Showing posts with label woke. Show all posts
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The backlash: how slavery research came under fire
More and more institutions are commissioning investigations into their historical links to slavery – but the fallout at one Cambridge college suggests these projects are meeting growing resistance writes Samira Shackle in The Guardian
When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as “a ‘woke activist’ with an agenda”. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about “fanatical” scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.
Bell-Romero, originally from Australia, had recently finished a PhD at Cambridge. He was at the start of his academic career and eager to prove himself. This was the ideal post-doctoral position: a chance to dig into the university’s archives to explore faculty and alumni links to slavery, and whether these links had translated into profit for Cambridge. It was the kind of work that, Bell-Romero said, “seems boring to the layperson” – spending days immersed in dusty archives and logbooks, exploring 18th- and 19th-century financial records. But as a historian, it was thrilling. It offered a chance to make a genuinely fresh contribution to burgeoning research about Britain’s relationship to slavery.
In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.
Cambridge was never a centre of industry like Manchester, Liverpool or Bristol, cities in which historic links to slavery are deep and obviously apparent – but as one of the oldest and wealthiest institutions in the country, the university makes an interesting case study for how intimately profits from slavery were entwined with British life. Given how many wealthy people in Britain in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were slaveholders, or invested in the slave economy, it was a reasonable expectation that both faculty and alumni may have benefited financially, and that this may have translated into donations to the university.
In the past decade, universities in the UK and US have commissioned similar research. Top US universities such as Harvard and Georgetown found they had enslaved people and benefited from donations connected to slavery. The first major research effort in the UK, at the University of Glasgow, began in 2018, but soon similar projects launched at Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham. Stephen Mullen, co-author of the Glasgow report, told me that he was surprised not only by the extent of the university’s financial ties to slavery, but by how much that wealth is still funding these institutions.
In their report, Mullen and his co-author Simon Newman established a methodology for working out the difficult question of how the financial value of historic donations and investments might translate into modern money, which produces a range of estimates rather than a single number: in the case of Glasgow, between £16.7m and £198m. In response to the research, the University of Glasgow initiated a “reparative justice” programme, including a £20m partnership with the University of the West Indies and a new centre for slavery studies.
All of this marks a dramatic change in how Britain thinks about slavery, and especially the idea of reparations. For the most part, when Britain has engaged with this history, the tendency has been to focus on the successful campaign for abolition; historians of slavery like to repeat the famous quip that Britain invented the slave trade solely to abolish it.
This wider trend is reflected in Cambridge. As far as the story of slavery and the University of Cambridge goes, perhaps the most well-known fact is that some of Britain’s key abolitionists – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson – were educated there. But British celebration of the abolition of slavery in the 1800s has tended to elide the awkward question of who the abolitionists were fighting against, and the point that the wealth and economic power generated by slavery did not disappear when the Abolition Act was passed.
“It was interesting to me that there weren’t so many questions about the other side – were slaveholders educated here? Did slaveholders give benefactions? Did students invest in the different slave-trading companies?” Bell-Romero said. “It’s not about smashing what came before, it’s about contributing and building on histories.”
Cambridge consists of the central university and 31 constituent colleges, each of which has its own administration, decision-making powers and budgets. Most of the university’s wealth is situated within colleges, and from the outset, the legacies of enslavement inquiry relied to an extent on colleges granting Bell-Romero and Cadeau access to their archives. This wasn’t always easy. “The entire research experience, even now, remains a constant struggle for archival access, an ongoing political tug of war,” Cadeau told me in late 2022. “There was financial support for the research from the central university, but mixed feelings and outright opposition were both widespread.”
The conflict at Caius seemed to be part of a wider faltering of legacies of slavery research – through overt backlash, or institutions announcing projects with great fanfare but not following through with support and funding. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and the author of Britain’s Black Debt, calls this pattern “research and run” – where universities do the archival work, then say a quick sorry and run from the implications of the findings, leaving the researchers exposed.
The historian Olivette Otele, a scholar of slavery and historical memory who was the first Black woman to be appointed a professor of history in the UK, joined the University of Bristol in 2020, and worked on the university’s own research into its deep connections to the slave trade. When she left just two years later, a colleague in another department tweeted that the university had used Otele “as a human shield to deflect legitimate criticism”. Announcing her departure, Otele wrote on Twitter: “The workload became insane and not compensated by financial reward. I actually burnt out,” adding that colleagues had been “sabotaging my reputation inside and outside the uni.”
As far as anyone could see, Caius had backed away from publishing Bell-Romero’s report after the controversy; Everill, head of the working group, was not sure it would ever be published. But in July, a newspaper submitted a freedom of information request about it. (Newspapers increasingly submit FoIs about academic research on subjects like slavery and empire as universities have become the frontline in the culture war; a controversial Times front page in August claimed that universities were changing syllabuses, even though their own data did not bear this out. Riley recalled one absurd example, where a journalist sent an FoI requesting all emails from academics using the word “woke”. “There were none, because we don’t actually sit there writing ‘I’m a woke historian’. That is insane.”)
The following month, the Caius report was published online, with the proposal for MPhil funding removed. It was not covered anywhere. “Probably because it turns out that wasn’t actually that inflammatory,” Everill said. In a statement to the Guardian, the master of the college, Prof Pippa Rogerson, said: “The report makes uncomfortable reading for all those affiliated to Caius. The College is 675 years old and it is important we acknowledge our complex past.”
In September, Bell-Romero and Cadeau’s much larger Cambridge University legacies of enslavement project was published. It found that Cambridge fellows had been involved in the East India Company and other slave-trading entities, and that the university had directly invested in the South Sea Company. They wrote: “Such financial involvement both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge.” The report was covered by major news outlets, but did not provoke a particularly strong response.
The conflict over the Caius research suggests that these disputes often have little to do with the archival research itself, or its conclusions. In the view of the critics, the research is discredited by its intention to correct past wrongs. Even when the researchers insist that they are not trying to assign blame or guilt, the critics insist in return – not without some justification – that whether or not this is the intention, it is almost always the effect. This is presumably why they disapprove of doing the research to begin with.
Seen this way, it is a standoff that has no hope of resolution. When I spoke to Abulafia, he questioned the point of the research: “Cambridge University and its role in slavery is not, to my mind, as big a question as all sorts of other questions one could argue about the slave trade,” he said. But scholars working on the area argue that this is precisely the point; to understand institutions’ relationships to slavery, whether small or large, and through this to build a fuller picture of the past. “When we do this research, we’re just adding another layer, another perspective,” said Bell-Romero. The critics, of course, see this empirical modesty as disingenuous. But the archival work carries on, all over the country, and the diametrically opposing views on the very premise will inevitably lead to more conflicts.
In late September, Cadeau and Bell-Romero organised an academic conference about reparations, held at the Møller Institute, a starkly modern building west of Cambridge city centre. A few days before, it was covered in the Telegraph, which quoted anonymous sources describing it as “propagandist” and “fanatical” and Abulafia saying: “It’s that sense that it’s going to be one-sided that concerns me.” Cadeau, who is now a lecturer of diaspora history at Soas in London, was unfazed. “What I am most concerned about are legacies of racism. I am concerned with how little this country knows about slavery, even leading historians,” she told me. “I have been more concerned about the implications of how we treat the history of slavery, and whether or not our societies will address the legacies of slavery and racism, and much less concerned about the press.”
In his opening remarks to the conference, the historian Prof Nicholas Guyatt acknowledged the negative coverage, saying: “We’ve had some media attention already and that’s great, I welcome all views and am pleased everyone is here to listen to our fantastic speakers.” Bell-Romero presented a paper on the profits of slavery at Oxbridge. Cadeau spoke about her research into South Sea Company annuities at Cambridge, saying that it was hard to find an older college in Cambridge that doesn’t have links to this funding. No news story about the conference emerged – perhaps because in practice this was a fairly routine academic exercise. People presented papers on their niche areas of research, ran over time and debated.
On the final day of the conference, I sat with Bell-Romero in the lunch hall. He told me that he felt the launch of the Cambridge project had been handled better than the Caius report; the draft had gone to expert readers and the university backed the research it had commissioned. While the academics waited for the next talk to begin, Bell-Romero and a few other scholars working on slavery and reparations discussed the growing backlash to their work in an incredulous and frustrated tone. One British academic said he receives death threats every time he speaks about the case for reparations. After a few minutes of weary commiseration, they stood up from their empty plates and walked back into the lecture theatre.
“If you take pride in the past,” a Latin American researcher said with quiet exasperation before leaving, “then you have to take responsibility, too.”
When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as “a ‘woke activist’ with an agenda”. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about “fanatical” scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.
Bell-Romero, originally from Australia, had recently finished a PhD at Cambridge. He was at the start of his academic career and eager to prove himself. This was the ideal post-doctoral position: a chance to dig into the university’s archives to explore faculty and alumni links to slavery, and whether these links had translated into profit for Cambridge. It was the kind of work that, Bell-Romero said, “seems boring to the layperson” – spending days immersed in dusty archives and logbooks, exploring 18th- and 19th-century financial records. But as a historian, it was thrilling. It offered a chance to make a genuinely fresh contribution to burgeoning research about Britain’s relationship to slavery.
In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.
Cambridge was never a centre of industry like Manchester, Liverpool or Bristol, cities in which historic links to slavery are deep and obviously apparent – but as one of the oldest and wealthiest institutions in the country, the university makes an interesting case study for how intimately profits from slavery were entwined with British life. Given how many wealthy people in Britain in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were slaveholders, or invested in the slave economy, it was a reasonable expectation that both faculty and alumni may have benefited financially, and that this may have translated into donations to the university.
In the past decade, universities in the UK and US have commissioned similar research. Top US universities such as Harvard and Georgetown found they had enslaved people and benefited from donations connected to slavery. The first major research effort in the UK, at the University of Glasgow, began in 2018, but soon similar projects launched at Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham. Stephen Mullen, co-author of the Glasgow report, told me that he was surprised not only by the extent of the university’s financial ties to slavery, but by how much that wealth is still funding these institutions.
In their report, Mullen and his co-author Simon Newman established a methodology for working out the difficult question of how the financial value of historic donations and investments might translate into modern money, which produces a range of estimates rather than a single number: in the case of Glasgow, between £16.7m and £198m. In response to the research, the University of Glasgow initiated a “reparative justice” programme, including a £20m partnership with the University of the West Indies and a new centre for slavery studies.
All of this marks a dramatic change in how Britain thinks about slavery, and especially the idea of reparations. For the most part, when Britain has engaged with this history, the tendency has been to focus on the successful campaign for abolition; historians of slavery like to repeat the famous quip that Britain invented the slave trade solely to abolish it.
This wider trend is reflected in Cambridge. As far as the story of slavery and the University of Cambridge goes, perhaps the most well-known fact is that some of Britain’s key abolitionists – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson – were educated there. But British celebration of the abolition of slavery in the 1800s has tended to elide the awkward question of who the abolitionists were fighting against, and the point that the wealth and economic power generated by slavery did not disappear when the Abolition Act was passed.
“It was interesting to me that there weren’t so many questions about the other side – were slaveholders educated here? Did slaveholders give benefactions? Did students invest in the different slave-trading companies?” Bell-Romero said. “It’s not about smashing what came before, it’s about contributing and building on histories.”
Cambridge consists of the central university and 31 constituent colleges, each of which has its own administration, decision-making powers and budgets. Most of the university’s wealth is situated within colleges, and from the outset, the legacies of enslavement inquiry relied to an extent on colleges granting Bell-Romero and Cadeau access to their archives. This wasn’t always easy. “The entire research experience, even now, remains a constant struggle for archival access, an ongoing political tug of war,” Cadeau told me in late 2022. “There was financial support for the research from the central university, but mixed feelings and outright opposition were both widespread.”
