The Futility Of Renaming Things
JULy 15, 2023
ROLLAND KIDDER
I read recently where a group was removing the
name “Audubon” from its organization because somewhere, in the
past, John James Audubon had owned slaves. Does that mean that his name should
forever be removed from the annals of natural history and ornithology?
If so, then shouldn’t the Washington Monument be
renamed? What about the Jefferson Memorial? Should Andrew Jackson’s name be
taken off the twenty-dollar bill? These former Presidents owned slaves. Should
Abe Lincoln’s name even be considered being tarnished because he waited until
three years into the Civil War before he announced the Emancipation
Proclamation?
I am a deep believer in civil rights for everyone in
America. As far as I know, no one in my family ever owned slaves. But, what if
some of my ancestors moved south after they arrived in this country in 1649 and
ended up owning slaves. Does that mean I should change my own name?
What I am saying is that I think there must come a time
in our lives and national history when we need to move beyond what may have
been the indiscretions and sins of our forefathers. That does not mean that we
should forget about evils from the past or not accept our history as a nation
that once embraced slavery. What it does mean is that we need to rise above the
idea that “name-changing” can erase all of that.
I took my kids for many years to “Audubon Weekend” at Allegany State Park. We have been members for many years of the
local Audubon Center. Audubon will be most remembered for his contributions to
bird-watching and advancing the study of natural history. That is what “Audubon” means to me.
George Washington owned slaves, but he will always be
remembered as the southern gentlemen who became a military man, and then led
the country through five grueling years of a Revolutionary War to final victory
over the British at Yorktown.
Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves, but fathered
children by a slave. Yet, he also wrote the Declaration of Independence which
was grounded in the principle that “all men are created equal”-a truth that would end up bringing an end to slavery.
If any support of slavery is to be deemed to be just
cause for renaming things, then one could even argue that any who helped create
the Constitution could be culpable because that initial document included the
three-fifths clause — that slaves would be counted not as citizens, but as
three-fifths of a person when it came to apportioning votes in the Congress.
In short, I think that the whole idea of renaming
things from times past puts us on the “slippery slope” of
trying to redefine history itself. It is better to let things be, admit to
mistakes and sins of the past, but not to continually try to rewrite history.
Where could it all end? Should we rebury soldiers in
Arlington Cemetery where up until World War II, black Americans were buried in
separate sections of the cemetery from white Americans. No, I say. Let them be.
These graves are a witness to a time when legalized segregation was still a
part of our history.
History is what it is-for good or for bad. We cannot
rewrite and rectify it by renaming or trying to change everything that may have
been tainted by it.
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