We need to broaden our discussion of who’s worthy, or not worthy, of monumentalization. It should be obvious that the men who made war on the United States in the cause of preserving and expanding slavery were traitors. As yet, though, none of the Confederate monument preservers have been compelled to argue why the Confederate form of treason deserves such honors, while other forms of treason do not. If Jefferson Davis, why not Benedict Arnold? If the difference is that Davis remains a hero to a particular region, then why not, say, Julius Rosenberg, who, whether a Soviet spy or not, had a lot of support in parts of the Bronx?

In my very own part of D.C., less than half a mile from my home, there’s a statue in Meridian Hill Park that the District would be well advised to remove. The park has long been home to three statues that seem to have been placed there by the principle of maximum random selection. One is of Joan of Arc. The second is of Dante. The third is of James Buchanan, who was not only our worst pre-Trump president but a president who so encouraged Southern extremism that he paved the way for Southern secession and the Civil War.

As the great American historian Kenneth Stampp documented in America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink, Buchanan insisted on conditioning Kansas’s bid for statehood on its adoption of a pro-slavery constitution. Such a constitution was explicitly and overwhelmingly rejected by Kansas voters, but Southern Democrats rallied around Buchanan’s position while Northern Democrats largely opposed it, which led to the party split that enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln to defeat the two Democratic presidential candidates who opposed him in the election of 1860. After Lincoln’s election but before his inauguration, outgoing president Buchanan stood idly by as Southerners seized most of the U.S. military installations and equipment in Southern states.

Why Buchanan is allowed to keep company with Joan and Dante in a D.C. public park is a damned good question.

Meanwhile, in D.C.’s Union Station, its great and beautiful train terminal, there’s a small bust of the founder of the union of Pullman car porters, A. Philip Randolph. A lifelong democratic socialist, Randolph not only led the nation’s first African American trade union, but initiated the March on Washington movement that compelled Franklin Roosevelt to order the desegregation of defense plants in 1941, Harry Truman to order the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948, and culminated in the great March on Washington in 1963. Randolph deserves a larger memorial in the nation’s capital, as does his aide Bayard Rustin, not to mention Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and a host of others.