Call Them by Their True Names Read online

  Masters was supposed to be tried and found innocent or guilty only of playing a role in the murder of a prison guard. But the appellate decision shows how much the state built up a portrait of him as a person guilty of many other things—including being a former member of a Black prison gang whose revolutionary philosophy was also considered relevant. He was, in sum, put on trial as someone who was more or less inherently criminal and inherently dangerous. It’s impossible not to consider that his race was a part of this.

  The overall impression I came away with from reading the court decision was that he was considered a low-grade person who only deserved a low-grade trial. It’s certainly what he got. Another remarkable passage in the California Supreme Court decision states: “Defense counsel sought to examine a correctional officer about various notes found in the prison that claimed responsibility for Sergeant Burchfield’s murder. These notes were turned over to the prison’s investigators but were apparently lost…. The officer also saw at least 10 other notes claiming responsibility for Sergeant Burchfield’s murder. The trial court precluded the officer from testifying about the note.” In other words, conflicting evidence was lost, and potentially exonerating testimony was excluded. The California Supreme Court did not have a problem with this. Nor did it have problems with the pivotal testimony of the prosecution’s main witness—another member of the same gang, who had been given immunity in exchange for his testimony and who had refused to speak or meet with the defense team. The court decision mentions this and dismisses it, as it does testimony by other prisoners that this key witness was unreliable. He testified to Masters’s role in the killing but initially described a man who differed substantially from Masters. The description closely matched another gang member who actually confessed to making the murder weapon, but Masters’s lawyers were not at the time told these crucial facts.

  Joe Baxter, Masters’s lead lawyer, described the court’s ruling as “a shabby product” that was “poorly written and poorly reasoned,” and said it made factual and legal mistakes. “Justice delayed is justice denied” is an oft-cited legal maxim, and you could apply it to Masters’s case; but whether there was ever a chance of justice in the first place is a question worth asking. That a man was condemned to death and has lived in grim conditions for thirty-five years on the basis of shabby evidence and procedures makes “justice” too good a word for what happened to Jarvis Jay Masters.

  As of 2018, Joe Baxter was preparing for the habeas corpus hearing. We await its results.

  The Monument Wars

  (2017)

  For years, whenever I was in New Orleans, I used to run past an equestrian statue just outside the voluptuously green City Park. Though it was situated at a major intersection, where Esplanade Avenue meets Wisner Boulevard, the statue itself was unremarkable, the usual muscular horse and male rider. It celebrated Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the general whose assault on Fort Sumter in April 1861 launched the Civil War. Beneath the horse’s raised foreleg, a plaque commemorates the four years that Beauregard served in the Confederate Army; it says nothing about his decades in the US Army. A few miles to the south, at the center of Lee Circle, Beauregard’s Confederate commander and fellow slaveholder Robert E. Lee loomed atop a sixty-foot marble column, his arms crossed, a sword at his side. Lee was too high up to be clearly seen, as though purposefully placed out of the reach of anyone who might question why he was there.

  Monuments to the South’s Confederate past were not hard to find in New Orleans. On the banks of the Mississippi, a white obelisk paid tribute to the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place, a bloody attempt by a racist paramilitary group called the Crescent City White League to overthrow the Reconstructionist Louisiana government. The administration, which had both Black and white members, was defended by a Black militia as well as by New Orleans police. During the skirmishes, the White League militants used streetcars as barricades and hid behind bales of cotton. A few dozen people died, including eleven policemen. The insurrection was quashed, but its goal of ending Reconstruction was realized within two years, when the presidential election of 1876 rolled back the reforms of the previous decade and disenfranchised Black voters. In 1932, an inscription was added to the monument, praising the overthrow of the “carpetbag government.” The national election, the inscription reads,“ recognized white supremacy and gave us our state.”

  “Us,” of course, refers to white people. The history books insist that the North won the war, but in the South it’s hard to find the evidence. If the North had won the war, there would not be statues and street names honoring the defeated leaders. If the North had won the war, our monuments would be to the suffering of slaves and their struggle to be free. If the North had won the war, the Confederate flag would be a symbol of shameful beliefs and military defeat, seen only in museums. If the North had won the war, the war would be over. Or so I thought, coming to the South as an adult unaccustomed to encountering that flag and those monuments as an ordinary part of the civic landscape.

  In the West, where I currently live, we have our own unfinished wars: the Indian wars. I was reminded how unfinished they are when I attended a demonstration led by Native Americans against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The protest took place on the vast greensward in front of the statehouse in Bismarck, North Dakota, where a memorial to pioneers stands. The gray, cast-metal statue depicts a family: a patriarch, his shirt unbuttoned, poised for action; a matriarch, babe in her arms, leaning into her husband; and their strapping son. This is a military monument, despite its domestic subject, one of the many across the West that commemorate the invaders of these lands as heroes and, more than that, as us, while insisting that Native Americans are them.

