We don’t erase history by pulling statues down. We do it by putting them up.

The truth is that there is a great deal of history we have chosen, or allowed ourselves, to forget. The Fort Pillow garrison, I learned, consisted not only of whites and former slaves together, but Northerners and southern Unionists together. While Forrest’s statue stands tall in Memphis, his bust keeps watch at the state capitol and his name graces numerous schools, the names of those who opposed him at such terrible cost remain obscure. This was not an oversight. It was, and is, intentional. Attempts to paint a more complete picture of Ben Tillman, the violent post-Reconstruction governor and senator, at his monument at the South Carolina state house have been rebuffed over the last few years. The monument to the people who lost their lives resisting him is, like Fort Pillow, much newer and far away. History, like the people who inherit it, inhabits neighborhoods of more and less prominence.

Just as white America never sustained any attempts at justice for the freed people and their descendants, there has never been a true public accounting of the history that took place around and against those nobly mounted men of bronze. Any argument to preserve them in their places of honor and prominence, however earnestly protective of “history,” must first acknowledge that their very presence served to help people not to remember but to forget. Until that forgetting is undone, they will never do anything else.