Who owns America's history? The answer will define what replaces fallen monuments.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Kentucky sculptor Ed Hamilton, 73, is impressively agile for a man of almost any age. On a seasonably warm fall afternoon, he easily ascends a four-foot plinth supporting a bronze statue of an enslaved man named York, who "belonged" to the famed American explorer William Clark.

Hamilton, who is showing me around Louisville—a city eerily emptied out by coronavirus realities and sustained civil unrest tied to the police killing of Breonna Taylor—has spotted a bit of gunk covering York’s right eye.

“OK, brother York, we have to keep your freedom vision clear,” Hamilton says, using a red handkerchief to dab at the eye of the monument, which looks northward toward the Ohio River from a downtown park.

The city of Louisville commissioned Hamilton in 2002 to create the statue to honor York, who is believed to have been a vital part of the journey of Clark and Meriwether Lewis to explore lands west of the Mississippi River from 1804 to 1806.

Save a few journal passages written by Clark, the history of York is scant. In research for the sculpture, Hamilton says he gleaned that York essentially functioned as a free man during those two years of exploration, but was forced back into enslavement after the mission was complete.

-more-

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2021/02/who-owns-americas-history-the-answer-will-define-what-replaces-fallen-monuments-feature/

[SWBTATTReg]

1. I say we as the American people owns the history of this Country. As we well know, history has

been full of those who attempted to subvert history to their liking (McCarthyism) etc. and their attempts failed dismally and they are all remembered as fearmongers and worse today. trumpism will become the same as fearmongers, benedict arnolds..., the same.

[Ron Green]

2. I believe the entire white privilege bubble in which most of us have grown up

has been kept inflated by a weak reading of history. My school classes extolled the glories of the Confederacy, but even in the North students didn’t learn much about the genocide on which this country is based.

The tentative efforts to call out structural white racism are still being met with bigoted backlash, and history itself is as rarely invoked as science in what now passes for public discourse.

[Aristus]

3. My two cents are: nobody owns American history.

But nobody learns it from statues, either...