Here in Madison, on Tuesday evening about dinner time, a Black man went into a Capitol Square restaurant with a bullhorn and a baseball bat, saying basically, “I’m here to F**k you up”, and when he got arrested, other protesters got violent and eventually pulled down the Forward statue, and Hans Christian Heg, who was a Norwegian immigrant, a Union soldier in the Civil War, and I think an abolitionist, and rolled Heg into the lake.
I, like all the other good liberals in Madison, am horrified by the violence, and saddened by the destruction, because Forward is the work of a woman artist, Jean Pond Miner, and Heg was fighting on the “good” side in the Civil War.
The statue of Colonel Hans Christian Heg (1829-1863), commander of the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, as it stands in front of the Wisconsin State Capitol. Heg was mortally wounded on 19 September 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga (Georgia) and died the next day.
The Historical Society has preserved clippings about the Heg’s statue
But that’s the thing – the history of these white people has been carefully preserved, while the history of indigenous people and people of color that happened in this very same place has not. And these are just statues.
There was violence against living people, Black and white, and maybe instead of that being a sidebar to the vandalism of the statues, that should be a bigger part of the story. A state senator, Tim Carpenter, says he was assaulted during the protests, and a man trying to drive downtown to go pick up his girlfriend got beat up.
I need to thank Brian Bedford, who is running for State Senate, for writing this post on facebook that did a lot to help educate me. Since I’m old and white, and because I can remember being discriminated against as a woman and a Jew, I have trouble fully inhabiting the privilege that I know have.
And like Brian, I write this for me, to help myself understand, not to ask for permission or forgiveness.
The main thing that scares me now is the possibility that as the violence gets worse, Trump will declare martial law, and that will really prevent everyone from voting.