Gonville and Caius college (centre) at Cambridge University. Photograph: eye35/Alamy
So when Bell-Romero was approached by Gonville and Caius, the college where he had recently completed his PhD, to conduct a separate piece of research into the college’s links to slavery, he was delighted. Caius, as it is commonly known (it’s pronounced “Keys”), was founded in 1348. One of the oldest and wealthiest colleges in Cambridge, it is also seen as one of the most conservative and traditional. The college offered him a year’s contract, working one day a week, meaning he had about 50 days to do the archival research and write the report – a very short time for a broad brief.
As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the East India, South Sea and Royal African Companies, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty. Not only would this be interesting in its own right, but hugely useful for the wider project. He said yes. “I just thought – this is wonderful, unrestricted access to the archive,” he said. “That’s a dream for a historian. It’s as good as it gets.”
But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people “carry the taint of original sin” and that it was motivated by an “agenda” to “implicate” the college in slavery.
What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.
When the Cambridge vice-chancellor Stephen Toope first announced the legacies of enslavement inquiry, he said he wanted the university to “acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history”, adding: “We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it.”
Momentum was building around institutions looking into their links to slavery. Historians working on this area see this as a valuable addition to historic knowledge and a way to understand how the profits of slavery shaped Britain. Many of the richest people in 18th- and 19th-century Britain were involved in the slave trade and the plantation economy. The trade and distribution of goods produced by enslaved people helped fuel Britain’s development.
While enslaved people were mostly overseas, in colonies, out of sight, slavery funded British wealth and institutions from the Bank of England to the Royal Mail. The extent to which modern Britain was shaped by the profits of the transatlantic slave economy was made even clearer with the launch in 2013 of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. It digitised the records of tens of thousands of people who claimed compensation from the government when colonial slavery was abolished in 1833, making it far easier to see how the wealth created by slavery spread throughout Britain after abolition. “Slave-ownership,” the researchers concluded, “permeated the British elites of the early 19th century and helped form the elites of the 20th century.” (Among others, it showed that David Cameron’s ancestors, and the founders of the Greene King pub chain, had enslaved people.)
But as Bell-Romero would write in his report on Caius, “the legacies of enslavement encompassed far more than the ownership of plantations and investments in the slave trade”. Scholars undertaking this kind of archival research typically look at the myriad ways in which individuals linked to an institution might have profited from slavery – ranging from direct involvement in the trade of enslaved people or the goods they produced, to one-step-removed financial interests such as holding shares in slave-trading entities such as the South Sea or East India Companies.
Bronwen Everill, an expert in the history of slavery and a fellow at Caius, points out “how widespread and mundane all of this was”. Mapping these connections, she says, simply “makes it much harder to hold the belief that Britain suddenly rose to power through its innate qualities; actually, this great wealth is linked to a very specific moment of wealth creation through the dramatic exploitation of African labour.”
This academic interest in forensically quantifying British institutions’ involvement in slavery has been steadily growing for several decades. But in recent years, this has been accompanied by calls for Britain to re-evaluate its imperial history, starting with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 turbo-charged the debate, and in response, more institutions in the UK commissioned research on their historic links to slavery – including the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, the National Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Guardian.
But as public interest in exploring and quantifying Britain’s historic links to slavery exploded in 2020, so too did a conservative backlash against “wokery”. Critics argue that the whole enterprise of examining historic links to slavery is an exercise in denigrating Britain and seeking out evidence for a foregone conclusion. Debate quickly ceases to be about the research itself – and becomes a proxy for questions of national pride. “What seems to make people really angry is the suggestion of change [in response to this sort of research], or the removal of specific things – statues, names – which is taken as a suggestion that people today should be guilty,” said Natalie Zacek, an academic at the University of Manchester who is writing a book on English universities and slavery. “I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of that – no one is saying you, today, are a terrible person because you’re white. We’re simply saying there is another story here.”
For the critics of this work, campaigns to remove statues, revise university curricula, or investigate how institutions may have benefited from slavery are all attempts to censure the past. While this debate often plays out in public with emotive articles about “cancellation” and “doing Britain down”, conservative historians emphasise the danger of imposing value judgments on historical events or people. David Abulafia is a life fellow at Caius, and an influential figure in the college. Best known for his acclaimed history of the medieval Mediterranean, in recent years he has become a prominent conservative commentator. (Some of his eye-catching Telegraph columns have argued that “Cambridge is succumbing to the woke virus” and that the British Museum “might as well shut” if it “surrenders the Rosetta Stone”.) When I spoke to Abulafia, he struck a less strident tone. “What worries me is that modern politics is intruding into the way we interpret the past,” he said. “One has somehow to be able to chronicle the past without getting caught up with moralising about the current state of the world.”
Yet the historians working on studies of slavery or imperialism are often bemused by this concern, pointing out that all history is a product of the time in which it is written. “The job of a historian is to uncover the past and try to work out what happened, why it did, and what consequences and effects that had,” said Michael Taylor, a historian of colonial slavery and the British empire. “We’re allowed to focus on and celebrate abolition, but the previous 200 years of slavery are apparently taboo. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Every historian of slavery I spoke to emphasised that their research primarily involves archives and financial records. In their view, the work of many institutions mapping their own historic links to slavery helps to build up a more detailed picture of how Britain was shaped by its relationship with slavery and the slave trade.
Abulafia agreed that history is about “the accumulation of evidence, in as accurate and careful a way as possible”, but argued that “there is a danger of manipulating the past in the interest of current political concerns, one of which might be the idea that the ascendancy of the west has been achieved through a systematic policy of racism”. He questioned the point of tracing “profits from the slave trade that alumni might then have converted into benefactions” since, in the 18th century, using your wealth to fund scholarship might have been seen as virtuous. “It’s that challenge of trying to get one’s head around values, which are so remote from our own,” he said.
Historians of slavery argue that simply establishing these flows of money does not equate to moral judgment. As Taylor says: “This research simply helps us piece together a picture of what Britain was like when slave-trading and slave-holding was legal, which would otherwise not be there.” But critics do not accept this.
On 17 June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests raged across the country, activists in Cambridge spraypainted the heavy wooden medieval gate that separates Caius from the busy high street it sits on: “Eugenics is genocide. Fisher must fall.” The graffiti referred to a stained-glass window installed in the Caius dining hall in 1989, commemorating the statistician RA Fisher. The window was an abstract design; squares of coloured glass arranged in a Latin Square, an image from the cover of Fisher’s influential 1935 book The Design of Experiments.
Commonly thought of as the most important figure in 20th-century statistics, Fisher was also a prominent eugenicist. He helped to found the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and, after the second world war, wrote letters in support of a Nazi scientist who had worked under Josef Mengele. The window had been controversial for years: a substantial number of students – and some faculty – wanted it to be taken down. The debate was reignited by the graffiti. A Caius student launched an online petition, writing: “Caius students and Fellows eat, converse and celebrate in space that also acts as a commemoration of our racist history.” It gained more than 1,400 signatures.
But there was pushback. Cambridge colleges are like universities within a university; faculty usually work both for their university department, where they deliver lectures, and for their college, where they provide tutorials. Students live at the college for at least part of their degree and typically have much of their teaching there. Despite a wide range of specialisms and political views among the faculty, and a proactive student body, Caius is broadly seen as one of Cambridge’s most conservative colleges, largely due to its vociferous community of life fellows. Someone becomes a life fellow after teaching at Caius for 20 years. Life fellows – who make up about 25% of the total fellowship, similar to the number of female fellows – occupy a strange position in college life; most do not teach any more, but have a room at the college and can eat at the dining hall. One former Caius student described the college as “the most luxurious nursing home in the country”.
As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the East India, South Sea and Royal African Companies, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty. Not only would this be interesting in its own right, but hugely useful for the wider project. He said yes. “I just thought – this is wonderful, unrestricted access to the archive,” he said. “That’s a dream for a historian. It’s as good as it gets.”
But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people “carry the taint of original sin” and that it was motivated by an “agenda” to “implicate” the college in slavery.
What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.
When the Cambridge vice-chancellor Stephen Toope first announced the legacies of enslavement inquiry, he said he wanted the university to “acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history”, adding: “We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it.”
Momentum was building around institutions looking into their links to slavery. Historians working on this area see this as a valuable addition to historic knowledge and a way to understand how the profits of slavery shaped Britain. Many of the richest people in 18th- and 19th-century Britain were involved in the slave trade and the plantation economy. The trade and distribution of goods produced by enslaved people helped fuel Britain’s development.
While enslaved people were mostly overseas, in colonies, out of sight, slavery funded British wealth and institutions from the Bank of England to the Royal Mail. The extent to which modern Britain was shaped by the profits of the transatlantic slave economy was made even clearer with the launch in 2013 of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. It digitised the records of tens of thousands of people who claimed compensation from the government when colonial slavery was abolished in 1833, making it far easier to see how the wealth created by slavery spread throughout Britain after abolition. “Slave-ownership,” the researchers concluded, “permeated the British elites of the early 19th century and helped form the elites of the 20th century.” (Among others, it showed that David Cameron’s ancestors, and the founders of the Greene King pub chain, had enslaved people.)
But as Bell-Romero would write in his report on Caius, “the legacies of enslavement encompassed far more than the ownership of plantations and investments in the slave trade”. Scholars undertaking this kind of archival research typically look at the myriad ways in which individuals linked to an institution might have profited from slavery – ranging from direct involvement in the trade of enslaved people or the goods they produced, to one-step-removed financial interests such as holding shares in slave-trading entities such as the South Sea or East India Companies.
Bronwen Everill, an expert in the history of slavery and a fellow at Caius, points out “how widespread and mundane all of this was”. Mapping these connections, she says, simply “makes it much harder to hold the belief that Britain suddenly rose to power through its innate qualities; actually, this great wealth is linked to a very specific moment of wealth creation through the dramatic exploitation of African labour.”
This academic interest in forensically quantifying British institutions’ involvement in slavery has been steadily growing for several decades. But in recent years, this has been accompanied by calls for Britain to re-evaluate its imperial history, starting with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 turbo-charged the debate, and in response, more institutions in the UK commissioned research on their historic links to slavery – including the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, the National Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Guardian.
But as public interest in exploring and quantifying Britain’s historic links to slavery exploded in 2020, so too did a conservative backlash against “wokery”. Critics argue that the whole enterprise of examining historic links to slavery is an exercise in denigrating Britain and seeking out evidence for a foregone conclusion. Debate quickly ceases to be about the research itself – and becomes a proxy for questions of national pride. “What seems to make people really angry is the suggestion of change [in response to this sort of research], or the removal of specific things – statues, names – which is taken as a suggestion that people today should be guilty,” said Natalie Zacek, an academic at the University of Manchester who is writing a book on English universities and slavery. “I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of that – no one is saying you, today, are a terrible person because you’re white. We’re simply saying there is another story here.”
For the critics of this work, campaigns to remove statues, revise university curricula, or investigate how institutions may have benefited from slavery are all attempts to censure the past. While this debate often plays out in public with emotive articles about “cancellation” and “doing Britain down”, conservative historians emphasise the danger of imposing value judgments on historical events or people. David Abulafia is a life fellow at Caius, and an influential figure in the college. Best known for his acclaimed history of the medieval Mediterranean, in recent years he has become a prominent conservative commentator. (Some of his eye-catching Telegraph columns have argued that “Cambridge is succumbing to the woke virus” and that the British Museum “might as well shut” if it “surrenders the Rosetta Stone”.) When I spoke to Abulafia, he struck a less strident tone. “What worries me is that modern politics is intruding into the way we interpret the past,” he said. “One has somehow to be able to chronicle the past without getting caught up with moralising about the current state of the world.”
