Post 99 - June 18, 2020

Day 99…

On the days that I walk or ride downtown, I invariably end up passing through Columbus Circle.  It sits at the south west corner of Central Park.

On the north edge of it is one of the President’s hotels. Between the circle and the hotel is a sculpture of the globe by an artist named Kim Brandell.  The globe is an homage to the Unisphere sculpture at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Queens also happens to be where the President was born which is why he wanted it there.

Originally, the President wanted the words “Trump International” in letters 3’ high to encircle the globe in the same way that the word “Universal” does in the film studio’s logo. The city, however, objected saying that doing that would turn the piece of sculpture into a sign. So, ultimately after a long fight, the globe remained without the words.

Across from it, at the center of the traffic circle stands a tall column with a sculpture of the man for whom the circle was named atop it, Christopher Columbus. It was installed there in 1892 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

As a kid, we studied Columbus in school as the man who discovered America. October 12, the day that he arrived here is celebrated as a National holiday. It seemed only fitting that a statue of him should stand above the city. As time has passed, however, Columbus has come to be regarded as far less saint-like than we were led to believe.

Christopher Columbus did not, in fact, discover an empty continent. It was already quite crowded. He was, instead, merely the first European to arrive here.  Even that fact isn’t true as there is evidence that the Vikings from Scandinavia had established small settlements here centuries before. What greeted him upon his arrival was not emptiness, but rather an entire culture of people whom he subsequently enslaved and almost drove to extinction in his quest for gold.

It turns out that he didn’t discover the Americas at all, he was just the first person from the east to invade them.

Statues of Columbus all over the country have been repeatedly vandalized in recent years. Following the killing of George Floyd last month, a sculpture of him in Richmond, Virginia was spray painted, set on fire and thrown into a lake.

Richmond has also become a focal point for the tensions around the country in regard to public statues that commemorate leaders of the Confederacy. Monument Avenue has a whole series of statues of so-called Civil War heroes who fought for the South.

The Civil War was fought over the issue of State’s rights. Should States be able to decide for themselves how they are governed, or should the Federal government be the ultimate power. The Southern states believed that they should control their own destiny, so they seceded from the Union. The specific issue over which they decided to do this was the institution of slavery.

Slave labor was the fuel that ran the engine of the South’s pre-war booming economy. When President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on the first of January in 1863, he also signed away the South’s prosperity. A hundred and fifty years later, the resentment against him is still very much present in deep pockets throughout the South.

The men who fought against the North are considered heroes and martyrs by many in the southern white population. Statues to those men serve as a reminder to them of what could have been.  That the prosperity their ancestors enjoyed came from the blood of enslaved Africans is immaterial. The people who want to keep the statues of these Civil War Generals up, resent the North for winning and they resent present day African Americans for being free.

Two weeks ago, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced that the statue of General Robert E. Lee, the largest on Monument Avenue, would finally be removed. A lawsuit by a man who claims that Virginia promised to guard and protect the statue when the land was annexed by the state in 1890, caused a judge in the Richmond, Virginia Circuit Court to issue a 10-day injunction. A three-foot-high barrier has been erected around the monument, the base of which is now covered with graffiti from the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Symbols matter. You can say that African Americans are free, but if you keep a statue of a man who led a war against their right for that freedom, you are sending a very clear message that you don’t actually believe what you are saying. Sure, all those fancy words and lip-service to the idea of equality are out there floating around, but just drive down Monument Avenue in Richmond and those statues tell you something else.

Just north of Tampa, where we rehearse the Norwegian Cruise Lines version of Jersey Boys, at the intersection of two interstate highways, flies a gigantic Confederate flag 139 feet up in the air. The tiny plot of land in the middle of the on and off ramps where the flagpole stands is owned by a guy who believes he has the right to exercise his freedom of speech by flying it. At the moment, it is temporarily down because the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans fear it will be burned during the Black Lives Matter protests.

In 1889, a new pancake mix started to be sold under the name Aunt Jemima. The Quaker Oats Company bought it in 1926 and formerly registered it as a trademark in 1937. Quaker Oats then introduced Aunt Jemima syrup in 1966.

