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PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID GUTTENFELDER
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By Debra Adams Simmons, HISTORY Executive Editor
This week there will be celebrations of Juneteenth, which marks a late acknowledgment of the end of slavery. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which recently passed a grim 100th anniversary, many Americans were never taught about these important historical moments.
The omissions were intentional. Even now there are aggressive efforts to erase these milestones from collective memory. Just two weeks ago, retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter had his microphone intentionally cut off as he talked about African American contributions at a Memorial Day celebration in Hudson, Ohio.
At the same time a reckoning with the legacy of slavery is underway—or perhaps in response to it—the country is having a debate over the teaching of African American history, which is fundamental to American history. (Pictured above, an anguished crowd in Minneapolis in May 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd.)
Many people are frustrated about how little has been revealed about the history that has shaped the United States and are demanding a more complete telling. Others are doing the most to rewrite the ugliest parts of our history.
Poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander writes in National Geographic’s June issue that for the U.S. to untangle itself from its legacy of white supremacism, we must embrace our full history. “Without learning, without knowledge, without the voices and the experiences and the insights gained from a determined excavation of our country’s past, we will never eradicate racism and racial violence,” writes Alexander. “If we are to stop weaving white supremacism into the fabric of our country, then we must learn our full histories. We must live like we understand what that history teaches us.”
Alexander, head of the Mellon Foundation, is leading an effort to rethink who gets memorialized and to reframe who and what gets remembered. She’s working with organizations around the country to reconsider monuments in public spaces. “Monuments and memorials are places where people come together to remember, to collectively mark a moment, to be a ‘we,’ to help identify a new direction, and to make a way forward,” she writes.
Alexander, who won a National Magazine Award last week for her New Yorker work, The Trayvon Generation, calls on the country to embrace Black freedom. “What does it mean to be Black and free in a country that rejects Black freedom?” she asks. (Below, a sign riddled with bullet holes marks the spot where, in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till’s mutilated body was pulled from Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. A bulletproof sign was erected in its place.)
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