  That the hundred or more young Native people in that crowd in Bismarck had to face a symbol of their status as the enemy seemed as threatening, in its way, as the long line of heavily armed cops who were there. It was impossible not to think of the US government’s military campaigns against the Lakota and Dakota a century and a half ago, which made some—eventually most—of the tribal territory available for white settlement and, of course, for exploitation. Part of the goal was to secure mineral resources. The Indian wars were and are frequently resource wars. North Dakota, like Louisiana and Alberta, has become hostage to oil interests, and the state seems to have declared a new war on its original inhabitants, treating as violent aggressors people who have declared peace and prayer as their tactics. When I visited the Standing Rock reservation, multiple roadblocks stopped people from getting near the activist camps. I was told by government security officers that they were turning people back for their own safety, which seemed to be an attempt to instill fear and portray peaceful resistors as terrorists or criminals.

  Plenty of statues in the West depict men who killed and dispossessed indigenous people. But most of the memorials depict what followed the initial invasion and conflict: white settlement. In San Francisco, a pioneer mother with her children overlooks a path in Golden Gate Park; near City Hall towers another, bigger monument, with several groups of bronze figures, including one that shows a Spanish priest and a vaquero standing over a cringing Native American man. They’re supposed to be “civilizing” him, but they look more like cops roughing up a suspect.

  A city is a book we read by wandering its streets, a text that favors one version of history and suppresses others, enlarges your identity or reduces it, makes you feel important or disposable depending on who you are and what you are. When I called Maurice Carlos Ruffin, a writer and lawyer who lives in New Orleans, to discuss his city’s Confederate monuments, he told me, “The statues—a lot of them physically beautiful—argue that if you’re white, you’re human, and if you’re not, you’re not.” He’s not.

  Who is remembered, and how? Who decides? These are political questions. “Who controls the past,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “controls the future.” Those in the United States trying to shape the future know this, as well as the rest of Orwell’s admoniti
on: “Who controls the present controls the past.” We are not who we once were—“we” meaning the citizens of a country whose nonwhite population has grown, in numbers and in visibility and in power, but remains marginalized in countless ways. Racism is so embedded that if we were to cease honoring slaveholders, we would have to rename cities and counties and the state of Washington; sexism is so deeply entrenched that the great women of history are largely missing from our streets and squares. What is to be done with a landscape whose features carry the legacy of violence? Do we tear down what’s already standing? Do we work toward parity by erecting new buildings, new monuments? Do we recontextualize or reclaim what is already there?

  A quarter century ago, in Birmingham, Alabama, a series of sculptures was erected to commemorate the civil rights movement. The most startling, by the artist James Drake, flanks a pedestrian path in a city park. Emerging from a wall on one side and the ground on the other, snarling bronze and steel dogs lunge as if to tear apart any passersby. The sculpture suggests that to understand the violence people once met with here, we need to experience at least a shadow of that violence ourselves. It’s a rare thing, an official memorial to institutional savagery on the site where it transpired.

  History, unlike physics, does not have an equal and opposite reaction for every action, but sometimes it has a curious way of advancing. In June 2015, nine Black people were killed inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a city where the Confederate flag is frequently displayed. The bloodbath, which was intended to be the opening salvo of a race war, had the opposite symbolic effect: it forced people to confront the flag’s association with racist violence.

  The standard defense of the Confederate flag is that it is an emblem of history, but its display in South Carolina doesn’t date back to the nineteenth century: it first flew over the statehouse in 1961, ostensibly resurrected to mark the centennial of the Civil War but really as a symbol of opposition to integration. After the Charleston massacre, the activist Bree Newsome scaled a flagpole at the capitol to take it down; she was arrested. A month later, in a milestone marking the road away from Jim Crow, legislators finally ordered it taken down for good.

  Across the South, public memory has been shifting—or at least expanding—to acknowledge previously overlooked facets of history. In October 2016, the town of Abbeville, South Carolina, unveiled a monument to a man named Anthony Crawford, a century after a mob beat, tortured, shot, and hanged him for arguing with a white man over the price of his crops. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative is building a memorial to the more than four thousand Black victims of lynching. The city also houses a Rosa Parks museum.

  Many of these advances meet with ferocious resistance. In New Orleans, when the obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League was removed, in 1989, from its prime location at the foot of Canal Street, a follower of David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, led a successful lawsuit to make sure that the landmark at which so many Klan marches had originated remained present and visible in the city. In 1993, it was installed in a less conspicuous location a block away.

  In 2014, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis asked Mitch Landrieu, the city’s white mayor at the time, to look at the towering statue of General Lee: “Let me help you see it through my eyes. Who is he? What does he represent? And in that most prominent space in the city of New Orleans, does that space reflect who we were, who we want to be, or who we are?”

