When the National Park Service recently removed all references to transgender and queer people from the Stonewall National Monument website, one of our country’s most important ways to honor and preserve the past was effectively turned into a weapon, one designed to further the Trump administration’s attack on so-called “gender ideology” as well as on public history.
Monuments have been challenged and even removed in recent years, some with acts of civil disobedience, including violence. As a nation, we’ve debated the way they can shape, distort or deny our collective understanding of the past or help us find common ground over time and across our differences. We’ve begun to reckon with the reality that one person’s hero is another’s worst enemy, or that a moment of national pride can also be one of deep shame.
That conversation has been particularly rich in Chicago. In 2020, the city convened a committee to both review and make recommendations about the city’s existing monuments and markers. As two people deeply involved in the city’s efforts to realize new monuments and markers, we believe several lessons from that process offer a path forward now, one we urgently need to follow.
First, we need more, not fewer, monuments. In Chicago that work is underway. Memorials to Mahalia Jackson, Mother Jones, and Latina histories in Pilsen, commemorations of the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 and honoring the survivors of police torture, and a series that foregrounds Native American stories, are all in the works. By turns they offer opportunities to celebrate the past, acknowledge its erasures and confront the hard truths of racial history. Rather than removing troubling monuments, the city plans to engage with some of them, including adding to an existing statue of George Washington in Washington Park.
Second, we also need to talk with one another more, not less, about monuments. Revisiting the city’s memorials encouraged a wide-ranging civic dialogue about how best to recognize our histories. Community organizations, youth groups, historical societies and artists all made suggestions for new markers or shared ideas about how to tell these stories. All of it was an engagement with public history as not just an opportunity to celebrate but also to confront and even heal our shared past. We need platforms, spaces and opportunities for us to share and understand why monuments and memorials matter to us and to be able to challenge and confront one another in civil ways.
The national conversation around monuments has also led President Donald Trump to call for more memorials, through an idea he proposed during his first term in office and has recently revived. The “National Garden of American Heroes” would have over 250 statues recognizing significant Americans, from Whitney Houston to Harriet Tubman and Antonin Scalia. While there is nothing wrong with adding more monuments, what is missing in his plan is any kind of invitation to the public to discuss the merits, contributions and impact of these historical figures.
On the contrary, his policy around monuments and memorials seeks to stifle debate, threatening to punish people “to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law” for any actions that result in the damage or desecration of monuments. How ironic, then, that by erasing the role of trans and queer people in the historic events the Stonewall memorial honors and removing the T and Q from LGBTQ, the administration is in effect violating its own policy, desecrating the history this monument seeks to remember.
With this move, Trump offers up history as a zero-sum game, where one person or community’s win is seen as a threat or loss to another group’s identity. Monuments and memorials can and should do more than simply be a definitive representation of one person’s truth over another. But contests around the limits of public history, historical truth and national identity emerge through collective democratic processes, not via an executive order or individual fiat.
Monuments matter not only because they speak to our past but because they allow us to discuss the most pressing issues facing us today. There are many examples of what this looks like in Chicago. The recently announced plan to create the COVID-19 Memorial Monument of Honor, Remembrance & Resilience, a 25-foot stainless-steel sculpture on a site in the Illinois Medical District, offers a place where we could come together to remember what we went through and to discuss public health policy, how to prepare for the next pandemic and care for the most vulnerable people in our society.
This vision of monuments as active and evolving community spaces is at the heart of a city-led project, announced in 2023, to create markers across Chicago neighborhoods, ones that would honor the way all communities have contributed to the city’s history, from the work of everyday individuals to historic sites and collective events like festivals.
Monuments can help us to reactivate a vibrant public sphere that nurtures discussion and debate, one free from loyalty oaths, the threat of censorship, and retribution. Chicago offers a case study in how to make that happen, but it will take all of us to participate in expanding our shared history. Monuments are not just static timeless statues but a critical tool of resistance, especially as the current administration seeks to erase not just history but the lived realities and experiences of Americans.
Alison Cuddy is a writer and consultant for the city of Chicago Community Markers program. Lisa Yun Lee is the executive director of the National Public Housing Museum and a member of the Chicago Monuments Project and the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials.
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