Historical context

by Thomas Mills, Politics NC, August 17, 2017.

My great-grandfather, George Stephens, lived a remarkable life. He was born in 1873 near Summerfield in Guilford County into a family of excommunicated Quakers. His father died when he was very young and was raised by his mother. An outstanding athlete, he attended Oak Ridge Institute where he gained a reputation as  left-handed pitcher.

He caught the attention of some local alumni from UNC who wanted him to attend the school to play baseball. His cash strapped mother couldn’t afford college and the school didn’t offer athletic scholarships. So, they sent Stephens to Springfield, Massachusetts, to study physical education under James Naismith in the summer of 1892 shortly after Naismith had invented basketball. In return, he would serve as athletic director to pay for his education.

Stephens played football and baseball. His football career was notable because he’s credited with catching the first forward pass in college football in a game against the University of Georgia. Legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw called him “One the best college pitchers I have ever seen.” Stephens was heavily recruited by major league baseball teams, but he took a pass.

Instead, Stephens moved to Charlotte where he helped organize an insurance company and became involved in civic and business life. He became fascinated with landscape architecture and served on Charlotte’s Park and Tree Commission where he helped design Independence Park among other projects. As a real estate developer, he developed the Myers Park neighborhood on his father-in-law’s property southeast of downtown Charlotte, one of the first planned suburban communities in the South. He also founded a bank called the Southern States Trust Company that went on to become North Carolina National Bank which is today Bank of America. (Unfortunately, that stock never made it to my generation.)

Stephens, who also owned and published the Charlotte Observer for several years, moved to Asheville in 1919 where he bought the Asheville Citizen. He became an advocate for western North Carolina and was instrumental in helping get the Blue Ridge Parkway run through North Carolina instead of Tennessee. He was also a major supporter of creating the Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

But Stephens views on race reflected the time. He marketed his premier development, Myers Park, as a whites-only community. My great-grandfather’s project orchestrated the first deliberate white flight in North Carolina. The parks he developed in Charlotte were almost certainly segregated despite being on public land.

Stephens played a significant role in the development of two of North Carolina’s major cities and helped preserve the beauty of western North Carolina. The state is better for his involvement in its civic and business community. Still, he held views that would be unacceptable today in almost any company.

There’s no monument to George Stephens, but I tell this story because history is messy and uncomfortable, particularly in the South. I’m still proud of my great-grandfather’s legacy and believe North Carolina is a better place because he lived. That said, I don’t believe we need to hide the stain of his white supremacy, but believe we need to understand history in the context of the times that it was happening.

Stephen’s racist advertisements were fully in the mainstream of society in the first decade of the 20^thcentury. African-Americans who might have spoken up were being disenfranchised at the time, and not many whites were fighting for racial equality. That certainly doesn’t make his attitudes all right, but it does put them in historical context.

As we grapple with removing Confederate monuments across the South, we need to realize that 150 years after Appomattox, we’re still living in the aftermath of the Civil War. We should certainly remove most of the statues glorifying the Lost Cause, especially ones in front of courthouses, and the ones designed to hail traitors as heroes. But we should be very careful before we judge every white Southerner of the last century and a half by the standards of race that we hold today. We need to look at the totality of their accomplishments and failures. It’s too easy to judge people by their worst traits while ignoring their best ones, especially when they aren’t here to defend themselves.

North Carolina had some remarkable leaders in the 20^th century before the era of civil rights including Gov. O. Max Gardner, Gov. Kerr Scott and Sen. Sam Ervin. If we pull back the fabric of their lives, though, we would probably find out that they didn’t adhere to our standards on racial equality and certainly didn’t on the matter of LGBT rights. Their views may not be acceptable today, but they should be understandable in the context of history. And they don’t diminish their accomplishments.

Let’s take down the monuments that were designed to create the myth of the Lost Cause and whitewash history. But instead of trying to remove all the bitterness of the past, let’s look for ways to recognize more of our common heritage. Let’s shed light on the accomplishments of women and African-Americans who have not been properly celebrated. And let’s expose, not erase, the ugly side of our history so we don’t repeat it.

Relearning our history is not going to be easy or painless for anybody. We should move deliberately but cautiously to remove monuments put in place to distort history but we should be very careful about holding people long dead to today’s standards of morality. We should look for a fuller interpretation of history and its people, not just one more to our liking.

http://www.politicsnc.com/historical-context/