Yet the historians working on studies of slavery or imperialism are often bemused by this concern, pointing out that all history is a product of the time in which it is written. “The job of a historian is to uncover the past and try to work out what happened, why it did, and what consequences and effects that had,” said Michael Taylor, a historian of colonial slavery and the British empire. “We’re allowed to focus on and celebrate abolition, but the previous 200 years of slavery are apparently taboo. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Every historian of slavery I spoke to emphasised that their research primarily involves archives and financial records. In their view, the work of many institutions mapping their own historic links to slavery helps to build up a more detailed picture of how Britain was shaped by its relationship with slavery and the slave trade.
Abulafia agreed that history is about “the accumulation of evidence, in as accurate and careful a way as possible”, but argued that “there is a danger of manipulating the past in the interest of current political concerns, one of which might be the idea that the ascendancy of the west has been achieved through a systematic policy of racism”. He questioned the point of tracing “profits from the slave trade that alumni might then have converted into benefactions” since, in the 18th century, using your wealth to fund scholarship might have been seen as virtuous. “It’s that challenge of trying to get one’s head around values, which are so remote from our own,” he said.
Historians of slavery argue that simply establishing these flows of money does not equate to moral judgment. As Taylor says: “This research simply helps us piece together a picture of what Britain was like when slave-trading and slave-holding was legal, which would otherwise not be there.” But critics do not accept this.
On 17 June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests raged across the country, activists in Cambridge spraypainted the heavy wooden medieval gate that separates Caius from the busy high street it sits on: “Eugenics is genocide. Fisher must fall.” The graffiti referred to a stained-glass window installed in the Caius dining hall in 1989, commemorating the statistician RA Fisher. The window was an abstract design; squares of coloured glass arranged in a Latin Square, an image from the cover of Fisher’s influential 1935 book The Design of Experiments.
Commonly thought of as the most important figure in 20th-century statistics, Fisher was also a prominent eugenicist. He helped to found the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and, after the second world war, wrote letters in support of a Nazi scientist who had worked under Josef Mengele. The window had been controversial for years: a substantial number of students – and some faculty – wanted it to be taken down. The debate was reignited by the graffiti. A Caius student launched an online petition, writing: “Caius students and Fellows eat, converse and celebrate in space that also acts as a commemoration of our racist history.” It gained more than 1,400 signatures.
But there was pushback. Cambridge colleges are like universities within a university; faculty usually work both for their university department, where they deliver lectures, and for their college, where they provide tutorials. Students live at the college for at least part of their degree and typically have much of their teaching there. Despite a wide range of specialisms and political views among the faculty, and a proactive student body, Caius is broadly seen as one of Cambridge’s most conservative colleges, largely due to its vociferous community of life fellows. Someone becomes a life fellow after teaching at Caius for 20 years. Life fellows – who make up about 25% of the total fellowship, similar to the number of female fellows – occupy a strange position in college life; most do not teach any more, but have a room at the college and can eat at the dining hall. One former Caius student described the college as “the most luxurious nursing home in the country”.
Graffiti reading ‘Eugenics is genocide … Fisher must fall’ being cleaned off Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge University in 2020. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
Many Cambridge colleges have some form of life fellowship for retired professors, but Caius is unusual in that they have full voting rights and can sit on the college council, a small executive body on which staff serve rotating terms. This means they have as much of a say in the running of the college as current faculty. “They functionally run the place,” said Everill. Michael Taylor, the historian, went to Caius as an undergraduate in 2007 and stayed until he finished his PhD in 2014. When he sat as a student representative on the college council, he was struck by the dysfunction of this system. “The sheer indifference to the experience of students was shocking,” he told me. “A few good people were – and are – trying to reform the college, but it’s basically a form of feudal governance.” This has often led to a situation where faculty at Caius are pulling in different directions; one primarily concerned with the preservation of tradition and the good name of the college, and another with student experience and other day-to-day concerns of a modern academic institution.
A number of life fellows had been taught by Fisher and felt that his pioneering work on statistics stood separately to his other views. “It really sparked all hell,” said Vic Gatrell, a historian and life fellow at Caius. Gatrell, in common with many of the working faculty and the students, thought the window should come down. This marked him out among the life fellows, most of whom wanted the window to stay. Gatrell is in his 80s and has worked at Caius since the 1970s. In that time there had been disagreements – “the admission of women was very divisive,” he recalls – but in those 50 years, nothing had provoked such strong emotions. “In all these years, we never inquired into each other’s politics,” he told me. But now, colleagues he’d lived and worked with for decades walked past in the corridor without saying hello, or sat separately in the dining hall. “It was a microcosm of what’s happening in the nation at large,” he said.
In late June 2020, Caius removed the Fisher window. But the dividing lines were there to stay. In a long article for the Critic titled Cancelled by his college, the eminent geneticist, life fellow Anthony Edwards – who had been mentored by Fisher, and had proposed the installation of the window – rejected the allegation that Fisher was racist, or even a leading eugenicist. He decried the fact that “now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him”. Within college, life fellows spoke of Fisher being cancelled, dishonoured and targeted unfairly by BLM protesters. “The removal of the Fisher window opened a wound that still continues in various ways,” said one research fellow.
It was against this backdrop that Bell-Romero got to work in the Caius archives in the autumn of 2020. The Fisher window had been removed, but bad blood remained. Still, Bell-Romero – who was not based fulltime at the college – was blissfully unaware. He had a specific brief: to examine whether students, alumni, staff or benefactors had links to slavery. Once a week, he went into the archive, housed in a grand 19th-century building next to the lush green lawn of Caius Court. The archive spans the full eight centuries of the college’s life, from medieval estate records to the personal papers of modern alumni and faculty. The research was a low-key pursuit – just Bell-Romero and the college archivist, going through paper records.
As per his brief, he looked widely: “It’s not just about people owning plantations – it’s about small pots of money, small investments people had,” he said. Gradually, he traced a number of connections to slavery, through former students and staff who had investments in slave-holding companies. Previous histories of Caius had identified two sizeable donations to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the late 18th century. But in the archives, Bell-Romero found that the financial benefits from enslavement outweighed the college’s contribution to abolition.
His draft report was a modest document of about 50 pages. His key finding was that the college once had financial interests in the South Sea Company, an organisation that “sent 64,780 enslaved persons to the Spanish Americas”. These were in the form of annuities and stocks, gained through donations left to the college by alumni. He wrote that through these benefactions “the College’s fate – like so many other educational institutions in Great Britain – became intertwined with the imperial commercial economy, with slavery being one of its most profitable ventures”. Mapping this out, along with details of students from slave-owning families educated at Caius, Bell-Romero concluded that this story was “not singular, but indicative of the longstanding ties of British institutions and individuals to chattel slavery and coerced labour”.
These findings didn’t surprise Bell-Romero. “It was what you’d expect for a rich college that has existed for many hundreds of years,” he said. When he submitted the draft in the autumn of 2021, he did not realise how contentious it would be.
Bronwen Everill was head of the Caius working group on the legacies of enslavement project. Bell-Romero’s report was a draft – it needed editing – but Everill thought it was a solid piece of work with uncontroversial conclusions. “Basically, the finding of this report was – like almost all these institutions – Caius had a little bit of a hand in slavery, but it was not fundamentally based on financing from the slave trade,” she told me. Bell-Romero’s report only included archival research. But Everill and her three colleagues on the working group were expected to come up with suggestions for next steps.
Part of the remit of the Cambridge University inquiry was to consider how these legacies are reflected in the modern day. The most prominent example of this work – at Glasgow University – had led to a substantial reparative package. That project had passed without controversy. But in the intervening years, the political climate had changed. (“Any study now is being scrutinised from the outset, and the credibility and objectivity of academic historians is being questioned by some critics,” Mullen, the Glasgow researcher, told me.)
There are various mechanisms for working out how much historical sums are worth in today’s currency. For his report, Bell-Romero used an academic database called Measuring Worth, created by a group of economic historians to calculate estimates of the “present value” of past assets – which the Glasgow report had also employed. Bell-Romero wrote that “the calculation of historical value is not an exact science – indeed, these figures are at best a rough estimate.” On the basis of the report, the working group proposed that Caius offer funding to two Black Mphil students.
Typically, a drafted piece of research might be assessed and edited by other experts in the field; historians with some knowledge of its particular time period and geography. But the quirks of college life meant that the process at Caius was different. The report was being published on behalf of the college, so in December, the draft report was circulated for feedback to all fellows and life fellows, regardless of their expertise.
In January 2022, responses rolled in. Some highlighted mistakes: confusion over the name of a historical figure, and minor spelling errors. Others questioned the entire motivation for the project. In a lengthy response, Abulafia said that people in the past may have been involved in many things that today seem unsavoury, and asked: “If British people carry the taint of original sin by all those who are white supposedly being complicit in the slave trade, how much more are we complicit in all these activities that still go on around us?” He concluded that the report must “stand back from the past and not make it into a canvas they can slather with the moral wisdom of a particular fashionable ideology”.
A number of life fellows had been taught by Fisher and felt that his pioneering work on statistics stood separately to his other views. “It really sparked all hell,” said Vic Gatrell, a historian and life fellow at Caius. Gatrell, in common with many of the working faculty and the students, thought the window should come down. This marked him out among the life fellows, most of whom wanted the window to stay. Gatrell is in his 80s and has worked at Caius since the 1970s. In that time there had been disagreements – “the admission of women was very divisive,” he recalls – but in those 50 years, nothing had provoked such strong emotions. “In all these years, we never inquired into each other’s politics,” he told me. But now, colleagues he’d lived and worked with for decades walked past in the corridor without saying hello, or sat separately in the dining hall. “It was a microcosm of what’s happening in the nation at large,” he said.
In late June 2020, Caius removed the Fisher window. But the dividing lines were there to stay. In a long article for the Critic titled Cancelled by his college, the eminent geneticist, life fellow Anthony Edwards – who had been mentored by Fisher, and had proposed the installation of the window – rejected the allegation that Fisher was racist, or even a leading eugenicist. He decried the fact that “now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him”. Within college, life fellows spoke of Fisher being cancelled, dishonoured and targeted unfairly by BLM protesters. “The removal of the Fisher window opened a wound that still continues in various ways,” said one research fellow.
It was against this backdrop that Bell-Romero got to work in the Caius archives in the autumn of 2020. The Fisher window had been removed, but bad blood remained. Still, Bell-Romero – who was not based fulltime at the college – was blissfully unaware. He had a specific brief: to examine whether students, alumni, staff or benefactors had links to slavery. Once a week, he went into the archive, housed in a grand 19th-century building next to the lush green lawn of Caius Court. The archive spans the full eight centuries of the college’s life, from medieval estate records to the personal papers of modern alumni and faculty. The research was a low-key pursuit – just Bell-Romero and the college archivist, going through paper records.
As per his brief, he looked widely: “It’s not just about people owning plantations – it’s about small pots of money, small investments people had,” he said. Gradually, he traced a number of connections to slavery, through former students and staff who had investments in slave-holding companies. Previous histories of Caius had identified two sizeable donations to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the late 18th century. But in the archives, Bell-Romero found that the financial benefits from enslavement outweighed the college’s contribution to abolition.
His draft report was a modest document of about 50 pages. His key finding was that the college once had financial interests in the South Sea Company, an organisation that “sent 64,780 enslaved persons to the Spanish Americas”. These were in the form of annuities and stocks, gained through donations left to the college by alumni. He wrote that through these benefactions “the College’s fate – like so many other educational institutions in Great Britain – became intertwined with the imperial commercial economy, with slavery being one of its most profitable ventures”. Mapping this out, along with details of students from slave-owning families educated at Caius, Bell-Romero concluded that this story was “not singular, but indicative of the longstanding ties of British institutions and individuals to chattel slavery and coerced labour”.
These findings didn’t surprise Bell-Romero. “It was what you’d expect for a rich college that has existed for many hundreds of years,” he said. When he submitted the draft in the autumn of 2021, he did not realise how contentious it would be.
