Dylann Roof’s Civil War Memory

This week I am busy reading through drafts from the contributors to my book on how the Civil War is currently being interpreted at museums and historic sites. It involves a good deal of work, but I am learning a great deal and excited about how the project is beginning to come together.

One of the things that I encouraged my authors to tackle in their essays is the ongoing debate about the public display of Confederate iconography that followed the violent shooting in Charleston last summer by Dylann Roof, whose trial has begun. It seems to me that public historians are in somewhat uncharted territory in terms of finding a place within local communities that are engaged in these difficult conversations. I am pleased that a number of the contributors are dealing directly with these issues, which I hope will result in this book having some role in helping to guide public historians who want to get more involved.

John Rudy’s essay deals directly with the challenges that public historians face when having to address contemporary problems. As a trainer of park rangers for the National Park Service, John has thought long and hard about the need for front line interpreters to engage visitors and to encourage them to think about how the past informs the present.

One passage in particular in his essay stood out to me, which I can’t quite stop thinking about. It comes in his discussion of the Charleston shootings and its aftermath. I did not know that just months before stepping foot in the AME Church Roof visited the NPS’s Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island.

To a large extent, Dylann Roof was a Park Service visitor: looking for meaning in a landscape. He sketched “14-88,” a neo-nazi slogan, onto the sand at the beach and had his photograph taken in front of the marker commemorating the importation of human chattel.

I was, of course, familiar with the photographs of Roof with Confederate battle flags, but I did not know that he likely contemplated instigating a race war at a place that was central to the beginnings of American slavery and the Civil War.

As John points out in his essay, the NPS staff at Fort Moultrie discussed the implications of Roof’s visit on how they interpret the site and engage visitors, but it raises all kinds of profound and difficult questions for public historians at historic sites and museums.

Roof’s visit to Fort Moultrie is a powerful reminder that there is no neutral ground at our historic sites, where the present can be ignored and brushed aside.

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11 comments… add one
  • Andy Hall Nov 30, 2016 @ 19:50

    The large majority of the images Roof posted with his manifesto have some clear connection to either the Confederacy or antebellum slaveholding. They include visits to plantations and their slave cabins, a slave burial ground, a Confederate cemetery, and a museum operated by the SCV. He apparently posted these images as a way of explaining or justifying his actions (along with the manifesto), so they need to be taken seriously.

    • Kevin Levin Dec 1, 2016 @ 2:20

      At some point I need to look at this more systematically. Perhaps there is an article in it. Thanks for the reminder.

    • hankc9174 Dec 1, 2016 @ 7:21

      makes me yearn for some kind of ‘exit polling’ from historical sites. “Has your thinking changed on states rights, slavery, white supremacy, secession”, etc.

      • Kevin Levin Dec 1, 2016 @ 7:42

        Right now this story has me more interested in ‘entrance polling.’

        • Shoshana Bee Dec 1, 2016 @ 8:38

          I recently re-watched this excellent video “Freedom, the Civil War, and Its Complicated Legacy” youtu.be/fysAp_2pVCI (listed in your blog). It occurred to me after viewing, that there was probably no other collection of NPS sites, museums, or memorials in which the visitors were so firmly entrenched in pre-conceived notions, rhetoric, and myth, than those representing the Civil War. Indeed, entrance polling would be both revealing, and in some cases depressing, regarding these sites.

          • Kevin Levin Dec 1, 2016 @ 9:13

            Not sure I agree. Consider the situation that the Tenement Museum in New York City is dealing with in light of the election and concerns about immigration.

            • Shoshana Bee Dec 1, 2016 @ 17:39

              I guess that I need to adjust the paradigm to include the brave new world that we have entered into.

      • Rob Baker Dec 2, 2016 @ 6:55

        Oddly enough I encountered something similar in Charleston last spring at the Old Slave Mart Museum. There were some students from Texas A&M Univ. conducting a study and basically asked questions about the museum, its interpretation, etc. I need to see what’s come of that so far.

      • Joshism Dec 8, 2016 @ 18:10

        At least some in the public history field believe it’s not their place to attempt to change opinions, merely to inform.

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