Kristy Kelly: Heroes and villains are two sides of the same coin
Imagine going to school every day with statues of long-dead men lining the walkway. Their names are memorized through deliberate instruction in South Carolina classrooms. Wade Hampton III, Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Thomas Sumter and Andrew Pickens are known far and wide for their Revolutionary War prowess.
But heroism is often a matter of selective memory.
Hampton came from a wealthy family whose fortune was built on the backs of enslaved people. Marion owned more than 70 enslaved people near the end of his life. Sumter owned so many enslaved people that he later offered them as bounties to white recruits. Pickens, though discussed less often in popular memory, is also widely identified by historians as a slaveholder.
Heroes and villains are often two sides of the same coin. I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with my cousins. They were always the cowboys because girls were not allowed to use guns. I did not make the rules. I was just a girl. By the time I learned about the Trail of Tears, I no longer wanted to play.
Because it is Women’s History Month, I have seen a flood of praise for famous women whose names should be examined with the same moral scrutiny we apply to men who owned slaves or enabled atrocity. A few celebrated accomplishments do not erase the failures of character behind them.
Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of birth control and women’s reproductive autonomy, will always carry the stain of eugenics. Martha Washington, wife of the first president, oversaw an enslaved household and helped manage a slaveholding estate. Dolley Madison, another revered first lady, benefited from a household sustained by enslaved labor in both Montpelier and Washington. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a founding figure in the women’s rights movement, but she also used racially charged arguments in the fight over voting rights after the Civil War. Even Helen Keller, widely honored for her advocacy and writing, held views that placed her alongside other public figures touched by the eugenics movement.
The most revealing thing about history is not who committed harm. It is who we are still willing to protect after we know the truth. We do not just inherit the myths of dead people. We choose, over and over again, which reputations deserve preservation and which victims deserve erasure. That is the real lesson in every statue, every school lesson and every sanitized tribute. History does not protect the innocent. It protects the useful.
The lie is not that these people were flawless. The lie is that their victims became footnotes while their names became lessons, monuments and months of praise. History is never neutral about who it protects. Neither are we.
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