Bronwen Everill was head of the Caius working group on the legacies of enslavement project. Bell-Romero’s report was a draft – it needed editing – but Everill thought it was a solid piece of work with uncontroversial conclusions. “Basically, the finding of this report was – like almost all these institutions – Caius had a little bit of a hand in slavery, but it was not fundamentally based on financing from the slave trade,” she told me. Bell-Romero’s report only included archival research. But Everill and her three colleagues on the working group were expected to come up with suggestions for next steps.
Part of the remit of the Cambridge University inquiry was to consider how these legacies are reflected in the modern day. The most prominent example of this work – at Glasgow University – had led to a substantial reparative package. That project had passed without controversy. But in the intervening years, the political climate had changed. (“Any study now is being scrutinised from the outset, and the credibility and objectivity of academic historians is being questioned by some critics,” Mullen, the Glasgow researcher, told me.)
There are various mechanisms for working out how much historical sums are worth in today’s currency. For his report, Bell-Romero used an academic database called Measuring Worth, created by a group of economic historians to calculate estimates of the “present value” of past assets – which the Glasgow report had also employed. Bell-Romero wrote that “the calculation of historical value is not an exact science – indeed, these figures are at best a rough estimate.” On the basis of the report, the working group proposed that Caius offer funding to two Black Mphil students.
Typically, a drafted piece of research might be assessed and edited by other experts in the field; historians with some knowledge of its particular time period and geography. But the quirks of college life meant that the process at Caius was different. The report was being published on behalf of the college, so in December, the draft report was circulated for feedback to all fellows and life fellows, regardless of their expertise.
In January 2022, responses rolled in. Some highlighted mistakes: confusion over the name of a historical figure, and minor spelling errors. Others questioned the entire motivation for the project. In a lengthy response, Abulafia said that people in the past may have been involved in many things that today seem unsavoury, and asked: “If British people carry the taint of original sin by all those who are white supposedly being complicit in the slave trade, how much more are we complicit in all these activities that still go on around us?” He concluded that the report must “stand back from the past and not make it into a canvas they can slather with the moral wisdom of a particular fashionable ideology”.
A share certificate for the South Sea Company, in which Gonville and Caius College was found to have had financial interests. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty
Prof Joe Herbert, a life fellow in medicine, wrote that the report “clearly has an agenda: to implicate Caius as much as possible in supporting and benefiting [from] slavery”. He questioned the logic of funding Black MPhil students: “There is an undoubted shortfall of black applicants (not other ethnic groups); but this is not a direct result of slavery 200 years ago, and we absolve ourselves from our responsibility by thinking it is, and offering a solution which is no solution.”
Everill was surprised by the tenor of the responses, and particularly by the fact that the most strident criticism had come from life fellows who were not scholars of Britain or empire. To her, it felt like a fundamental misunderstanding of the project and a recycling of culture-war talking points. (Abulafia suggested the report was “infused with the ideas of critical race theory”.) Many of the people most affronted by the report were the same who had been most defensive of the Fisher window. “There’s a lot of people who read about the culture wars and think they are personally under attack by a woke mob,” Everill said a few months later.
A number of responses queried – in strong terms – the mechanism for working out historical inflation, which the critics argued had produced an implausibly wide range of estimated values, and the reparative suggestion. “They seemed to think we were saying we, today, should be guilty – rather than that the institution made this money, and so the institution should think about distributing this money,” said Everill.
Bell-Romero was frustrated that some of the notes appeared to be responding to points he hadn’t made. “It had nothing to do with what I found; it was just about the political bent of what they thought the research was about,” he said. “The point was never to denigrate the college.”
The college council told the working group they had to respond in particular to Abulafia’s criticisms, because of his high standing as a historian. Together, they drafted a 5,000-word response, accepting some criticisms and disputing others. They wrote: “The report is not admonishing past Caians, or saying that ‘Caians should not have’ done something … The very point is the banality … The report is recording the connections to a system that was widespread throughout British economic life. We are not asking for people to judge the people of the past. We are simply presenting a more complete picture so that we, today, can think about what we want to do with that information.”
Rather than defend the report in front of the college council, Everill thought it would be more productive to hold an open meeting, in the hope of encouraging a discussion rather than a debate. It took place in early March, an opportunity for anyone to ask questions of Bell-Romero and the working group. Bell-Romero expected a big turnout. But only one person turned up: Joe Herbert. According to others present at the meeting, he walked into the room and declared: “This is a terrible report.” That set the tone. Members of the working group said that Herbert, who declined to be interviewed for this story, called history a “crap discipline” and suggested that the low admission rates for Black students at Cambridge were not connected to the history of slavery.
Everill was appalled. At one point, she said, she stood up and said: “No, absolutely not, I will not put up with that kind of tone.” Herbert responded: “Sit down, woman,” adding, “You’re not in charge here.” In a later email to Everill, he acknowledged this, saying: “I told you to shut up because you were shrieking at me. You weren’t attempting to say anything.” (Contacted before publication, Herbert said that “inappropriate language” used at the meeting “was not limited to me”, but denied saying history was a “crap discipline”.)
After the open meeting, Everill was copied on an email thread in which this group of three life fellows continued to attack the report. They did not acknowledge the 5,000-word response, writing: “You never tried to explain anything.” In the emails, another life fellow, the philosopher Jimmy Altham, suggested that Everill may be “dyslexic” because of some typos; Herbert said that “the important thing is that this disastrous report is not published in the college’s name”; and Abulafia replied “I 100% agree”. Everill made a formal complaint of harassment against Altham and Herbert. The complaint against Herbert was upheld; but not against Altham. Herbert was encouraged to apologise, but he did not.
The scholars engaged in the research had fulfilled a narrow brief to examine the college’s financial links to slavery and come up with a proposal for action. But the life fellows who objected seemed to be responding to something larger; the idea that the legacies of slavery might still be shaping our present.
When I spoke with Abulafia, he didn’t want to discuss the specifics of events at Caius, which he described as “a source of division and contention”, but he did talk more broadly about this area of research. “It started with one or two Oxbridge colleges conducting these investigations and by and large, not much came out of it,” he said. “Why are they looking into it? It’s become a sort of fad, if you like. If we want to look at issues to do with the way human beings were being badly oppressed in the early 19th century, we might also want to look at children down the mines in this country. There are horrific stories. I just wish we could recognise that sort of unholy behaviour, which certainly took place in the slave trade, is also taking place on our own soil between white people – if we’re going to make it about a given colour, which I hate doing, actually.” Citing other examples of historic exclusion and oppression, such as child labour, he said: “Let’s tell those stories and not put so many resources into the legacies of slavery. I think we’ve got the basic idea on that now.”
Soon after the disastrous open meeting, the college council suggested that Bell-Romero redraft his report in collaboration with a life fellow in history who was not one of the primary critics – saying he would “know the fellowship tone”. But Bell-Romero was affronted. “It’s censorship, being babysat to write your own piece,” he said. “That’s where I drew the line.” He declined. With no clear plan of action, he thought the report might never be published. He continued with the Cambridge inquiry and tried to forget about it. But that would not be so easy.
In late May, as the Easter term edged towards its end, Tommy Castellani, a second-year languages undergraduate, was sitting in the Caius dining hall when a friend mentioned that his history tutor had been tweeting about a dispute. Castellani had recently started writing news stories for Varsity, the Cambridge student paper, and he wanted to know more. His friend pulled up Everill’s Twitter account. “It is literally my favourite thing, waking up on a lovely bank holiday Sunday to a whole string of emails from angry *life fellows* calling me names. The best.” (She was referring to the “dyslexic” comment.) Castellani started to dig into it.
“I realised this was going to be a big story,” he said. “There’s a culture war in college, and you can see it in the council papers – people feel divided.” He got hold of emails, spoke to Everill and interviewed Bell-Romero, who asked not to be named in the story. In June, Varsity published Castellani’s account of the fallout, including quotes from the life fellows’ emails and details of what was said at the open meeting. Castellani had approached the college for comment on the “racist and sexist” undertones of comments at the open meeting.
But when the Telegraph picked up on the Caius dispute three weeks later, the story had a very different slant. Incorrectly stating that the Caius research had been initiated “in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement” (the college had actually started the process of researching its links to slavery in spring 2019, a year before the protests), the story claimed the report included “incorrect monetary conversions”.
The paper identified Bell-Romero by name as a “woke activist” who had produced “shambolic” work that caused the crisis. Bell-Romero couldn’t access the article at first because of the paywall. When he did, his first response was horror. His second was to laugh. “I’d been struggling to explain to my friends what this had been like, and now I could point to the Telegraph article and say – that’s the tenor of the feedback we received.”
Although the reporter had clearly been briefed by at least one life fellow, the critics remained anonymous, even when quoted at length saying that these “attempts to rewrite history fall at the first hurdle”. Meanwhile Bell-Romero – a precariously employed early-career academic (wrongly described in the article as a “student”) – was named, and his professionalism questioned. A few days later, the Telegraph story was picked up by the Times, which has devoted increasing attention to campus conflicts in recent years.
The work of looking into legacies of slavery or related topics is typically done by early-career researchers. There is a growing concern about the risk of backlash for young academics working on histories of empire or slavery who are singled out in the press. They are left highly exposed, while their critics often have established positions and job security. Charlotte Riley, a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton, described a conversation with a new PhD student looking at empire and railways. “We had to sit him down and say: ‘The Daily Mail might come for you.’”
After the stories came out, Bell-Romero was contacted by a number of other researchers working on topics related to decolonisation and slavery who had been the subject of hit-jobs in the rightwing press. Time and again, researchers I interviewed for this story insisted on answering questions by email rather than speaking on the phone or in person, citing the fear of being misrepresented. “I do worry about a chilling effect,” says Everill. “There are a bunch of these postdocs available at the moment, and people who don’t want to be named and shamed in the national media might decide not to apply.”
Everill was surprised by the tenor of the responses, and particularly by the fact that the most strident criticism had come from life fellows who were not scholars of Britain or empire. To her, it felt like a fundamental misunderstanding of the project and a recycling of culture-war talking points. (Abulafia suggested the report was “infused with the ideas of critical race theory”.) Many of the people most affronted by the report were the same who had been most defensive of the Fisher window. “There’s a lot of people who read about the culture wars and think they are personally under attack by a woke mob,” Everill said a few months later.
A number of responses queried – in strong terms – the mechanism for working out historical inflation, which the critics argued had produced an implausibly wide range of estimated values, and the reparative suggestion. “They seemed to think we were saying we, today, should be guilty – rather than that the institution made this money, and so the institution should think about distributing this money,” said Everill.
Bell-Romero was frustrated that some of the notes appeared to be responding to points he hadn’t made. “It had nothing to do with what I found; it was just about the political bent of what they thought the research was about,” he said. “The point was never to denigrate the college.”
The college council told the working group they had to respond in particular to Abulafia’s criticisms, because of his high standing as a historian. Together, they drafted a 5,000-word response, accepting some criticisms and disputing others. They wrote: “The report is not admonishing past Caians, or saying that ‘Caians should not have’ done something … The very point is the banality … The report is recording the connections to a system that was widespread throughout British economic life. We are not asking for people to judge the people of the past. We are simply presenting a more complete picture so that we, today, can think about what we want to do with that information.”
Rather than defend the report in front of the college council, Everill thought it would be more productive to hold an open meeting, in the hope of encouraging a discussion rather than a debate. It took place in early March, an opportunity for anyone to ask questions of Bell-Romero and the working group. Bell-Romero expected a big turnout. But only one person turned up: Joe Herbert. According to others present at the meeting, he walked into the room and declared: “This is a terrible report.” That set the tone. Members of the working group said that Herbert, who declined to be interviewed for this story, called history a “crap discipline” and suggested that the low admission rates for Black students at Cambridge were not connected to the history of slavery.
