The Standing/Still Series Uses Arts Activism Toward Social Justice
The Make It Right Project, in partnership with Redux Contemporary Art Center, will hold a performance event at the John C. Calhoun monument in Marion Square. This is the second event in the Standing/Still performance series, which uses arts activism to call for the removal of the racist Calhoun marker and all symbols of white supremacy. Featured performers include musician/activist Benjamin Starr; actor/singer Nakeisha Daniel; historian Damon Fordham; and performer Javaron Conyers.
WHAT: Standing/Still performance series event presented by the Make It Right Project and Redux Contemporary Art Center
WHEN: Thursday, May 16, 2019, at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: The John C. Calhoun monument in Marion Square, Calhoun St., Charleston, SC 29401
WHO: Musician/activist Benjamin Starr; actor/singer Nakeisha Daniel; historian Damon Fordham; performer Javaron Conyers
The Make It Right Project
The Make It Right Project is dedicated to working with
multiple groups—activists, artists, historians and media outlets—to take down
Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history.
Last Thursday, April 11, the Make It Right Project launched its campaign to take down the John C. Calhoun monument in Charleston, South Carolina. The kick-off event was held at the Redux Contemporary Arts Center, which has partnered with MIR on an ongoing performance series, Standing / Still. The night featured a performance by Charleston Poet Laureate Marcus Amaker, DJ Samira Miché aka Sista Misses and artist Todd Anderson. Attendees included a cross-section of folks from Charleston’s arts, activist, academic, political and faith communities.
WCIV-ABC News 4 Charleston also ran a segment. Here, it’s critical to mention that the package was preceded by an anchor announcing that MIR had “led the charge” in the effort to take down Silent Sam, which was toppled in August 2018 by protesters. We want to be clear in stating that while we did work with numerous activists in Chapel Hill ahead of the monument’s removal, we do not take credit for “leading the charge.” Ahead of the statue’s takedown, MIR provided support—on several fronts—to those who have been fighting for years to take the monument down. Our work involves bolstering the efforts of those on the ground, many of whom have been tirelessly pursuing every path to removal.
Thanks to all of you who are a part of this fight.
Image credit: “John C. Calhoun — Marion Square Park Charleston (SC) 2012” by Ron Cogswell, CC BY 2.0, Flickr, modified from original. Design by Farida Sheralam.
Last week, we held our kickoff event for the Make It Right Project’s campaign to take down the racist John C. Calhoun monument in Charleston, South Carolina. Photos from the event, along with a wonderful Post and Courier article on the campaign, are below.
Now it’s time for us to get down to work.
Removing Calhoun will require sustained work and effort. The monument will never come down until those keeping it in place feel pressure from multiple sources, and realize that there won’t be a compromise.
If you aren’t already actively involved in the Charleston campaign and would like to be, please reach out—we need your help to carry out plans in the works for the coming weeks and months ahead.
And if you have a particular way you’d like to contribute, reach out and let us know. Put it into an email to [email protected].
Below are photos of Make It Right Project-designed posters around town, a photo from our kickoff event, and a brand new piece on MIR from the Post and Courier.
New Report Coauthored by Our Schools Chief Correspondent Jeff Bryant Highlighted in Congressional Hearing on $1 Billion Wasted in Federal Charter School Grant Program A recent hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives made headlines when Democratic members grilled U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about her budget proposing huge cuts to programs—including Special Olympics, after-school programs, and special education—while calling for a double-digit increase for the department’s charter school grant program.
Referring to a new report, which Our Schools Chief Correspondent Jeff Bryant co-authored with the Network for Public Education, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, told DeVos in the hearing, “It baffles me that you found room for a $60 million increase to the Charter School Program… especially when you consider recent reports of waste and abuse in the program.”
Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, referring to the same report, asked DeVos what was being done about federal funds wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened and quickly closed.
The report, titled “Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,” found that up to $1 billion awarded by the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program—in more than 1,000 grants—was wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud.
The report calls for a moratorium on any new grants coming from the federal Charter Schools Program and a thorough audit of money that has been spent.
Our Schools goes to the frontlines of the nationwide effort to privatize and undermine the public education system. It exposes the false promises of charter schools, voucher programs, and corporate-style reforms and spotlights how communities are fighting back and often succeeding against the school privatization agenda.
ARTICLE EXCERPT: A new report issued by the Network for Public Education provides a detailed accounting of how charter schools have scammed the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) for up to $1 billion in wasted grant money that went to charters that never opened or opened for only brief periods of time before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, or fraud. The report also found many of the charters receiving grant awards that managed to stay open fall far short of the grant program’s avowed mission to create “high-quality” schools for disadvantaged students.
