Naming Places and Placing Names
Choosing to remember the formational power behind the names.
Last weekend I co-facilitated another Sankofa trip. One stop that is always meaningful to the trip's participants is the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. This bridge was the site of the infamous Bloody Sunday, when African American marchers were chased down and beaten by law enforcement officers as they attempted to take their demand for voting rights to the state capitol in 1965.
After walking across the bridge, imagining the courage and determination of those first marchers, we typically spend a few minutes talking about the man for whom the bridge is named. Pettus was a self-avowed white supremacist, a Confederate soldier who led the regional Ku Klux Klan before using those networks to get elected to the U.S. Senate where he tirelessly opposed reconstruction.
Pettus died thirty-one years before the bridge bearing his name was built. Which is to say, those naming the bridge meant to communicate something to those who would use it, something about power and control. All these years later, despite the bridge's significance to the Civil Rights Movement, despite Selma being 84% African American today, the bridge continues to broadcast the racist's name.
The conversation we have as we pull away from Selma is about the significance of the built environments in which we all live. While most of us aren't thinking about how bridges, avenues, and public schools are shaping us, those who first bestowed their names certainly were. Something about the lives of those chosen for these naming honors was deemed worthy of emulation and adoration. Does the fact that we have forgotten who many of these people were neutralize their influence on our imaginations and assumptions? I'm not so optimistic.
Our bus driver took a different route from Selma last week and we passed an elementary school at the city limits. I didn't recognize the name stamped prominently on the building so I pulled out my phone and looked up John T. Morgan. My quick search revealed Pettus' contemporary in the Senate. Another Confederate from Alabama, a slaveholder, and a Grand Dragon of the KKK. He too worked to oppose legislation which would have protected the rights of the children now attending this school.
There are important conversations to be had about what to do about monuments and buildings dedicated to avowed racists. If you've not read it, Clint Smith's How the World is Passed is a beautifully written exploration of some of these places and the dilemmas they pose. Whatever long-term, systemic approaches we take to these troublesome landmarks, it seems to me they pose a unique opportunity for Christians.
In Scripture, names matter. People's names, of course, but also the names of places. The specificity of place is important to how God interacts with his people and there are few passages which don't contain the name of some place which reminds the reader that our sacred texts are never abstract; they are rooted in particular soils, climates, and histories. Stumbling over these names reminds us that God knows the histories behind them. To God they are not decontextualized labels, one easily exchanged for another; they are stories latent with intention and meaning. Should it not be the same for us?
Working against the grain of societal racism is, to put it mildly, complicated. But learning the stories behind the names which previous generations believed were worthy of our formation? This is simple. Maybe our newfound knowledge leads to advocating for new names and new monuments or for better, more accessible education about what these names mean. Maybe we testify to the grotesque absurdity of enslavers and terrorists gracing the schools and bridges serving Black citizens. At the very least, we will become the ones who can place the names which have for generations, purposefully and more powerfully than we've generally noticed, named our places.
I've enjoyed writing for Missio Alliance for the past few years and am thrilled (and bit nervous) to be speaking at their upcoming conference. Let me know if you'll be there!