Everill was appalled. At one point, she said, she stood up and said: “No, absolutely not, I will not put up with that kind of tone.” Herbert responded: “Sit down, woman,” adding, “You’re not in charge here.” In a later email to Everill, he acknowledged this, saying: “I told you to shut up because you were shrieking at me. You weren’t attempting to say anything.” (Contacted before publication, Herbert said that “inappropriate language” used at the meeting “was not limited to me”, but denied saying history was a “crap discipline”.)
After the open meeting, Everill was copied on an email thread in which this group of three life fellows continued to attack the report. They did not acknowledge the 5,000-word response, writing: “You never tried to explain anything.” In the emails, another life fellow, the philosopher Jimmy Altham, suggested that Everill may be “dyslexic” because of some typos; Herbert said that “the important thing is that this disastrous report is not published in the college’s name”; and Abulafia replied “I 100% agree”. Everill made a formal complaint of harassment against Altham and Herbert. The complaint against Herbert was upheld; but not against Altham. Herbert was encouraged to apologise, but he did not.
The scholars engaged in the research had fulfilled a narrow brief to examine the college’s financial links to slavery and come up with a proposal for action. But the life fellows who objected seemed to be responding to something larger; the idea that the legacies of slavery might still be shaping our present.
When I spoke with Abulafia, he didn’t want to discuss the specifics of events at Caius, which he described as “a source of division and contention”, but he did talk more broadly about this area of research. “It started with one or two Oxbridge colleges conducting these investigations and by and large, not much came out of it,” he said. “Why are they looking into it? It’s become a sort of fad, if you like. If we want to look at issues to do with the way human beings were being badly oppressed in the early 19th century, we might also want to look at children down the mines in this country. There are horrific stories. I just wish we could recognise that sort of unholy behaviour, which certainly took place in the slave trade, is also taking place on our own soil between white people – if we’re going to make it about a given colour, which I hate doing, actually.” Citing other examples of historic exclusion and oppression, such as child labour, he said: “Let’s tell those stories and not put so many resources into the legacies of slavery. I think we’ve got the basic idea on that now.”
Soon after the disastrous open meeting, the college council suggested that Bell-Romero redraft his report in collaboration with a life fellow in history who was not one of the primary critics – saying he would “know the fellowship tone”. But Bell-Romero was affronted. “It’s censorship, being babysat to write your own piece,” he said. “That’s where I drew the line.” He declined. With no clear plan of action, he thought the report might never be published. He continued with the Cambridge inquiry and tried to forget about it. But that would not be so easy.
In late May, as the Easter term edged towards its end, Tommy Castellani, a second-year languages undergraduate, was sitting in the Caius dining hall when a friend mentioned that his history tutor had been tweeting about a dispute. Castellani had recently started writing news stories for Varsity, the Cambridge student paper, and he wanted to know more. His friend pulled up Everill’s Twitter account. “It is literally my favourite thing, waking up on a lovely bank holiday Sunday to a whole string of emails from angry *life fellows* calling me names. The best.” (She was referring to the “dyslexic” comment.) Castellani started to dig into it.
“I realised this was going to be a big story,” he said. “There’s a culture war in college, and you can see it in the council papers – people feel divided.” He got hold of emails, spoke to Everill and interviewed Bell-Romero, who asked not to be named in the story. In June, Varsity published Castellani’s account of the fallout, including quotes from the life fellows’ emails and details of what was said at the open meeting. Castellani had approached the college for comment on the “racist and sexist” undertones of comments at the open meeting.
But when the Telegraph picked up on the Caius dispute three weeks later, the story had a very different slant. Incorrectly stating that the Caius research had been initiated “in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement” (the college had actually started the process of researching its links to slavery in spring 2019, a year before the protests), the story claimed the report included “incorrect monetary conversions”.
The paper identified Bell-Romero by name as a “woke activist” who had produced “shambolic” work that caused the crisis. Bell-Romero couldn’t access the article at first because of the paywall. When he did, his first response was horror. His second was to laugh. “I’d been struggling to explain to my friends what this had been like, and now I could point to the Telegraph article and say – that’s the tenor of the feedback we received.”
Although the reporter had clearly been briefed by at least one life fellow, the critics remained anonymous, even when quoted at length saying that these “attempts to rewrite history fall at the first hurdle”. Meanwhile Bell-Romero – a precariously employed early-career academic (wrongly described in the article as a “student”) – was named, and his professionalism questioned. A few days later, the Telegraph story was picked up by the Times, which has devoted increasing attention to campus conflicts in recent years.
The work of looking into legacies of slavery or related topics is typically done by early-career researchers. There is a growing concern about the risk of backlash for young academics working on histories of empire or slavery who are singled out in the press. They are left highly exposed, while their critics often have established positions and job security. Charlotte Riley, a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton, described a conversation with a new PhD student looking at empire and railways. “We had to sit him down and say: ‘The Daily Mail might come for you.’”
After the stories came out, Bell-Romero was contacted by a number of other researchers working on topics related to decolonisation and slavery who had been the subject of hit-jobs in the rightwing press. Time and again, researchers I interviewed for this story insisted on answering questions by email rather than speaking on the phone or in person, citing the fear of being misrepresented. “I do worry about a chilling effect,” says Everill. “There are a bunch of these postdocs available at the moment, and people who don’t want to be named and shamed in the national media might decide not to apply.”
The conflict at Caius seemed to be part of a wider faltering of legacies of slavery research – through overt backlash, or institutions announcing projects with great fanfare but not following through with support and funding. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and the author of Britain’s Black Debt, calls this pattern “research and run” – where universities do the archival work, then say a quick sorry and run from the implications of the findings, leaving the researchers exposed.
The historian Olivette Otele, a scholar of slavery and historical memory who was the first Black woman to be appointed a professor of history in the UK, joined the University of Bristol in 2020, and worked on the university’s own research into its deep connections to the slave trade. When she left just two years later, a colleague in another department tweeted that the university had used Otele “as a human shield to deflect legitimate criticism”. Announcing her departure, Otele wrote on Twitter: “The workload became insane and not compensated by financial reward. I actually burnt out,” adding that colleagues had been “sabotaging my reputation inside and outside the uni.”
As far as anyone could see, Caius had backed away from publishing Bell-Romero’s report after the controversy; Everill, head of the working group, was not sure it would ever be published. But in July, a newspaper submitted a freedom of information request about it. (Newspapers increasingly submit FoIs about academic research on subjects like slavery and empire as universities have become the frontline in the culture war; a controversial Times front page in August claimed that universities were changing syllabuses, even though their own data did not bear this out. Riley recalled one absurd example, where a journalist sent an FoI requesting all emails from academics using the word “woke”. “There were none, because we don’t actually sit there writing ‘I’m a woke historian’. That is insane.”)
The following month, the Caius report was published online, with the proposal for MPhil funding removed. It was not covered anywhere. “Probably because it turns out that wasn’t actually that inflammatory,” Everill said. In a statement to the Guardian, the master of the college, Prof Pippa Rogerson, said: “The report makes uncomfortable reading for all those affiliated to Caius. The College is 675 years old and it is important we acknowledge our complex past.”
In September, Bell-Romero and Cadeau’s much larger Cambridge University legacies of enslavement project was published. It found that Cambridge fellows had been involved in the East India Company and other slave-trading entities, and that the university had directly invested in the South Sea Company. They wrote: “Such financial involvement both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge.” The report was covered by major news outlets, but did not provoke a particularly strong response.
The conflict over the Caius research suggests that these disputes often have little to do with the archival research itself, or its conclusions. In the view of the critics, the research is discredited by its intention to correct past wrongs. Even when the researchers insist that they are not trying to assign blame or guilt, the critics insist in return – not without some justification – that whether or not this is the intention, it is almost always the effect. This is presumably why they disapprove of doing the research to begin with.
Seen this way, it is a standoff that has no hope of resolution. When I spoke to Abulafia, he questioned the point of the research: “Cambridge University and its role in slavery is not, to my mind, as big a question as all sorts of other questions one could argue about the slave trade,” he said. But scholars working on the area argue that this is precisely the point; to understand institutions’ relationships to slavery, whether small or large, and through this to build a fuller picture of the past. “When we do this research, we’re just adding another layer, another perspective,” said Bell-Romero. The critics, of course, see this empirical modesty as disingenuous. But the archival work carries on, all over the country, and the diametrically opposing views on the very premise will inevitably lead to more conflicts.
In late September, Cadeau and Bell-Romero organised an academic conference about reparations, held at the Møller Institute, a starkly modern building west of Cambridge city centre. A few days before, it was covered in the Telegraph, which quoted anonymous sources describing it as “propagandist” and “fanatical” and Abulafia saying: “It’s that sense that it’s going to be one-sided that concerns me.” Cadeau, who is now a lecturer of diaspora history at Soas in London, was unfazed. “What I am most concerned about are legacies of racism. I am concerned with how little this country knows about slavery, even leading historians,” she told me. “I have been more concerned about the implications of how we treat the history of slavery, and whether or not our societies will address the legacies of slavery and racism, and much less concerned about the press.”
In his opening remarks to the conference, the historian Prof Nicholas Guyatt acknowledged the negative coverage, saying: “We’ve had some media attention already and that’s great, I welcome all views and am pleased everyone is here to listen to our fantastic speakers.” Bell-Romero presented a paper on the profits of slavery at Oxbridge. Cadeau spoke about her research into South Sea Company annuities at Cambridge, saying that it was hard to find an older college in Cambridge that doesn’t have links to this funding. No news story about the conference emerged – perhaps because in practice this was a fairly routine academic exercise. People presented papers on their niche areas of research, ran over time and debated.
On the final day of the conference, I sat with Bell-Romero in the lunch hall. He told me that he felt the launch of the Cambridge project had been handled better than the Caius report; the draft had gone to expert readers and the university backed the research it had commissioned. While the academics waited for the next talk to begin, Bell-Romero and a few other scholars working on slavery and reparations discussed the growing backlash to their work in an incredulous and frustrated tone. One British academic said he receives death threats every time he speaks about the case for reparations. After a few minutes of weary commiseration, they stood up from their empty plates and walked back into the lecture theatre.
“If you take pride in the past,” a Latin American researcher said with quiet exasperation before leaving, “then you have to take responsibility, too.”
Friday, 17 March 2023
Thursday, 23 September 2021
Tuesday, 1 June 2021
Why every single statue should come down
Statues of historical figures are lazy, ugly and distort history. From Cecil Rhodes to Rosa Parks, let’s get rid of them all writes Gary Younge in The Guardian
Having been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game for the kind of moral panics that might make headlines in rightwing tabloids. It’s not like I hadn’t given them the raw material. In the course of my career I’d written pieces with headlines such as “Riots are a class act”, “Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people” and “End all immigration controls”. I might as well have drawn a target on my back. But the only time I was ever caught in the tabloids’ crosshairs was not because of my denunciations of capitalism or racism, but because of a statue – or to be more precise, the absence of one.
The story starts in the mid-19th century, when the designers of Trafalgar Square decided that there would be one huge column for Horatio Nelson and four smaller plinths for statues surrounding it. They managed to put statues on three of the plinths before running out of money, leaving the fourth one bare. A government advisory group, convened in 1999, decided that this fourth plinth should be a site for a rotating exhibition of contemporary sculpture. Responsibility for the site went to the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
Livingstone, whom I did not know, asked me if I would be on the committee, which I joined in 2002. The committee met every six weeks, working out the most engaged, popular way to include the public in the process. I was asked if I would chair the meetings because they wanted someone outside the arts and I agreed. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the Queen Mother died. That had nothing to do with me. Given that she was 101 her passing was a much anticipated, if very sad, event. Less anticipated was the suggestion by Simon Hughes, a Liberal Democrat MP and potential candidate for the London mayoralty, that the Queen Mother’s likeness be placed on the vacant fourth plinth. Worlds collided.
The next day, the Daily Mail ran a front page headline: “Carve her name in pride - Join our campaign for a statue of the Queen Mother to be erected in Trafalgar Square (whatever the panjandrums of political correctness say!)” Inside, an editorial asked whether our committee “would really respond to the national mood and agree a memorial in Trafalgar Square”.
