Newspaper Coverage

Last week, the Make It Right (MIR) Project continued its ongoing campaign to call out the racist Charleston monument to staunch pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun.

The South Carolina-focused initiative launched in April. On May 16, we held the second event in the Standing/Still performance series, which uses arts activism to call for the removal of the Calhoun marker and all symbols of white supremacy. Featured performers—all local Charleston artists—included musician and activist Benjamin Starr; actor and singer Nakeisha Daniel; historian Damon Fordham; and performer Javaron Conyers. The series is the result of a collaborative effort with Redux Contemporary Art Center.

In tandem with that work, MIR Director Kali Holloway wrote a powerful piece about South Carolina’s 2000 Heritage Law. In the article, which appeared in the Charleston City Paper, Holloway notes, “With the passage of that law, neo-Confederate state legislators successfully disenfranchised South Carolinians who oppose Confederate statuary, stripping entire communities of the political power to demand its removal. How fitting, in a kind of perfectly grim symmetry, that the same legislation that protects South Carolina’s Confederate monuments also disempowers the majority of its black citizens—just like the Jim Crow laws those markers celebrate.” To check out the piece in its entirety, visit the City Paper website.

The paper also ran its own coverage of MIR’s event and arts-focused partnership, noting our belief that “real change can come through arts activism because it provides a less didactic platform for people to express and consider potentially divisive issues.” Other local outlets covered the event and the initiative, including CBS television news affiliate Live 5 WCSC; ABC affiliate News 4; NBC affiliate News 2; and the right-leaning FITSNews.

Additionally, Rev. Joseph Darby—pastor of Morris Brown AME Church, vice president of the Charleston Branch of the NAACP, and an indispensable partner to MIR’s work in Charleston—wrote a timely Post and Courier piece that helped further bolster our efforts. Headlined “Calhoun Statue Should Not Stand in Prominent Public Space,” the piece notes that Calhoun was “a slaveholder who used his public offices to champion the right of the individual states to allow people to ‘own’ kidnapped Africans and their descendants, and who articulated his belief that my ancestors were an inferior species that somehow ‘benefited’ from being raped, beaten, castrated, maimed, tortured and lynched.”

You can read the piece in its entirety on the Post and Courier website.