EARLIER THIS YEAR, Emancipation Memorial in my neighborhood of Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., became the target of national protests and calls for removal. Erected to great fanfare in 1876, the memorial is not a Confederate monument but an homage to Black freedom built with the hard-earned dollars of former slaves. It commemorates a sacred moment in Black history, but does so with the racist imagery—and thus fictive narrative—of Abraham Lincoln dominating a crouching, half-dressed, emancipated Black man.
I resented Emancipation Memorial each time I passed by it, but when the calls began for its removal, I faltered. Learning its history several years ago as a monument fundraised by formerly enslaved Black people forged for me feelings of connection to it, even as I recoiled at its imagery. The meaning of “home” it carried as the landmark naming my D.C. neighborhood and church intensified in light of these feelings. My complicated response led me to reflect on another structure close to home for me that has yet to be dismantled.
In the sanctuary of my home church, a nearly 120-year-old Black United Methodist congregation in Pasadena, Calif., stained-glass panels depict the harmful fiction of white Jesus. The building dates from the 1970s, after the congregation was forced to move and rebuild following yet another collusion of the racist corporate and municipal forces that have plagued our church since its founding in 1903. Black Jesus is embraced in the resources our church utilizes, yet the stained glass—which may have come from our previous building—has remained.
These structures push my thinking in the national discussion on dismantling memory. What do we choose to tear down? What do we leave standing? Whose memory do we honor or dishonor, intentionally or unintentionally, in either choice?
I do not know of fixed answers to these questions; “right” answers, yes, but they are not static. Dismantling is necessarily a process as personal as it is public, particularly when what we are dismantling is wrapped up in our sacred idea, place, and space of “home.”
While something external falls when a racist symbol is retired at home, the moral center of gravity rests on the internal barriers that come down, yielding a freer connection to home previously unthinkable. We witnessed this interior deconstruction in the tears of a Black Mississippi mayor when signing the executive order removing the state flag in June. Black parents gesture forcefully to this interiority when stating that their children, not yet formed by certain racist images, are their rationale for dismantling racist monuments in the United States.
Dismantling is ethical work, which means it is ongoing and relational. The continued presence of stained glass or statues says something about what is important to us from the past. Removal can function in the same way. Keenly apprehending the relationship between past and future, dismantling fixes our eyes on the ethical possibilities and responsibilities of the present. History—especially the false narratives of the past—may be recorded in stone, but it lives in us and the worlds we make for ourselves and others to inhabit.
Jeania Ree V. Moore is a writer, United Methodist deacon, and doctoral student in religious studies and African American studies at Yale University.
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