[In the past several blogs I have been publishing documents from my twenty-two years of teaching at Roanoke College. I have done this rather than compose essays about these years from my retirement perspective, for I am still too close to it to have digested my sojourn. As late as 2015, when I published my book, Divine Simplicity, I dedicated it with great gratitude to the administration and faculty of Roanoke College and especially to the students whom I had taught. That was perhaps the high point. This will be the final installment in this series as it articulates some of the disillusionment with which my career ended.
During the tumultuous summer of 2020 I joined with like-minded faculty colleagues at Roanoke College who were distressed about a memorial to the Confederacy which to all appearances was situated prominently on college property as if to represent its history and mission. In fact, the monument belongs to Roanoke County. As we deliberated the problem, I undertook the task of composing the following open letter for the signature of faculty colleagues who wished to make a public witness.
I am not by nature nor conviction an iconoclast. But I am an educator and historicist, who wishes to see relics from the past treated as the museum pieces that they deserve to be. Our working group was ready to go forward with this open letter when in good faith we shared it with the College’s Administration. They literally pleaded with us not to do it for the trouble it would cause with community relations.
So far as I can see, this pleading was a monumental act of moral cowardice and hypocrisy. I say hypocrisy, because every year in orientation exercises for incoming students, the College celebrates the moral and intellectual courage of John Alfred Morehead who during his presidency of the college (1903-1920) defended the teaching of Civil War history and the theory of evolution against hostile public sentiment at a precarious time when the college’s existence was threatened. But in the present case, the Administration chose moral and intellectual cowardice.
Even as I dissented, our working group succumbed to the Administration’s special pleading. Perhaps my dissent was empowered by the nearness of my impending retirement, while my colleagues in the working group still needed years of future employment and did not want to jeopardize the viability of the college.. So I’ve hardly blame them. But this was the last straw for me personally in my disillusionment with the pretensions of current academia which will make brave moral stands, if, and only if, there is no cost involved. With this blog, I am done for now on my reflections on twenty-two years at Roanoke College.]
An Open Letter to the Citizens of Roanoke County regarding the Confederate Monument at the intersection of Main Street and College Avenue in Salem.
Citizens of Roanoke County! Do you know that you own the monument with its representation of a Confederate sentry standing guard before the old County Courthouse in Salem? Do you understand the history of this monument and what it represents? It is not simply or even chiefly a memorial of brave soldiers and lives tragically lost in the Civil War as its engraved caption, “Love Makes Memory Eternal,” suggests.
In 1987, Roanoke College purchased the old Roanoke County Courthouse in Salem and converted it into classrooms and office spaces renamed West Hall. The property transfer, however, included an important exception: the small square of land containing the 1910 Confederate Monument was not part of the purchase agreement. Since 1987 Roanoke County has continued to own the title to this land upon which the 28 foot granite form of the Confederate sentry stands. Yet, for anyone who visits or attends Roanoke College, the monument makes an inescapable statement of love for the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. As such, it seems to project the public face of the college on the corner of Main Street and College Avenue. Roanoke College cannot escape this appearance which deeply troubles us for reasons we are about to explain. In providing this historical knowledge, we appeal to your collective conscience to take up moral ownership for what is in fact your own property.
Our historians have uncovered disturbing facts about the erection and political purpose of the monument. As the 50th anniversary of the Civil War approached during the second decade of the 20th century obelisks and statues honoring Confederate soldiers were erected throughout the former Confederacy. Over twenty Confederate monuments were erected in Southwest Virginia between 1883 and 1920. Upon examination, we can see that these monuments served a present day political purpose over and above that of honoring the memory of the fallen, their widow and their orphan.
What we have learned about the monument in Salem in particular is disturbing. First, the statue was put up in 1910, i.e. 45 years after the end of the Civil War when there were few surviving veterans remaining to be consoled or honored by it. Life expectancy for those born at the end of the war in 1865 was 35 years, certainly much less for veterans. Thus the monument served another – present day political – purpose other than consolation or honoring of veterans.
Second, it was placed in front of the brand-new at the time County Courthouse in Salem at the very spot where Confederate soldiers had mustered. The date of June 3, 1910 was chosen when 5,000 people gathered in Salem for its dedication because this was the birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the defeated Confederacy. The unveiling ceremony culminated when members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy - dressed all in white - simultaneously pulled 26 ribbons – a reference to Confederate Memorial Day, April 26th.
Conspicuous by its absence is any accompanying text that says ‘the Confederate States of America committed treason and lost.’ Instead, the representation normalizes the idea that Confederate soldiers were part of a just cause worthy of love. To any viewer, the monument commemorates a victory rather than a defeat.
So what was the victory presently being celebrated? The political purpose of the monument was the perpetuation in a new form of the "lost cause" of the Confederacy. What was the new form? The segregation laws known as Jim Crow which came into force throughout this time period. Placed in front of the courthouse, it was as if the Confederate sentry were saying loudly and publicly: this is the kind of justice that will be dispensed here.
Standing in highly visible locations and often on public property, Salem’s Confederate monument together with the others in Southwest Virginia collectively gave the appearance of a united historical memory in honoring the Confederacy as such. In fact Southwest Virginia, on the border of breakaway West Virginia which joined the Union, was not a unified region during the Civil War. By omission such monuments tell nothing of the experiences of the enslaved people who lived hereabouts throughout the war nor of the role played by the defense of the race-based system slavery in the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. These painful divisions of real history in society are deliberately obscured by the monuments because in fact they are contrary to their political purpose. Surely today we all want fuller and more accurate understanding of what happened.
Our present discomfort with the memorial has a significant precedent in Roanoke College’s history. Presiding in the brand-new courthouse of 1910 was Judge William Walter Moffett who was also a member of the College’s Board of Trustees. In 1911, Moffett loudly and publicly objected to Roanoke College professor Thorstenberg’s decision to assign Henry Elson’s book History of the United States. The book contained information about the defense of slavery as the reason for secession that did not suit the Lost Cause narrative Moffett wanted to promote. Moffett threatened the college, called for the book’s banning, and endangered the college’s very existence until he finally resigned as a Board member. Faithful to its mission, however, Roanoke College weathered the storm and persevered in educating the young for true knowledge of the past and a more hopeful vision of the future.
In the light of the foregoing historical evidence, our appeal therefore is that citizens of Roanoke County own up morally to what is in fact their own possession. If Roanoke County is proud of the statue and its historical purpose, let it take moral responsibility and move the statue to the front of the current County Courthouse as an emblem of public justice. If Roanoke County is ashamed to honor the actual intentions of those who erected them monument by doing this, it should have the decency to recognize the shame we feel about it at Roanoke College and move it elsewhere where its history can be explained and its lessons taught.
Undersigned faculty of Roanoke College who live in the Roanoke Valley