One of the great privileges I had this year was meeting outgoing Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans. He recently received the Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for being the first Southern mayor to reckon with the Confederate legacy of his city and take down monuments of those who were allegiant to the Confederacy. In reflecting on actions he’s now had to defend many times over, he says, “There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.”
It’s a critical distinction because reverence can often get in the way of true remembrance and reckoning. Today, we celebrate Juneteenth - the day in 1865 that thousands of slaves in Texas received word that General Lee had surrendered, the Civil War had ended, and they were free.
Here in Vermont, we treat our abolishment of slavery in our 1777 Constitution with a certain reverence. But as scholars like Harvey Amani Whitfield at UVM have pointed out, that reverence has sometimes gotten in the way of truly remembering.
Quite a few important figures in Vermont history held slaves – including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Jacob and Levi Allen, brother to Ethan Allen – as did many of our nation’s founding fathers. And while we may accept this information when confronted by it, unless we discuss it openly, we risk repeating a history of revering our myths while forgetting our truths. This is especially important with those whose names are in our history books.
And sadly, even today this is a nagging reality. We live with the legacy of the Eugenics Survey, involving the forced sterilization of many Abenaki and low-income Vermonters. We are one of only five states where black men are incarcerated at more than 10 times the rate of white people, which is double the national average. We depend on farmworkers who live in the shadows to keep our dairy farms running, even though we know they enjoy almost no freedoms.
Mayor Landrieu made a compelling case for the nation to remember the Confederacy without reverence when he said, “Like it or not, we all carry the past of our country. The unresolved conflicts of race and class lay coiled, ready to erupt, unless we set our minds to an honest reckoning with that past and a search for solutions grounded in genuine truth and justice.”
It’s time to examine our own past - and truly remember.
