Estelle Cade’s letter of June 19 misses the crucial distinction between remembering and honoring. We erect statues to honor people of great achievement. But great achievements can also be accompanied by great evils. We cannot honor one side of the story while erasing the other.
Columbus’ landing on what he called the island of Hispaniola permanently changed the history of the world, and white inhabitants of North America have benefited enormously as a result.
But on the first day he landed, he seized and enslaved six of its indigenous people. He went on to kill or enslave the entire population of the island, and then raided all the neighboring islands.
From rapidcityjournal.com: “Columbus returned home to Spain and came back to the Caribbean with 17 ships and 1,200 men. His men traveled from island to island, taking Indians as captives.
In 1495, in a large slave raid, Columbus and his men rounded up 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children, and put them in pens. They selected what they considered the best natives and loaded them onto ships back to Spain. Two hundred died en route. After the survivors were sold as slaves in Spain, Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
The Civil War generals who are now honored by statues were fighting bravely to preserve a system that allowed them to own other human beings as if they were cattle. I cannot honor their struggle.
Many of my own ancestors were slaveholders, and one or two fought for the Confederacy. I’ve spent 14 years researching their history.
As decent and honorable as they may have been, that decency did not stop them from separating slave families, forcing enslaved women into concubinage, or selling dozens of young men, some of them their own sons, down the Mississippi River, under unspeakable conditions, to the brutal slavery of the Louisiana cane and cotton plantations.
I can’t feel guilty for things done a hundred years before I was born. But I have a moral obligation not to forget them, and the consequences that still flow from them. As to the statement that Germany is trying to say that the Holocaust never happened: Germany has been doing public penance for the Holocaust for my entire lifetime. There are no statues to Hitler or his lieutenants. Instead, the country is covered with monuments to their victims. tripsavvy.com/holocaust-memorials-in-germany-1520059 will give you a tour of some of the most famous. That is what it means to remember history.
Carla Barringer Rabinowitz is a resident of Royalston.