In a recent post, I talked about Lester Maddox, the pistol-armed, self-styled “Southern segregationist,” who closed his famous restaurant in downtown Atlanta rather than de-segregate it. This veritable personification of violent bigotry, of hatred, of everything wrong with the South, later went on to be the governor of my home state.
Now, that’s a fact of history, and a cautionary example, and I can’t change it. But I can change this: the bridge on I-75 over the Chattahoochee, right near my family’s house, is still named after this demon. It should be changed.
Public monuments are valuable and important markers of where we’ve been, and where we’re going. Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest damnatio memoriae – the Roman practice by which an unpopular leader’s name was stricken from every public memorial and record book (obviously unsuccessfully!). We have to balance the need for our monuments to accurately reflect our public values against the need for permanence in the historical record, and the need for institutional memory. Applied to this case, I would never suggest destroying Maddox’s statue in the Georgia Capitol: the proper response to things like that is more often to recontextualize and repurpose them (although Sanford Levinson might disagree).
But naming highways is different. Naming a highway is less an expressive act than a minimal-effort honorarium, and naming highways after such historically dubious figures as Maddox doesn’t serve the value of historical permanence. Maddox’s name should be stripped from the highway, and replaced with the name of someone who deserves the honor.
Actually, I don’t disagree with you at all. I see no obligation to keep honoring someone we properly view as despicable. One of the interesting things about “named things” (bridges, roads, buildings, etc.) is that we can’t really move them to museums (unlike statues), so we’re put to a direct choice between continuing to honor the person and finding someone more appropriate.
Posted by sandy levinson | June 2, 2008, 10:43 amProfessor Levinson, it’s an honor to have you reading my posts. I read parts of your book, Constitutional Faith, in college, and enjoyed it immensely.
I actually did expect that you would agree on the highway. Where I thought we may part company is on the treatment of Maddox’s statue in the Capitol, but now, hearing from you, it sounds like we’re on the same page with that, too. It reminds me of the “Altar of Victory” affair from late Roman history. You may be interested to know that Professor Adler here at NYU teaches that article of yours, on the Liberty Monument, as a part of her Art Law class.
Thanks for visiting and feel free to come again. Every now and again there’re some law issues on this small site.
Posted by Ames | June 2, 2008, 1:44 pmWhile history seems to remember Lester Maddox as a pick-ax handle carrying segregationist—and I don’t try to excuse or justify that— there was more to him than that. He could easily be characterized as one of the last Southern populist politicians dating back to “the revolt of the rednecks” of the early 20th century, when working classes took over state and local governments from the agrarian aristocracy. Once he became governor, he implemented and supported quite a few programs that benefited the poor and working classses of all races, and in fact was responsible for hiring more African American state employees than any previous governor. As to his statue and the bridge named after him and his wife, it’s easy, if intellectually lazy, to frame a discussion of him and that era in such a simplistic framework. But then I suppose symbols such as these encourage a certain reductionist thinking, for better or worse.
Posted by Gil | February 1, 2009, 12:48 pm