"The past is never dead. It's not even past," William Faulkner once wrote and no truer words were ever written about history's hold on modern society.
Too many people see history as something that's locked into place, when it's actually a dynamic entity, constantly shifting as it incorporates new information and new perspectives.
School history books on the role of First Nations in the development of Canada are vastly different today than they were 50 years ago and that's for the good.
In Jacksonville, Florida, this week, a high school changed its named from Nathan B. Forrest High to Westside High, finally and permanently addressing the decades of protest in that city over who the school was named after.
That would be Nathan Bedford Forrest who, according to James Loewen in his 1999 book Lies Across America, has more public spaces - schools, parks, streets and so on - named after him than any other American, even more than George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Forrest was a Confederate general during the American Civil War, who likely ordered his men to commit the war crime of killing the Federal troops who surrendered after the siege of Fort Pillow, possibly for having fought alongside black soldiers in defence of the Tennessee fort.
Yet Forrest's worst atrocity happened after the Civil War ended. As Loewen chronicles in detail in his book, Forrest was a key figure in the creation of the Ku Klux Klan.
The "lies across America" Loewen chronicles in his book are historical markers across the United States that are outright fabrications or are misleading. In the South, Forrest was depicted as a hero who proudly fought for his people and was a key player in the development of the region, which is why so many things were named after him, including the Jacksonville school that opened in 1959.
The part about the Klan was glossed over, as it is throughout the South to this day, which is why it took until 2014 for Forrest's name to finally come off the school.
It's not just Forrest, of course. Legitimate heroes of the South got whitewashed, too, Loewen points out elsewhere in his book. At Ivy Green, the birthplace of Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama, her development as a child under the guidance of Anne Sullivan, the "Miracle Worker," is well-documented. But even to this day, her adult life is glossed over. The website at helenkellerbirthplace.org says little about Keller's adult life, other than that she became an advocate for the blind and deaf around the world.
That's not all Keller advocated, however. During her day, she was on the far left of the political spectrum. She campaigned for the right of women to vote and have access to birth control. She was a member of the Socialist Party of America and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She passionately supported the trade union movement, addressing rallies and walking with striking workers. Beside being a devoted pacifist, she was an early financial supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In other words, Keller was a hellraiser whose political views were completely opposite to the vast majority of the people she grew up with in rural Alabama. History is kind to Keller but mostly by giving us little beyond the little girl holding her hands under a water pump. Hopefully, one day, her courage and her convictions as an adult will be remembered better and praised more. She deserves to be lifted up for more than just learning how to read, write and speak.
Meanwhile, it's gratifying to see history finally catch up to Forrest. Some have called stripping his name from the school as revisionism, as if that's a bad thing. History should be revised when it's wrong and heroes should either be taken off their pedestal if they were, in truth, villains, like Forrest, or exalted further, for their bravery and advocacy, like Keller.
