Children were beginning to climb up on the Confederate Monument in Forest Park to see what was carved on it. Their teacher and a guest lecturer encouraged them to take a closer look, and its dimensions are such that a fifth grader can climb on it.
“Should we not stand on it?” one boy asked. “It is a monument.”
Stephanie Teachout, their fifth grade teacher at New City School, brought the class to the park to learn about exactly what kind of monument it is. They were taught by David Cunningham, a sociology professor at Washington University and New City parent, and Jeanette Freiberg, Cunningham’s research assistant, a sophomore at WUSTL studying sociology and Latin America.
They also were guided to come up with ideas for what to do with this problematic monument, which glorifies those who died for the Confederacy – who died defending race-based chattel slavery in the United States.
The student’s ideas for the monument – which now stands, without context, in the city’s crown public jewel, Forest Park, on a public road called “Confederate Drive” – would include (among less radical notions) dumping it in the Mississippi River and destroying it to build a more positive work of art from its elements.
But the adults did call the children down from standing and crawling on the monument.
Once the children reported on what they found looking closely at the monument – including “lots of bird poop” – their teacher and guest instructors helped them put it all together.
“There is no mention of slavery,” Teachout said. That is true. The monument honors the soldiers of the Confederacy as defenders of states’ rights, not race-based slavery.
“We know the Civil War was about slavery,” Teachout said. “That means a lot, right? It’s all pretty positive word choices, but it doesn’t mention why the war was fought.”
Cunningham spelled it out a little more: “When you’re honoring only one side of a war and making it heroic, it’s easy to say this side was right and were fighting for the right reasons.”
The students had noticed the heroic language about Confederate soldiers and the sculpture of a family sending a son off to fight the Union. Their teacher directed their attention to another figure towering above the family.
“Everyone notice the angel?” Teachout said. “That’s the Angel of the Confederacy. What does it mean to have an angel of the Confederacy? What does it mean to have this in Forest Park now?”
Cunningham gave them a succinct history of the monument and the more recent controversy about its remaining on public view in St. Louis, a city and region that became notorious globally for racial disparity and oppression following the Ferguson unrest in 2014. It was dedicated a century before Ferguson, in 1914, under the auspices of the Confederate Monument Association of St. Louis, with funding by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Following Ferguson, Cunningham explained, then-Mayor Francis G. Slay called for a “reappraisal” of the monument and its prominent public display in April 2015. That June, a group of protestors offered their own “reappraisal,” protesting at the monument and placing “Black Lives Matter” signs on it. Then a group of vandals offered a further “reappraisal,” which Cunningham situated on the kind of timeline that fifth graders understand.
“When you were in third grade, as an act of protest, people threw paint on this monument, painted a big black X and painted ‘Black Lives Matter’ on it,” Cunningham said, after showing them traces of the vandalism that remained after power washing.
“People were not happy this was here,” Teachout said.
Cunningham told them that then-Mayor Slay formed a committee that issued a report about what to do with the monument – and then nothing happened.
As Cunningham told the students, and as the committee report states, only one institution told the City of St. Louis that it would want the monument. The Missouri Civil War Museum said it would accept the monument but would not immediately display it. St. Louis County Parks, whose space the museum occupies, would not permit it – or submit any proposal for future use. The city did not agree to those terms, and the monument remained on prominent display on Confederate Drive in Forest Park when Slay stepped down and Mayor Lyda Krewson was sworn in on April 18.
In New Orleans, as these students also have learned in class, the mayor was more proactive. In December 2015, Mayor Mitch Landrieu signed an ordinance calling for the removal of four monuments related to the Confederacy and its aftermath. This April, workers (paid with private funds) took down The Battle of Liberty Place Monument, an obelisk in New Orleans honoring a violent uprising in 1874 by whites who rejected the election of black public officials Reconstruction.
This sparked a backlash from white protestors waving Confederate flags, and the other three monuments, which would require a crane to move, remain standing. Landrieu told The Times-Picayune that every crane company in the area had received threats. But Landrieu has said the city plans to proceed with taking them down and moving them into storage until a museum accepts them.
“This is current,” Teachout told The St. Louis American in an interview. “They’re reading about statues coming down in New Orleans, and hearing about these debates in other cities, but we do have this debate in our own city, so what can we actually do? I love the idea of this design thinking. So, here’s a problem: What are you going to do about it? They’re 10 and 11 years old, but very often they want to be grappling with these topics, they want to be engaged. And they also love to run outside and play on the playground, like right after these conversations.”
The American was invited to observe this educational process by Alexis Wright, the relatively new head of school at New City, the first African American to lead the powerhouse, high-priced private school.
“This is Stephanie’s curriculum, but we are working on a strategic plan for academic innovation, and this feels fresh, important and at the vanguard,” Wright said. “It’s teaching the skills our kids need to know. This is why I came to St. Louis, why I came to New City.”
Wright, Teachout and Cunningham think these students’ ideas might strike a chord with the new mayor. Krewson is a former New City parent who lives in the neighborhood. She also ran on a racial equity platform, like several other candidates, and nearly lost the Democratic primary to a progressive coalition that backed Tishaura O. Jones.
“You live here,” Cunningham told the fifth graders after they were called down from the Confederate Monument. “Your views matter. People will listen to you. You’re not just sitting back watching.”
Teachout sunk the point home a little deeper: “We have a new mayor. You are the future. She should listen to you.”
A spokesman for Krewson told The American, “The mayor wants to remove the statue from the park. She is currently reviewing the different options to get that done.”
Sophie Hurwitz, a St. Louis American editorial intern from John Burroughs School, contributed reporting.
