Frances Cathryn is an editor, museum worker, and community organizer who fights to recontextualize stories as they’ve been told to us. Her work confronting racist histories and the myth of neutrality in museums helped her start wip projects, where she looks forward to building something different.
Since George Floyd’s death on Memorial Day, hundreds of thousands of people across the country have poured into the streets daily to demand an end to brutality against Black Americans and to call for transformative change in our institutions. But hiding in plain sight in plazas and parks, the backdrop to many of these protests, stand symbols of the long history of inequality in our society and of the hard fight ahead of us.
On June 3, over 2,000 people gathered at Academy Green in Kingston, a small triangular park between Uptown and Midtown, to walk in support of Black lives. Behind the event’s main speakers, who rose to call for the end of police violence, three cast-bronze men cast a shadow over the defiant and revolutionary atmosphere.
Why did these statues seem so out of place? Because these outsized figures are symbols of New York State’s history of colonization, enslavement, and state-sanctioned discrimination. Peter Stuyvesant tried to eject Jewish refugees fleeing persecution, calling them a “deceitful race.” Governor George Clinton, who also has a building named after him across the street, owned eight enslaved African Americans. And Henry Hudson, the region’s namesake, colonized the Lenape territory for the Dutch East India Company.
Across the nation and around the world, communities are reevaluating what’s important to them and removing symbols to white supremacy, oppression, and systemic racism where they live. Memorials to Confederate generals are toppling across the South. On June 3, Philadelphians pulled down a statue of their notoriously racist former mayor and police commissioner, Frank Rizzo. And on June 7, anti-racism protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston and dumped the oppressive figure into the harbor nearby. (Colston has since been fished out, and is destined for a museum, spray-painted face and all.)
The dismantling of these monuments can be seen as part of a larger commemorative justice movement, which seeks to conscientiously redefine place-based narratives. The concept encourages communities to reimagine what our public spaces say about our values—who and what we are willing to put on a pedestal (such as the 10 US army bases named after Confederate generals).
The irony is that the statues in Academy Green were never commissioned to commemorate Kingston’s history. They were intended for scrap after a Manhattan bank was renovated in the 1940s, but then were purchased and rededicated to Ulster County.
Black history is American history. We need to make room for Black stories in our collective memories. Removing the three statues in Academy Green and replacing them with monuments to silenced voices in Kingston’s history can be part of the larger work toward racial justice—in our city as well as in our society.
When local activists of color and young Black students gather at Academy Green and call for the acknowledgment of their basic civil rights in front of an enslaver, it serves as a reminder of the present precarity of Black and brown lives in all spaces, and how we as a society fail to keep them safe.
Let’s use the significance of this moment in history to acknowledge our violent past and institute radical change. Removing monuments to oppression in our communities and building new ones isn’t a new idea—and it’s only a small part of the work. But taking that first step requires the kind of boldness of thinking that will lead to an even greater reimagining of our world and how we want to live in it.
Learn more about the Kingston Monument Project and sign the petition here.
I think it is good for local resident’s to reimagine and redesign the public places they visit and spend time in.
I also value history, for what happened and the people that were important at the time, should not be forgotten. No one can say Peter Stuyvesant did not shape the early settlement of Kingston. Should we forget his impact on our history? Will removing a statue of him remove the scars of slavery or colonialism? Will it remove the fact that almost every settler had slaves back in the day?
Yes we need to create spaces where local people and visitors can enjoy and relax and revel and learn. If we remove every statue of early slave holders then there will be few left. That would include all the founders of our democracy etc. Is that what we want, to erase all that history?
The history that we make now, does not have to reflect that of these early historical figures. But my view, is that we cannot erase or heal from social scars by removing statues. It is up to the community, it is their park. They can forge a new vision for the space they use. Let’s just not forget the history that got us here in the first place, whether it was good or bad.
I Totally agree with their person above. I just read that Lord York of New York fame was a slaver trader, as the Lord Yale guy named that the famed University is named for. Should we tear down the NYC/NYS, cancel all degrees from famous Yalies as They are secret racists? Where does it stop? Should we purge any and all evil in the world or just dead white guys? The Kente cloths that Pelosi and her ilk were wearing in Congress last month celebrate the Kente Tribes in Africa who sold men of warring tribes to the Europeans. I say add statues, not remove history. I totally oppose Frances Cathryn and her new-age ideas. I’m not sure but I doubt she’s a native Ulster County resident. Tell me if I’m wrong.