On the night of June 23 in Madison, Wisconsin, the city where this magazine is published, anger turned to violence.
Hundreds of protesters took part in tearing down two statues. One was a symbol of Wisconsin progressivism, the other a tribute to a Wisconsin abolitionist who was killed fighting Confederate troops during the Civil War. Much smaller groups also set a small fire in an inhabited building and beat up a progressive state senator.
The biggest problem with violence isn’t that it provides fodder to Fox News and others who demonize the left and treat “progressive” as a dirty word.
This ugliness was not typical of the protests in Madison, and all over the world, in response to the police murder of George Floyd on May 25. Most have been peaceful, with the protesters being markedly more peaceful than the police. But the few acts of violence that have occurred, in Madison and throughout the nation, are worthy of our consideration.
In fact, they demand that we pay attention. That’s the whole point. Every broken window, every toppled statue, and every thrown punch is meant to send an outsized message. That’s why we should take a hard look at what is gained and what is lost when the ideal of nonviolence is abandoned. There will be more of this to come.
Hans Christian Heg memorial (formerly) outside the Wisconsin state capitol.
Making the case for nonviolence in a violent world is not easy. Rage is exactly the proper reaction to what happened to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Atatiana Jefferson, and Elijah McClain, among many others, all part of a 400-year-old legacy of repression. The whole world should be outraged, and real change must come. The question is how to bring about this change.
What happened in Madison is a small sliver of a much larger story, but one that illustrates the tension between projecting outrage and provoking it. The events of June 23 were preceded by several nights in late May in which a handful of people shattered windows and looted stores.
In the aftermath, dozens of Madisonians turned out to help with the cleanup. The city’s mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, put things in perspective: “If you are angry because you want those who broke windows and trashed sidewalk cafes . . . to face consequences, be more angry that the people who kill Black people all too often walk free.”
Those engaged in violence were not acting in concert with the crowd. At least one Madison protester was seriously injured in an altercation with looters. The police used tear gas and pepper spray to drive protesters away. The destruction could be a death blow to small businesses already struggling to survive COVID-19, many now closed and boarded up.
Even here, though, what is good and positive about the present moment shines through, in the beautiful artwork that the city funded local artists to paint on the plywood canvases created by the breaking of glass. The boarded-up front of the building where The Progressive has its office became a mural picturing George Floyd on one side, Malcolm X on the other, the initialism BLM, and the words “Unite” and “Power.”
The biggest problem with violence isn’t that it provides fodder to Fox News and others who demonize the left and treat “progressive” as a dirty word. If those outlets didn’t have footage of mayhem to air, they’d just make something up.
No, the real problem is that it’s wrong.
Hans Christian Heg was a Norwegian-born Wisconsin journalist and reform-minded state prison commissioner who became a colonel in the Union army. A prominent anti-slavery activist, he led a militia that targeted slave catchers in Wisconsin.
His regiment of Wisconsin volunteer soldiers, mostly Scandinavians, played a role in several Civil War battles, including the September 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, where Heg was shot in the abdomen. He died the next day, at age thirty-three.
For decades, a statue of Heg stood at the eastern entrance to the Wisconsin state capitol, as a tribute to his “triumphs and sacrifice,” according to one newspaper account. But on the night of June 23, protesters tore it down, along with “Forward,” a replica of a statue that had stood for more than 100 years on another capitol pedestal.
Some have defended the tearing down of the Madison statues by noting that Wisconsin has not lived up to the ideals that these sculptures represent.
The statue of Heg, erected in 1926 on the heels of the Progressive Era in which Wisconsin played a pivotal role, was decapitated and thrown into a nearby lake. “Forward,” cast for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 by a Wisconsin woman artist, Jean Pond Miner, to symbolize the state’s commitment to progress, especially women’s rights, was left lying in the street.
Later that same night, someone set fire to a public building that houses juveniles in detention, jail inmates, and the county’s 911 emergency response center. And a group of protesters attacked state Senator Tim Carpenter, a progressive Democrat and LGBTQ rights activist, for taking pictures of them.
“I don’t know what happened,” Carpenter told a reporter. “All I did was stop and take a picture . . . and the next thing I’m getting five-six punches, getting kicked in the head.”
Dismantling the statue of Hans Christian Heg did not help the cause of dismantling the police, which is a great idea. And beating up Tim Carpenter certainly did not move the dial in terms of the possibility of that happening.
Moreover, such acts are not what George Floyd would have wanted, as several members of his family have stressed. As his brother Rodney put it, “I’m asking for peace the same way my brother would ask us to if he could see the situation, if he was here. Peace. Peaceful protests. It is the best option we have to bring justice.”
It was the option to which Representative John Lewis devoted his life. In June, the month before he died, Lewis joined a Black Lives Matter march in Washington, D.C., where he championed the “right to protest in a peaceful, orderly, nonviolent fashion.”
Honoring his memory should entail following his example.
While some cities and states have banned chokeholds and eliminated the qualified immunity that allows officers to escape consequences for bad actions, these are baby steps toward the “major changes” to the criminal justice system that the vast majority of Americans now support. We need a full-scale revamping of the role of police. President Trump, of course, is doing everything he can to stop this from happening.
As always, his method is to divide. Here’s how Trump put to use the attack on Tim Carpenter: “The person they beat up was a Democrat who happened to be gay, and he was probably out there rooting them on or something, because Democrats think it’s wonderful that they’re destroying our country.”
Trump has similarly crusaded against the removal of statues meant to commemorate the nation’s racist past and ensure its racial futures: “We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms.”
And in Portland, Oregon, Trump has predictably responded to clashes between protesters and police—which one prominent local civil rights activist, Ron Herndon, decried as “people . . . taking advantage of the demonstrations for their own reasons that have nothing to do with social justice”—by sending in his jack-booted government thugs to inflame violence, because it serves his despicable purposes.
The anger over monuments that glorify Confederate military officers is justified and should result in those statues coming down. As Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, “There is no reason to cling to torturers, warlords, conquerors, and exploiters—and especially no reason to celebrate Confederate traitors who plunged the nation into civil war, in the aftermath of which we are in many ways still living.”
But, in fact, most of the statues that have come down have been removed by the action of government officials responding to popular public sentiment. In contrast, toppling a statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, or of Hans Christian Heg in Madison, is simply incoherent. It persuades no one.
Some have defended the tearing down of the Madison statues by noting that Wisconsin has not lived up to the ideals that these sculptures represent. But the fact that progress has stalled or been halted does not mean that aspiring to progress is a bad idea, worthy of rebuke.
Yes, it is appropriate to be angry in this terrible time, with a pandemic raging, with an unstable idiot of a President nudging the nation toward civil war, with police emboldened into believing that they can literally get away with murder. But it is precisely when rage is the right response that violence should be the last resort. The problem with using violence to oppose injustice is that violence creates injustices of its own. Always has, always will.
The cause of transforming the role of police, including a substantial defunding of law enforcement agencies, is righteous and urgent. The principle that nonviolence is preferable to violence is sound, especially when it’s difficult. Fairness should matter, even in the unfairest of worlds, like the one George Floyd was murdered in.