Never mind that a committee, convened by parliament, had already decided how the plinth should be filled. Never mind that it was supposed to be an equestrian statue and that the Queen Mother will not be remembered for riding horses. Never mind that no one from the royal family or any elected official had approached us.
The day after that came a double-page spread headlined “Are they taking the plinth?”, alongside excerpts of articles I had written several years ago, taken out of context, under the headline “The thoughts of Chairman Gary”. Once again the editorial writers were upon us: “The saga of the empty plinth is another example of the yawning gap between the metropolitan elite hijacking this country and the majority of ordinary people who simply want to reclaim Britain as their own.”
The Mail’s quotes were truer than it dared imagine. It called on people to write in, but precious few did. No one was interested in having the Queen Mother in Trafalgar Square. The campaign died a sad and pathetic death. Luckily for me, it turned out that, if there was a gap between anyone and the ordinary people of the country on this issue, then the Daily Mail was on the wrong side of it.
This, however, was simply the most insistent attempt to find a human occupant for the plinth. Over the years there have been requests to put David Beckham, Bill Morris, Mary Seacole, Benny Hill and Paul Gascoigne up there. None of these figures were particularly known for riding horses either. But with each request I got, I would make the petitioner an offer: if you can name those who occupy the other three plinths, then the fourth is yours. Of course, the plinth was not actually in my gift. But that didn’t matter because I knew I would never have to deliver. I knew the answer because I had made it my business to. The other three were Maj Gen Sir Henry Havelock, who distinguished himself during what is now known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when an uprising of thousands of Indians ended in slaughter; Gen Sir Charles Napier, who crushed a rebellion in Ireland and conquered the Sindh province in what is now Pakistan; and King George IV, an alcoholic, debtor and womaniser.
The petitioners generally had no idea who any of them were. And when they finally conceded that point, I would ask them: “So why would you want to put someone else up there so we could forget them? I understand that you want to preserve their memory. But you’ve just shown that this is not a particularly effective way to remember people.”
In Britain, we seem to have a peculiar fixation with statues, as we seek to petrify historical discourse, lather it in cement, hoist it high and insist on it as a permanent statement of fact, culture, truth and tradition that can never be questioned, touched, removed or recast. This statue obsession mistakes adulation for history, history for heritage and heritage for memory. It attempts to detach the past from the present, the present from morality, and morality from responsibility. In short, it attempts to set our understanding of what has happened in stone, beyond interpretation, investigation or critique.
But history is not set in stone. It is a living discipline, subject to excavation, evolution and maturation. Our understanding of the past shifts. Our views on women’s suffrage, sexuality, medicine, education, child-rearing and masculinity are not the same as they were 50 years ago, and will be different again in another 50 years. But while our sense of who we are, what is acceptable and what is possible changes with time, statues don’t. They stand, indifferent to the play of events, impervious to the tides of thought that might wash over them and the winds of change that that swirl around them – or at least they do until we decide to take them down.
Workers removing a statue of Confederate general JEB Stuart in Richmond, Virginia, July 2020. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
In recent months, I have been part of a team at the University of Manchester’s Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (Code) studying the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on statues and memorials in Britain, the US, South Africa, Martinique and Belgium. Last summer’s uprisings, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, spread across the globe. One of the focal points, in many countries, was statues. Belgium, Brazil, Ireland, Portugal, the Netherlands and Greenland were just a few of the places that saw statues challenged. On the French island of Martinique, the statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais, who was born to a wealthy colonial family on the island and later became Napoleon’s first wife and empress, was torn down by a crowd using clubs and ropes. It had already been decapitated 30 years ago.
Across the US, Confederate generals fell, were toppled or voted down. In the small town of Lake Charles, Louisiana, nature presented the local parish police jury with a challenge. In mid-August last year, the jury voted 10-4 to keep a memorial monument to the soldiers who died defending the Confederacy in the civil war. Two weeks later, Hurricane Laura blew it down. Now the jury has to decide not whether to take it down, but whether to put it back up again.
And then, of course, in Britain there was the statue of Edward Colston, a Bristol slave trader, which ended up in the drink. Britain’s major cities, including Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and Leeds, are undertaking reviews of their statues.
Many spurious arguments have been made about these actions, and I will come to them in a minute. But the debate around public art and memorialisation, as it pertains to statues, should be engaged not ducked. One response I have heard is that we should even out the score by erecting statues of prominent black, abolitionist, female and other figures that are underrepresented. I understand the motivation. To give a fuller account of the range of experiences, voices, hues and ideologies that have made us what we are. To make sure that public art is rooted in the lives of the whole public, not just a part of it, and that we all might see ourselves in the figures that are represented.
But while I can understand it, I do not agree with it. The problem isn’t that we have too few statues, but too many. I think it is a good thing that so many of these statues of pillagers, plunderers, bigots and thieves have been taken down. I think they are offensive. But I don’t think they should be taken down because they are offensive. I think they should be taken down because I think all statues should be taken down.
Here, to be clear, I am talking about statues of people, not other works of public memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, the Holocaust memorial in Berlin or the Famine memorial in Dublin. I think works like these serve the important function of public memorialisation, and many have the added benefit of being beautiful.
The same cannot be said of statues of people. I think they are poor as works of public art and poor as efforts at memorialisation. Put more succinctly, they are lazy and ugly. So yes, take down the slave traders, imperial conquerors, colonial murderers, warmongers and genocidal exploiters. But while you’re at it, take down the freedom fighters, trade unionists, human rights champions and revolutionaries. Yes, remove Columbus, Leopold II, Colston and Rhodes. But take down Mandela, Gandhi, Seacole and Tubman, too.
I don’t think those two groups are moral equals. I place great value on those who fought for equality and inclusion and against bigotry and privilege. But their value to me need not be set in stone and raised on a pedestal. My sense of self-worth is not contingent on seeing those who represent my viewpoints, history and moral compass forced on the broader public. In the words of Nye Bevan, “That is my truth, you tell me yours.” Just be aware that if you tell me your truth is more important than mine, and therefore deserves to be foisted on me in the high street or public park, then I may not be listening for very long.
For me the issue starts with the very purpose of a statue. They are among the most fundamentally conservative – with a small c – expressions of public art possible. They are erected with eternity in mind – a fixed point on the landscape. Never to be moved, removed, adapted or engaged with beyond popular reverence. Whatever values they represent are the preserve of the establishment. To put up a statue you must own the land on which it stands and have the authority and means to do so. As such they represent the value system of the establishment at any given time that is then projected into the forever.
That is unsustainable. It is also arrogant. Societies evolve; norms change; attitudes progress. Take the mining magnate, imperialist and unabashed white supremacist Cecil Rhodes. He donated significant amounts of money with the express desire that he be remembered for 4,000 years. We’re only 120 years in, but his wish may well be granted. The trouble is that his intention was that he would be remembered fondly. And you can’t buy that kind of love, no matter how much bronze you lather it in. So in both South Africa and Britain we have been saddled with these monuments to Rhodes.
The trouble is that they are not his only legacy. The systems of racial subjugation in southern Africa, of which he was a principal architect, are still with us. The income and wealth disparities in that part of the world did not come about by bad luck or hard work. They were created by design. Rhodes’ design. This is the man who said: “The native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa.” So we should not be surprised if the descendants of those so-called natives, the majority in their own land, do not remember him fondly.
The timing was no coincidence. It was long enough since the horrors of the civil war that it could be misremembered as a noble defence of racialised regional culture rather than just slavery. As such, it represented a sanitised, partial and selective version of history, based less in fact than toxic nostalgia and melancholia. It’s not history that these statues’ protectors are defending: it’s mythology.
Colston, an official in the Royal African Company, which reportedly sold as many as 100,000 west Africans into slavery, died in 1721. His statue didn’t go up until 1895, more than 150 years later. This was no coincidence, either. Half of the monuments taken down or seriously challenged recently were put up in the three decades between 1889 and 1919. This was partly an aesthetic trend of the late Victorian era. But it should probably come as little surprise that the statues that anti-racist protesters wanted to be taken down were those erected when Jim Crow segregation was firmly installed in the US, and at the apogee of colonial expansion.
Statues always tell us more about the values of the period when they were put up than about the story of the person depicted. Two years before Martin Luther King’s death, a poll showed that the majority of Americans viewed him unfavourably. Four decades later, when Barack Obama unveiled a memorial to King in Washington DC, 91% of Americans approved. Rather than teaching us about the past, his statue distorts history. As I wrote in my book The Speech: The Story Behind Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream, “White America came to embrace King in the same way that white South Africans came to embrace Nelson Mandela: grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace or guile. Because by the time they realised their hatred of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which loving him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice.”
One claim for not bringing down certain statues of people who committed egregious acts is that we should not judge people of another time by today’s standards. I call this the “But that was before racism was bad” argument or, as others have termed it, the Jimmy Savile defence.
Firstly, this strikes me as a very good argument for not erecting statues at all, since there is no guarantee that any consensus will persist. Just because there may be a sense of closure now doesn’t mean those issues won’t one day be reopened. But beyond that, by the time many of these statues went up there was already considerable opposition to the deeds that had made these men (and they are nearly all men) rich and famous. In Britain, slavery had been abolished more than 60 years before Colston’s statue went up. The civil war had been over for 30 years before most statues of Confederate generals went up. Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II of Belgium were both criticised for their vile racist acts and views by their contemporaries. In other words, not only was what they did wrong, but it was widely known to be wrong at the time they did it. By the time they were set in stone there were significant movements, if not legislation, condemning the very things that had made them rich and famous.
Having been a black leftwing Guardian columnist for more than two decades, I understood that I would be regarded as fair game for the kind of moral panics that might make headlines in rightwing tabloids. It’s not like I hadn’t given them the raw material. In the course of my career I’d written pieces with headlines such as “Riots are a class act”, “Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people” and “End all immigration controls”. I might as well have drawn a target on my back. But the only time I was ever caught in the tabloids’ crosshairs was not because of my denunciations of capitalism or racism, but because of a statue – or to be more precise, the absence of one.
The story starts in the mid-19th century, when the designers of Trafalgar Square decided that there would be one huge column for Horatio Nelson and four smaller plinths for statues surrounding it. They managed to put statues on three of the plinths before running out of money, leaving the fourth one bare. A government advisory group, convened in 1999, decided that this fourth plinth should be a site for a rotating exhibition of contemporary sculpture. Responsibility for the site went to the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
Livingstone, whom I did not know, asked me if I would be on the committee, which I joined in 2002. The committee met every six weeks, working out the most engaged, popular way to include the public in the process. I was asked if I would chair the meetings because they wanted someone outside the arts and I agreed. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the Queen Mother died. That had nothing to do with me. Given that she was 101 her passing was a much anticipated, if very sad, event. Less anticipated was the suggestion by Simon Hughes, a Liberal Democrat MP and potential candidate for the London mayoralty, that the Queen Mother’s likeness be placed on the vacant fourth plinth. Worlds collided.
The next day, the Daily Mail ran a front page headline: “Carve her name in pride - Join our campaign for a statue of the Queen Mother to be erected in Trafalgar Square (whatever the panjandrums of political correctness say!)” Inside, an editorial asked whether our committee “would really respond to the national mood and agree a memorial in Trafalgar Square”.
Never mind that a committee, convened by parliament, had already decided how the plinth should be filled. Never mind that it was supposed to be an equestrian statue and that the Queen Mother will not be remembered for riding horses. Never mind that no one from the royal family or any elected official had approached us.
The day after that came a double-page spread headlined “Are they taking the plinth?”, alongside excerpts of articles I had written several years ago, taken out of context, under the headline “The thoughts of Chairman Gary”. Once again the editorial writers were upon us: “The saga of the empty plinth is another example of the yawning gap between the metropolitan elite hijacking this country and the majority of ordinary people who simply want to reclaim Britain as their own.”