President Trump’s 2020 budget blueprint proposes increasing funding for the charter grant program by 13.6 percent, from $440 to $500 million, and education secretary Betsy DeVos praised this increase as a step forward for “education freedom.” But the report finds that increasing federal funds for this program would mostly continue to perpetuate academic fraud. READ MORE
As America’s racist historical myths go, the loyal black slave is one of the most enduring, destructive, and tightly held. Emerging from the white Southern racial imagination in the 1830s, the faithful slave personified slave owners’ defensiveness against a growing abolitionist movement and its condemnations of slavery, and slaveholders, as evil and immoral. The loyal-slave trope insisted that enslaved blacks labored for their enslavers not out of self-preservation and deeply instilled fear, but as an expression of love, fidelity, and devotion. After the Civil War ended in their humiliating defeat, white Southerners attempted to retroactively justify the Confederacy with the “Lost Cause” ideology, an ahistorical narrative that further reimagined the Old South as filled with happy enslaved blacks. The loyal slave became a stock character in slavery apologia from Gone with the Wind to pancake-mix ad campaigns to—perhaps less famously—a little-known subgenre of Confederate monuments. Nearly all of those overtly racist memorials still stand in sites around the South.
As with Confederate monuments generally, loyal-slave markers communicated not only the white South’s nostalgia for a counterfeit version of what once was, but also its belief in what should have been. Constructed not during slavery but between the 1900s and 1930s, like nearly all Confederate monuments, loyal-slave markers served as the visible component of an anti-black backlash against black civil-rights gains. In the face of African-American empowerment struggles, loyal-slave monuments telegraphed the idea that slavery had been the natural state of things. Faithful-slave markers also warned black folks working to overturn the racial-caste system in the late-19th and early-20th centuries that they risked the same brutal violence that had kept racial order during slavery. In fact, black defiance had manifested in 250 slaveuprisings, more than 100,000 escapes via the Underground Railroad, and thousands more escaped slaves’ joining the Union Army before slavery was abolished in 1865.
This past weekend, I attended the Second Annual International Take ’Em Down Organizer’s conference, from March 22 to 24, hosted by the TakeEmDownJax group in Jacksonville, Florida. The group that turned out—activists, organizers and aligned supporters there to engage, exchange and learn—was truly incredible.
For three days, the group had critical, necessary conversations about what this work means, why we do it, how best to carry it out, obstacles we face, ways to be and do better, failures and successes, future plans and goals, and the true meaning of liberation.
An amazing bus tour of Jacksonville was led by Rodney Lawrence Hurst Sr., a civil rights legend and author of It Was Never About a Hot Dog and a Coke. We stopped by a remembrance of Vernell Bing Jr., a young unarmed black man murdered by Jacksonville police officer Tyler Landreville, who is still employed by the Sheriff’s Office. A rally held in Jacksonville’s aptly named Confederate Park—home to the Confederate behemoth currently being targeted by the Make It Right Project—drew a fantastic crowd, and I was honored to be included on the list of speakers. That was followed by a panel, a humbling experience for me to sit with so many key voices in this movement: Wells Todd of TakeEmDownJax, without whom this conference wouldn’t have happened; Michael “Quess” Moore of Take ’Em Down NOLA, the group that did the heavy lifting to take down Confederate monuments (despite New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu being given the credit) and that inspired Take ’Em Down chapters around the country; Maya Little, the UNC-Chapel Hill activist whose protest of Silent Sam gave the removal effort national visibility; and Rev. Ron Rawls of St. Paul AME Church in St. Augustine, Florida, whose thoughtful answers and uncompromising voice repeatedly brought down the house.
I cannot give enough thanks to TakeEmDownJax’s organizers—there are too many to name here, but there are so many dedicated folks—for putting together this inspiring event. You really put together something special. Thanks to all the incisive and committed folks who attended—including a special thanks to the brilliant folks from Take ’Em Down NOLA, who offered so much wisdom and love.
Download an editable PDF of a pamphlet you can use to inform people about Confederate monuments where you live. Once you’ve finished your pamphlet and filled in all your local information, send us the completed pamphlet and let us know you’ll be using it. You can email us at [email protected].
Click the link above and download from your browser.
Once you’ve downloaded, we recommend opening the document in Adobe Reader.
Type in the blue fields to adapt the text for your monument.
Save the file after you update your custom fields—otherwise your edits will be lost.
Print. We recommend printing from Adobe Reader, with the print settings of:
Actual size: rather than shrink-to-fit to the page—don’t worry if in the preview it looks like text will be outside the cropmarks, as it should work if you try a test print with this setting
Print on both sides
Flip on the short edge: otherwise one side will be upside-down
Fold (in a trifold with the cover at right on side 1, then fold the Q&A flap next). (You may need to trim one margin or adjust your folding or print settings to make the margins work.)
The Make It Right Project erected a billboard in downtown Jacksonville, Florida, today calling for the removal of monuments to the Confederacy—specifically targeting the city’s “Monument to the Women of the Confederacy.” The billboard points out the shamefulness of Jacksonville’s Confederate statuary, which glorifies and honors a nation founded explicitly on the cornerstone of black chattel slavery.
