Confederate memorials and the unjust geography of memory
Reuben Rose-Redwood co-authored an opinion piece for Atlantic's CityLab on the practice of naming streets after celebrated figures and what it can symbolize for different communities. He discusses the implications of renaming spaces and toppling monuments, pointing out that they often coincide during times of change in politics or societal values.
"One of these key lessons is that those with political power have long used place naming and other forms of commemoration as a means of legitimizing their own political ideology by giving it the appearance of spatial permanence and fixity in the landscape...The current movement to change Confederate place names is yet another example that underscores how the commemorative priorities of the present need not always align with those of the past. In such contexts, changing the memorial landscape to better reflect present-day values is not the exception but the rule, since history is replete with cases of de-commemoration and re-commemoration."
Read the full article at CityLab.