The Mail’s quotes were truer than it dared imagine. It called on people to write in, but precious few did. No one was interested in having the Queen Mother in Trafalgar Square. The campaign died a sad and pathetic death. Luckily for me, it turned out that, if there was a gap between anyone and the ordinary people of the country on this issue, then the Daily Mail was on the wrong side of it.
This, however, was simply the most insistent attempt to find a human occupant for the plinth. Over the years there have been requests to put David Beckham, Bill Morris, Mary Seacole, Benny Hill and Paul Gascoigne up there. None of these figures were particularly known for riding horses either. But with each request I got, I would make the petitioner an offer: if you can name those who occupy the other three plinths, then the fourth is yours. Of course, the plinth was not actually in my gift. But that didn’t matter because I knew I would never have to deliver. I knew the answer because I had made it my business to. The other three were Maj Gen Sir Henry Havelock, who distinguished himself during what is now known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when an uprising of thousands of Indians ended in slaughter; Gen Sir Charles Napier, who crushed a rebellion in Ireland and conquered the Sindh province in what is now Pakistan; and King George IV, an alcoholic, debtor and womaniser.
The petitioners generally had no idea who any of them were. And when they finally conceded that point, I would ask them: “So why would you want to put someone else up there so we could forget them? I understand that you want to preserve their memory. But you’ve just shown that this is not a particularly effective way to remember people.”
In Britain, we seem to have a peculiar fixation with statues, as we seek to petrify historical discourse, lather it in cement, hoist it high and insist on it as a permanent statement of fact, culture, truth and tradition that can never be questioned, touched, removed or recast. This statue obsession mistakes adulation for history, history for heritage and heritage for memory. It attempts to detach the past from the present, the present from morality, and morality from responsibility. In short, it attempts to set our understanding of what has happened in stone, beyond interpretation, investigation or critique.
But history is not set in stone. It is a living discipline, subject to excavation, evolution and maturation. Our understanding of the past shifts. Our views on women’s suffrage, sexuality, medicine, education, child-rearing and masculinity are not the same as they were 50 years ago, and will be different again in another 50 years. But while our sense of who we are, what is acceptable and what is possible changes with time, statues don’t. They stand, indifferent to the play of events, impervious to the tides of thought that might wash over them and the winds of change that that swirl around them – or at least they do until we decide to take them down.
Workers removing a statue of Confederate general JEB Stuart in Richmond, Virginia, July 2020. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAIn recent months, I have been part of a team at the University of Manchester’s Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (Code) studying the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on statues and memorials in Britain, the US, South Africa, Martinique and Belgium. Last summer’s uprisings, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, spread across the globe. One of the focal points, in many countries, was statues. Belgium, Brazil, Ireland, Portugal, the Netherlands and Greenland were just a few of the places that saw statues challenged. On the French island of Martinique, the statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais, who was born to a wealthy colonial family on the island and later became Napoleon’s first wife and empress, was torn down by a crowd using clubs and ropes. It had already been decapitated 30 years ago.
Across the US, Confederate generals fell, were toppled or voted down. In the small town of Lake Charles, Louisiana, nature presented the local parish police jury with a challenge. In mid-August last year, the jury voted 10-4 to keep a memorial monument to the soldiers who died defending the Confederacy in the civil war. Two weeks later, Hurricane Laura blew it down. Now the jury has to decide not whether to take it down, but whether to put it back up again.
And then, of course, in Britain there was the statue of Edward Colston, a Bristol slave trader, which ended up in the drink. Britain’s major cities, including Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and Leeds, are undertaking reviews of their statues.
Many spurious arguments have been made about these actions, and I will come to them in a minute. But the debate around public art and memorialisation, as it pertains to statues, should be engaged not ducked. One response I have heard is that we should even out the score by erecting statues of prominent black, abolitionist, female and other figures that are underrepresented. I understand the motivation. To give a fuller account of the range of experiences, voices, hues and ideologies that have made us what we are. To make sure that public art is rooted in the lives of the whole public, not just a part of it, and that we all might see ourselves in the figures that are represented.
But while I can understand it, I do not agree with it. The problem isn’t that we have too few statues, but too many. I think it is a good thing that so many of these statues of pillagers, plunderers, bigots and thieves have been taken down. I think they are offensive. But I don’t think they should be taken down because they are offensive. I think they should be taken down because I think all statues should be taken down.
Here, to be clear, I am talking about statues of people, not other works of public memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, the Holocaust memorial in Berlin or the Famine memorial in Dublin. I think works like these serve the important function of public memorialisation, and many have the added benefit of being beautiful.
The same cannot be said of statues of people. I think they are poor as works of public art and poor as efforts at memorialisation. Put more succinctly, they are lazy and ugly. So yes, take down the slave traders, imperial conquerors, colonial murderers, warmongers and genocidal exploiters. But while you’re at it, take down the freedom fighters, trade unionists, human rights champions and revolutionaries. Yes, remove Columbus, Leopold II, Colston and Rhodes. But take down Mandela, Gandhi, Seacole and Tubman, too.
I don’t think those two groups are moral equals. I place great value on those who fought for equality and inclusion and against bigotry and privilege. But their value to me need not be set in stone and raised on a pedestal. My sense of self-worth is not contingent on seeing those who represent my viewpoints, history and moral compass forced on the broader public. In the words of Nye Bevan, “That is my truth, you tell me yours.” Just be aware that if you tell me your truth is more important than mine, and therefore deserves to be foisted on me in the high street or public park, then I may not be listening for very long.
For me the issue starts with the very purpose of a statue. They are among the most fundamentally conservative – with a small c – expressions of public art possible. They are erected with eternity in mind – a fixed point on the landscape. Never to be moved, removed, adapted or engaged with beyond popular reverence. Whatever values they represent are the preserve of the establishment. To put up a statue you must own the land on which it stands and have the authority and means to do so. As such they represent the value system of the establishment at any given time that is then projected into the forever.
That is unsustainable. It is also arrogant. Societies evolve; norms change; attitudes progress. Take the mining magnate, imperialist and unabashed white supremacist Cecil Rhodes. He donated significant amounts of money with the express desire that he be remembered for 4,000 years. We’re only 120 years in, but his wish may well be granted. The trouble is that his intention was that he would be remembered fondly. And you can’t buy that kind of love, no matter how much bronze you lather it in. So in both South Africa and Britain we have been saddled with these monuments to Rhodes.
The trouble is that they are not his only legacy. The systems of racial subjugation in southern Africa, of which he was a principal architect, are still with us. The income and wealth disparities in that part of the world did not come about by bad luck or hard work. They were created by design. Rhodes’ design. This is the man who said: “The native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa.” So we should not be surprised if the descendants of those so-called natives, the majority in their own land, do not remember him fondly.
A statue of Cecil Rhodes being removed from the University of Cape Town campus, South Africa, 2015. Photograph: Schalk van Zuydam/AP
A similar story can be told in the southern states of the US. In his book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, the American historian Kirk Savage writes of the 30-year period after the civil war: “Public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus, not to prolong conflict … Even now to commemorate is to seek historical closure, to draw together the various strands of meaning in an historical event or personage and condense its significance.”
Clearly these statues – of Confederate soldiers in the South, or of Rhodes in South Africa and Oxford – do not represent a consensus now. If they did, they would not be challenged as they are. Nobody is seriously challenging the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, because nobody seriously challenges the notion of women’s suffrage. Nor is anyone seeking historical closure via the removal of a statue. The questions that some of these monuments raise – of racial inequality, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism and slavery – are still very much with us. There is a reason why these particular statues, and not, say, that of Robert Raikes, who founded Sunday schools, which stands in Victoria Embankment Gardens in London, were targeted during the Black Lives Matter protests.
But these statues never represented a consensus, even when they were erected. Take the statues of Confederate figures in Richmond, Virginia that were the focus of protests last summer. Given that the statues represented men on the losing side of the civil war, they certainly didn’t represent a consensus in the country as a whole. The northern states wouldn’t have appreciated them. But closer to home, they didn’t even represent the general will of Richmond at the time. The substantial African American population of the city would hardly have been pleased to see them up there. And nor were many whites, either. When a labour party took control of Richmond city council in the late 1880s, a coalition of blacks and working-class whites refused to vote for an unveiling parade for the monument because it would “benefit only a certain class of people”.
Calls for the removal of statues have also raised the charge that longstanding works of public art are at the mercy of political whim. “Is nothing sacred?” they cry. “Who next?” they ask, clutching their pearls and pointing to Churchill. But our research showed these statues were not removed as a fad or in a feverish moment of insubordination. People had been calling for them to be removed for half a century. And the issue was never confined to the statue itself. It was always about what the statue represented: the prevailing and persistent issues that remained, and the legacy of whatever the statue was erected to symbolise.
One of the greatest distractions when it comes to removing statues is the argument that to remove a statue is to erase history; that to change something about a statue is to tamper with history. This is such errantarrant nonsense it is difficult to know where to begin, so I guess it would make sense to begin at the beginning.
Statues are not history; they represent historical figures. They may have been set up to mark a person’s historical contribution, but they are not themselves history. If you take down Nelson Mandela’s bust on London’s South Bank, you do not erase the history of the anti-apartheid struggle. Statues are symbols of reverence; they are not symbols of history. They elevate an individual from a historical moment and celebrate them.
Nobody thinks that when Iraqis removed statues of Saddam Hussein from around the country they wanted him to be forgotten. Quite the opposite. They wanted him, and his crimes, to be remembered. They just didn’t want him to be revered. Indeed, if the people removing a statue are trying to erase history, then they are very bad at it. For if the erection of a statue is a fact of history, then removing it is no less so. It can also do far more to raise awareness of history. More people know about Colston and what he did as a result of his statue being taken down than ever did as a result of it being put up. Indeed, the very people campaigning to take down the symbols of colonialism and slavery are the same ones who want more to be taught about colonialism and slavery in schools. The ones who want to keep them up are generally the ones who would prefer we didn’t study what these people actually did.
But to claim that statues represent history does not merely misrepresent the role of statues, it misunderstands history and their place in it. Let’s go back to the Confederate statues for a moment. The American civil war ended in 1865. The South lost. Much of its economy and infrastructure were laid to waste. Almost one in six white Southern men aged 13 to 43 died; even more were wounded; more again were captured.
Southerners had to forget the reality of the civil war before they could celebrate it. They did not want to remember the civil war as an episode that brought devastation and humiliation. Very few statues went up in the decades immediately after the war. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, nearly 500 monuments to Confederate white supremacy were erected across the country – many in the North – between 1885 and 1915. More than half were built within one seven-year period, between 1905 and 1912.
A similar story can be told in the southern states of the US. In his book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, the American historian Kirk Savage writes of the 30-year period after the civil war: “Public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus, not to prolong conflict … Even now to commemorate is to seek historical closure, to draw together the various strands of meaning in an historical event or personage and condense its significance.”
Clearly these statues – of Confederate soldiers in the South, or of Rhodes in South Africa and Oxford – do not represent a consensus now. If they did, they would not be challenged as they are. Nobody is seriously challenging the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, because nobody seriously challenges the notion of women’s suffrage. Nor is anyone seeking historical closure via the removal of a statue. The questions that some of these monuments raise – of racial inequality, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism and slavery – are still very much with us. There is a reason why these particular statues, and not, say, that of Robert Raikes, who founded Sunday schools, which stands in Victoria Embankment Gardens in London, were targeted during the Black Lives Matter protests.
But these statues never represented a consensus, even when they were erected. Take the statues of Confederate figures in Richmond, Virginia that were the focus of protests last summer. Given that the statues represented men on the losing side of the civil war, they certainly didn’t represent a consensus in the country as a whole. The northern states wouldn’t have appreciated them. But closer to home, they didn’t even represent the general will of Richmond at the time. The substantial African American population of the city would hardly have been pleased to see them up there. And nor were many whites, either. When a labour party took control of Richmond city council in the late 1880s, a coalition of blacks and working-class whites refused to vote for an unveiling parade for the monument because it would “benefit only a certain class of people”.