As early as 1864, while the Civil War was still being fought, a character named Aunt Jemima appeared onstage in Washington D.C. Aunt Jemima was based on a stereotypical “Mammy” character from the minstrel shows common at the time. Minstrel shows featured white performers in black-face makeup behaving as exaggerated and grotesque caricatures of slaves. The inspiration for the brand came from a song called “Old Aunt Jemima” written in 1875.

Aunt Jemima, and characters like her, idealized idyllic antebellum plantation life. Early advertising promotions featured paper dolls of Aunt Jemima and her family all dressed in the tattered clothing befitting a slave.

In 1890, the R.T. Davis milling company, the brand’s original creators, hired a woman who’d been born a slave named Nancy Green, to be Aunt Jemima’s spokesperson. In 1893 at the World’s Columbian (!) Exposition in Chicago, she cooked pancakes next to what was billed as the world’s largest flour barrel. She continued appearing around the country as Aunt Jemima until her death in 1923.

Hattie McDaniel played a character named “Mammy” in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind for which she won an Academy Award. She was the first African American performer to ever win an Oscar. It didn’t happen again for another 24 years when Sidney Poitier finally won his for Lilies of the Field. When the film debuted in the South, all of the black actors were removed from the poster and the promotional materials. Neither Hattie McDaniel nor her fellow black cast members were allowed to attend the film’s premier in Atlanta.

The Academy Award ceremony for Gone with the Wind took place at the Coconut Grove Restaurant at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel had a strict whites-only policy, but they allowed Ms. McDaniel in as a favor. She had to sit at the back, against the wall, at a segregated table, with only her escort and her white agent. The after party was also held at a whites-only establishment and Ms. McDaniel was not allowed to attend.

Hattie McDaniel was and is often criticized by the black community and liberal northerners for helping to perpetuate the “Mammy” stereotype. Her response was usually along the lines of, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.”

Neither Nancy Green nor Hattie McDaniel had been given a lot of options.

Last year, I was invited to speak to a group of stage managers in Russia. While I was there, I went to an open-air museum called the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments. When the USSR and the communist government collapsed, the Russians took all of the old statues of Lenin, Stalin, Bresnev and other so-called “heroes of the revolution” and put them all together in one area. Today, you can walk through that stone and cement forest of towering monuments. They weren’t destroyed, they were just relocated and put somewhere where their history could be contextualized.

Why not do the same with all of the Civil War statues and the monuments to Columbus.  We shouldn’t forget who those people are, but do we really need to keep glorifying them?

Our First Amendment rights to free speech do not apply to everything. Those things that aren’t covered include obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, true threats and speech integral to already criminal conduct.

NASCAR just banned the display of the Confederate flag. What is flying the Confederate flag but incitement? Take them all down. The Mississippi state flag includes the Confederate battle flag in its design.  Take it down, too, and redesign it.

HBO has pulled Gone with the Wind from its streaming service. They say that they are going to create a documentary to accompany it in the future that will try to explain the period of history in which it was made.

The Quaker Oats company, a subsidiary of Pepsi announced just yesterday that they will be finally be pulling the logo and will change the name of their Aunt Jemima brand. Cream of Wheat is now also reconsidering the image it uses - a character named Rastus who shares the same minstrel show origins as Aunt Jemima.

At the end of the Christmas special, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, the citizens of the town throw away the portraits of the Burgermeister Meisterburgers, who are the central villains of the story. The town should have kept them.

We are repeating history as it is because we have forgotten things that have happened in the past. We shouldn’t glorify the parts of our pasts that we have fought to overcome, but nor should we hide them.

Bottles of Aunt Jemima syrup belong in a museum that explains what they were. They do not still belong on our grocery shelves sending the message to all that pass by them that African Americans are inferior. Dump most of them in the trash but keep one or two around as a constant reminder and as a warning.

Following the murder of George Floyd, we are all being called upon to look deeply within ourselves to identify institutional racism. The more you look, the easier it is to see all of the symbols of that racism that surround us.  They are in our entertainment, in our streets, in our grocery stores. They are in the clichéd phrases we all use without thinking. They all need to be changed.

I do fear that just obliterating and forgetting these symbols, though, will just allow it all to rise up again.

We need to move on and move forward. Badly. But we must also never forget. We did what we did - that can’t be changed.

The first step in solving a problem is acknowledging that there is one. We are starting to do that.

I should go back and re-watch that Christmas special. There’s probably something in there that should go too.

Forward.