“According to the inscription, the women honored by this monument ‘gave their all’ to the Confederate cause, which was the enslavement of black human beings in perpetuity,” said Kali Holloway, Director of the Make It Right Project. “It is an ethically bankrupt and morally indefensible cause, which this statue has nonetheless represented for more than a century. Today we loudly call for that misplaced reverence—of racist violence, supremacy and power—to end. Now.”
“The Confederacy: Wrong Side of Slavery. Wrong Side of History,” the signage reads. The billboard follows other MIR billboards demanding Confederate monument removal erected in Seattle, Washington; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Charlottesville, Virginia. Located along I-95 West, 300 feet north of Kings Road, the sign is up days before the “Take ’Em Down Everywhere” Global Conference.
Take ’Em Down Everywhere Global Conference — March 23, 2019
TakeEmDownJax hosts the Second Annual Take ’Em Down Everywhere Global Conferencethis Saturday, March 23. The convening brings together activists from around the country and world who are dedicated to dismantling white supremacy and reckoning with its ongoing legacy in every form, including its most visible manifestation—monuments glorifying systems of racist oppression and their defenders. Public events will be held downtown, including a rally at 3 p.m. in Confederate Park at 956 Hubbard Street, followed by a panel discussion that will include Make It Right Project Director Kali Holloway, to be held in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Union Hall at 966 North Liberty Street at 5 p.m.
“We know these monuments were not erected right after the Civil War, but from the close of the 19th century through the second half of the 20th,” said Wells Todd of TakeEmDownJax. “Putting Confederate soldiers and racist, pro-slavery politicians on literal pedestals sent a threatening and intimidating message to the African-American community. These statues were tied to the legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans, and they are inextricably connected to inequities that persist to this day.”
The list of confirmed speakers and panelists is as follows:
Mary Cobb of the Women’s March St. Johns, who will discuss the theft of a marker dedicated recently to an African-American man lynched in St. Johns County
Maya Little from Take Action Chapel Hill, who led the fight to remove the statue of Silent Sam from the UNC-Chapel Hill campus
Kali Holloway from the Make It Right Project, a campaign dedicated to taking down Confederate monuments and telling the truth about history
Michael Quess Moore of Take ’Em Down NOLA, who successfully led the effort to remove numerous New Orleans Confederate markers
Rev. Ron Rawls of St. Paul AME Church in Lincolnville, speaking on the struggle to take down the statues in St. Augustine
Ben Frazier of TakeEmDownJax, who will discuss the effort to remove two statues in Jacksonville
Rev. Phillip Baber on the launching of an initiative to change the name of Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville
Holli Rumsey of TakeEmDownJax, who will break down myths surrounding these symbols of the Confederacy
JoAnna Brown, a spoken word poet
Kara Lane, a student leader at Robert E. Lee High School
The Make It Right Project
The Make It Right Project is dedicated to working with multiple groups—activists, artists, historians and media outlets—to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history.
I’ve written more than a few Post and Courier columns about the need to move monuments to the Confederate States of America from public spaces to places where they can be viewed in their proper historical context.
A few recent letters to the editor have defended those monuments, noting that similar monuments were erected to honor those who fought for the United States of America. They argue that Confederate monuments — built years after of the Civil War — were erected not to celebrate the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow segregation but because it took years for the South to recover from economic devastation and to raise the funds for their erection.
Those who actually erected or played a role in the erection of those Confederate monuments say otherwise.
When Confederate veteran and Ku Klux Klan supporter Julian Carr spoke at the dedication of the “Silent Sam” monument on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1913, he said, “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her clothing hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, and rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed this pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.”
Last night, the Dallas City Council voted 4-11 to take down the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park. Dallas anti-racist activists deserve tremendous credit for making this vote happen. For years now, they’ve been unstinting in their calls for the monument’s removal—employing methods of protest from the traditional to the wildly creative. Thank you for all your hard work and tireless effort.
This isn’t the end, of course. The Dallas Landmark Commission will now take up the issue, and that decision may be “appealed to the Dallas Plan Commission since the monument and the location in the Pioneer Cemetery are both historic,” according to a local NBC affiliate. “The issue would then once again return to the City Council for a final decision, but Wednesday’s vote is a very strong indication of what that final decision will be.”
The monument, which has stood since 1896, features a Confederate soldier atop a lofty 60-foot pedestal and ringed by statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Johnston, and Jefferson Davis. Erected by the Dallas chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, it’s located in downtown Dallas, just across the street from City Hall. The statue is one of the Make It Right Project’s 10 Most Unwanted statues.
Congratulations, again, to Dallas’s activists, whose sustained outcry over the last three years has led to the removal in September 2017 of the statue of Robert E. Lee at Lee Park, the renaming of the park to Oak Lawn Park, and the 2018 changing of multiple school names that formerly honored Confederates.
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