Calls for the removal of statues have also raised the charge that longstanding works of public art are at the mercy of political whim. “Is nothing sacred?” they cry. “Who next?” they ask, clutching their pearls and pointing to Churchill. But our research showed these statues were not removed as a fad or in a feverish moment of insubordination. People had been calling for them to be removed for half a century. And the issue was never confined to the statue itself. It was always about what the statue represented: the prevailing and persistent issues that remained, and the legacy of whatever the statue was erected to symbolise.
One of the greatest distractions when it comes to removing statues is the argument that to remove a statue is to erase history; that to change something about a statue is to tamper with history. This is such errantarrant nonsense it is difficult to know where to begin, so I guess it would make sense to begin at the beginning.
Statues are not history; they represent historical figures. They may have been set up to mark a person’s historical contribution, but they are not themselves history. If you take down Nelson Mandela’s bust on London’s South Bank, you do not erase the history of the anti-apartheid struggle. Statues are symbols of reverence; they are not symbols of history. They elevate an individual from a historical moment and celebrate them.
Nobody thinks that when Iraqis removed statues of Saddam Hussein from around the country they wanted him to be forgotten. Quite the opposite. They wanted him, and his crimes, to be remembered. They just didn’t want him to be revered. Indeed, if the people removing a statue are trying to erase history, then they are very bad at it. For if the erection of a statue is a fact of history, then removing it is no less so. It can also do far more to raise awareness of history. More people know about Colston and what he did as a result of his statue being taken down than ever did as a result of it being put up. Indeed, the very people campaigning to take down the symbols of colonialism and slavery are the same ones who want more to be taught about colonialism and slavery in schools. The ones who want to keep them up are generally the ones who would prefer we didn’t study what these people actually did.
But to claim that statues represent history does not merely misrepresent the role of statues, it misunderstands history and their place in it. Let’s go back to the Confederate statues for a moment. The American civil war ended in 1865. The South lost. Much of its economy and infrastructure were laid to waste. Almost one in six white Southern men aged 13 to 43 died; even more were wounded; more again were captured.
Southerners had to forget the reality of the civil war before they could celebrate it. They did not want to remember the civil war as an episode that brought devastation and humiliation. Very few statues went up in the decades immediately after the war. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, nearly 500 monuments to Confederate white supremacy were erected across the country – many in the North – between 1885 and 1915. More than half were built within one seven-year period, between 1905 and 1912.
A toppled confederate statue in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2018. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy
The timing was no coincidence. It was long enough since the horrors of the civil war that it could be misremembered as a noble defence of racialised regional culture rather than just slavery. As such, it represented a sanitised, partial and selective version of history, based less in fact than toxic nostalgia and melancholia. It’s not history that these statues’ protectors are defending: it’s mythology.
Colston, an official in the Royal African Company, which reportedly sold as many as 100,000 west Africans into slavery, died in 1721. His statue didn’t go up until 1895, more than 150 years later. This was no coincidence, either. Half of the monuments taken down or seriously challenged recently were put up in the three decades between 1889 and 1919. This was partly an aesthetic trend of the late Victorian era. But it should probably come as little surprise that the statues that anti-racist protesters wanted to be taken down were those erected when Jim Crow segregation was firmly installed in the US, and at the apogee of colonial expansion.
Statues always tell us more about the values of the period when they were put up than about the story of the person depicted. Two years before Martin Luther King’s death, a poll showed that the majority of Americans viewed him unfavourably. Four decades later, when Barack Obama unveiled a memorial to King in Washington DC, 91% of Americans approved. Rather than teaching us about the past, his statue distorts history. As I wrote in my book The Speech: The Story Behind Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream, “White America came to embrace King in the same way that white South Africans came to embrace Nelson Mandela: grudgingly and gratefully, retrospectively, selectively, without grace or guile. Because by the time they realised their hatred of him was spent and futile, he had created a world in which loving him was in their own self-interest. Because, in short, they had no choice.”
One claim for not bringing down certain statues of people who committed egregious acts is that we should not judge people of another time by today’s standards. I call this the “But that was before racism was bad” argument or, as others have termed it, the Jimmy Savile defence.
Firstly, this strikes me as a very good argument for not erecting statues at all, since there is no guarantee that any consensus will persist. Just because there may be a sense of closure now doesn’t mean those issues won’t one day be reopened. But beyond that, by the time many of these statues went up there was already considerable opposition to the deeds that had made these men (and they are nearly all men) rich and famous. In Britain, slavery had been abolished more than 60 years before Colston’s statue went up. The civil war had been over for 30 years before most statues of Confederate generals went up. Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II of Belgium were both criticised for their vile racist acts and views by their contemporaries. In other words, not only was what they did wrong, but it was widely known to be wrong at the time they did it. By the time they were set in stone there were significant movements, if not legislation, condemning the very things that had made them rich and famous.
A defaced statue of Leopold II in Arlon, Belgium last year. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Guillaume/Getty Images
A more honest appraisal of why the removal of these particular statues rankles with so many is that they do not actually want to engage with the history they represent. Power, and the wealth that comes with it, has many parents. But the brutality it takes to acquire it is all too often an orphan. According to a YouGov poll last year, only one in 20 Dutch, one in seven French, one in 5 Brits and one in four Belgians and Italians believe their former empire is something to be ashamed of. If these statues are supposed to tell our story, then why, after more than a century, do so few people actually know it?
This brings me to my final point. Statues do not just fail to teach us about the past, or give a misleading idea about particular people or particular historical events – they also skew how we understand history itself. For when you put up a statue to honour a historical moment, you reduce that moment to a single person. Individuals play an important role in history. But they don’t make history by themselves. There are always many other people involved. And so what is known as the Great Man theory of history distorts how, why and by whom history is forged.
Consider the statue of Rosa Parks that stands in the US Capitol. Parks was a great woman, whose refusal to give up her seat for a white woman on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama challenged local segregation laws and sparked the civil rights movement. When Parks died in 2005, her funeral was attended by thousands, and her contribution to the civil rights struggle was eulogised around the world.
But the reality is more complex. Parks was not the first to plead not guilty after resisting Montgomery’s segregation laws on its buses. Before Parks, there was a 15-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin. Colvin was all set to be the icon of the civil rights movement until she fell pregnant. Because she was an unmarried teenager, she was dropped by the conservative elders of the local church, who were key leaders of the movement. When I interviewed Colvin 20 years ago, she was just getting by as a nurses’ aide and living in the Bronx, all but forgotten.
And while what Parks did was a catalyst for resistance, the event that forced the segregationists to climb down wasn’t the work of one individual in a single moment, but the year-long collective efforts of African Americans in Montgomery who boycotted the buses – maids and gardeners who walked miles in sun and rain, despite intimidation, those who carpooled to get people where they needed to go, those who sacrificed their time and effort for the cause. The unknown soldiers of civil rights. These are the people who made it happen. Where is their statue? Where is their place in history? How easily and wilfully the main actors can be relegated to faceless extras.
I once interviewed the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who confessed that his greatest fear was “that we are all suffering from amnesia”. Who, I asked, is responsible for this forgetfulness? “It’s not a person,” he explained. “It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten … We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.”
Statues cast a long shadow over that beauty and shroud the complexity even of the people they honour. Now, I love Rosa Parks. Not least because the story usually told about her is so far from who she was. She was not just a hapless woman who stumbled into history because she was tired and wanted to sit down. That was not the first time she had been thrown off a bus. “I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated against my colour,” she once said. She was also an activist, a feminist and a devotee of Malcolm X. “I don’t believe in gradualism or that whatever should be done for the better should take for ever to do,” she once said.
Of course I want Parks to be remembered. Of course I want her to take her rightful place in history. All the less reason to diminish that memory by casting her in bronze and erecting her beyond memory.
So let us not burden future generations with the weight of our faulty memory and the lies of our partial mythology. Let us not put up the people we ostensibly cherish so that they can be forgotten and ignored. Let us elevate them, and others – in the curriculum, through scholarships and museums. Let us subject them to the critiques they deserve, which may convert them from inert models of their former selves to the complex, and often flawed, people that they were. Let us fight to embed the values of those we admire in our politics and our culture. Let’s cover their anniversaries in the media and set them in tests. But the last thing we should do is cover their likeness in concrete and set them in stone.
A more honest appraisal of why the removal of these particular statues rankles with so many is that they do not actually want to engage with the history they represent. Power, and the wealth that comes with it, has many parents. But the brutality it takes to acquire it is all too often an orphan. According to a YouGov poll last year, only one in 20 Dutch, one in seven French, one in 5 Brits and one in four Belgians and Italians believe their former empire is something to be ashamed of. If these statues are supposed to tell our story, then why, after more than a century, do so few people actually know it?
This brings me to my final point. Statues do not just fail to teach us about the past, or give a misleading idea about particular people or particular historical events – they also skew how we understand history itself. For when you put up a statue to honour a historical moment, you reduce that moment to a single person. Individuals play an important role in history. But they don’t make history by themselves. There are always many other people involved. And so what is known as the Great Man theory of history distorts how, why and by whom history is forged.
Consider the statue of Rosa Parks that stands in the US Capitol. Parks was a great woman, whose refusal to give up her seat for a white woman on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama challenged local segregation laws and sparked the civil rights movement. When Parks died in 2005, her funeral was attended by thousands, and her contribution to the civil rights struggle was eulogised around the world.
But the reality is more complex. Parks was not the first to plead not guilty after resisting Montgomery’s segregation laws on its buses. Before Parks, there was a 15-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin. Colvin was all set to be the icon of the civil rights movement until she fell pregnant. Because she was an unmarried teenager, she was dropped by the conservative elders of the local church, who were key leaders of the movement. When I interviewed Colvin 20 years ago, she was just getting by as a nurses’ aide and living in the Bronx, all but forgotten.
And while what Parks did was a catalyst for resistance, the event that forced the segregationists to climb down wasn’t the work of one individual in a single moment, but the year-long collective efforts of African Americans in Montgomery who boycotted the buses – maids and gardeners who walked miles in sun and rain, despite intimidation, those who carpooled to get people where they needed to go, those who sacrificed their time and effort for the cause. The unknown soldiers of civil rights. These are the people who made it happen. Where is their statue? Where is their place in history? How easily and wilfully the main actors can be relegated to faceless extras.
I once interviewed the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, who confessed that his greatest fear was “that we are all suffering from amnesia”. Who, I asked, is responsible for this forgetfulness? “It’s not a person,” he explained. “It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten … We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.”
Statues cast a long shadow over that beauty and shroud the complexity even of the people they honour. Now, I love Rosa Parks. Not least because the story usually told about her is so far from who she was. She was not just a hapless woman who stumbled into history because she was tired and wanted to sit down. That was not the first time she had been thrown off a bus. “I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated against my colour,” she once said. She was also an activist, a feminist and a devotee of Malcolm X. “I don’t believe in gradualism or that whatever should be done for the better should take for ever to do,” she once said.
Of course I want Parks to be remembered. Of course I want her to take her rightful place in history. All the less reason to diminish that memory by casting her in bronze and erecting her beyond memory.
So let us not burden future generations with the weight of our faulty memory and the lies of our partial mythology. Let us not put up the people we ostensibly cherish so that they can be forgotten and ignored. Let us elevate them, and others – in the curriculum, through scholarships and museums. Let us subject them to the critiques they deserve, which may convert them from inert models of their former selves to the complex, and often flawed, people that they were. Let us fight to embed the values of those we admire in our politics and our culture. Let’s cover their anniversaries in the media and set them in tests. But the last thing we should do is cover their likeness in concrete and set them in stone.
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