  A year later, the mayor proposed that the city take down the statue, along with others that commemorated the Confederate cause. Then city employees were threatened, and the contractor who accepted the job of removing the statues received death threats and withdrew.

  Residents’ frustrations over the delay have erupted periodically into outright conflict. In September 2016, Take ’Em Down NOLA, an activist group led by African Americans, began protesting the statue of Andrew Jackson that sits in the heart of the French Quarter. Jackson fought against Native Americans, owned and traded slaves, and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which dispossessed the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and other southeastern tribes of their lands. The several hundred demonstrators who poured into Jackson Square found that the statue had been placed behind barricades and was being protected by police. Meanwhile, a counterprotest sought to obstruct the activists. When David Duke himself showed up at Jackson Square, a quarrel broke out, and in the scuffle police arrested seven people, including the gray-haired woman who had wrested Duke’s megaphone out of his hands.

  The statue remained standing, but Duke’s followers seemed worried that it was doomed. On Duke’s website, a commenter wrote, “To the victor go the spoils—and the ability to humiliate the vanquished. One of the most iconic ways is to destroy the statues and monuments of the defeated side.”

  He has a point. If you want to see defeat, Berlin might be the best place to look. The city has repudiated its role in the Third Reich with a formidable array of museums, statues, memorials, and other urban aide-mémoire. The most dramatic is the nearly five-acre Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It’s like a city in miniature, a grid of nearly three thousand blank brown concrete plinths, all the same width and depth but of varying heights. It’s a city of absence, of wordless commemoration, eerie to walk through. Completed in 2005, it commemorates only Jewish victims of the Holocaust; later memorials rectify the omission with monuments to gay victims and to Roma victims. The former SS headquarters also memorialize genocide. There’s a Jewish museum that does so as well.

  And then there are the “stumbling blocks”—Stolperstein literally means a stone you trip over, and it can also mean something you stumble across, as in discover. The German artist Gunter Demnig has since 1996 laid more than 50,000 small—about four-inch-square—bronze plaques in the streets in front of homes from which victims of the Holocaust were taken, including Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, homosexuals, and dissidents. The Stolperstein project continues, according to Demnig’s website; with funding from donors and data from the Yad Vashem archives, he is installing about 450 carefully crafted, small, gold-colored memorials a month.

  Memory is overtaking oblivion, at least in these small interpolations that must jolt people’s sense of time and place when they come across one unexpectedly. They are installed in other cities in Germany and beyond, a dispersed project to insist that places must have memories, and we must remember what took place in them. Memory, too, can die—or it can be kept alive. And who is remembered, and how, and who decides: these are deeply political things. The physical spaces we inhabit control the past through statues, names, and representations.

  In New Orleans, in the places where those monuments still stand, so does the Confederacy. Yet artists and activists are making interventions into public space all over the country, some of them elaborate, some more ad hoc. The insult of the pioneer monument in Bismarck was temporarily solved by draping it with a bed sheet, on which was painted, “Protect Our Mother.” In New Orleans, the Jefferson Davis monument was tagged “slave owner” to draw attention to what was left off the plaque. On Memorial Day in 2015, John Sims, a conceptual artist, organized burnings and burials of the Confederate flag in thirteen Southern states. “The Confederate flag is the n-word on a pole,” he said. One of the burials took place at Lee Circle.

  In periods when progressives don’t hold federal power, the work of rights and racial justice is largely relegated to the state and local levels. In the Trump era, this change of focus becomes imperative—if we advance at all, it will be through actions taken in our own communities, on city councils and in neighborhood assemblies and on the streets. The fight is perhaps most powerful, most poignant, when the guerrilla revisionists wage it.

  To mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the 1598 arrival of Juan de Oñate, a Spanish colonial governor, a statue was erected north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In that part of the country, the Native American pueblos are strung like beads along the silver thread of th
e Rio Grande. Native memory is long, and Oñate had not been forgiven for chopping off the right feet of the Acoma Pueblo men who rose against him. So one night, several years after its installment, the statue’s booted, spurred foot was severed from its leg. In a letter to the editor of the Albuquerque Journal, a person who claimed involvement wrote, “If you must speak of his expedition, speak the truth in all its entirety.”

  What is the whole truth? How do we reach it? In the monument wars, as we excavate our history like an archaeological site—or a crime scene—we have a chance to arrive at new conclusions, nominate new heroes, rethink the past, and reorient ourselves to the future. Some classes of people are educated, others rebuked. On occasion, the public dialogue produces something tangible. In Lower Manhattan, a grand statue of George Washington, yet another slaveholder, stands guard over Federal Hall, as it has since 1882. But a few blocks away, in a small counterpoint to the master narrative, a recently installed sign remembers Wall Street’s eighteenth-century slave market.

  The playing field is level, shout the men on the mountaintop to the people below. From the abyss, the people shout back in disagreement.