I had not planned to spend part of my morning editing the Wikipedia entry for the Liberty Bell (here and here), but I could not stop myself after reading about the most recent efforts to turn the bell’s famous crack into a memory hole:
At the Liberty Bell Center, the [Trump] administration wants to take down or cover up a sign about “the contradiction between the ideals of the Revolution and the reality of more than four million enslaved people,” as well as a sign that acknowledges the systematic deprivation of civil rights from Black people after the Civil War.
Source: New York Times
In my view, this report encapsulates what the administration’s current war on public history is ultimately driving toward. It’s about removing any hint of contradiction or complexity from sites that teach about the nation’s past, until all that is left is a seamless monolith of “greatness” that erases even the smallest, factual mention of slavery and enslaved people.
No fractures, no struggles, no conflicts. No cracks.
It’s wrong, and in the case of the Liberty Bell Center sign, it’s ridiculous given the very origins of the bell’s name. As solid scholarship shows, and as my edits to the Wikipedia entry reinforce, nineteenth-century abolitionists were the first to dub the bell the “Liberty Bell” in the 1830s, and they did so precisely to call attention to the contradiction between its inscription (“proclaim liberty”) and the realities of slavery.
You can’t destroy text about that contradiction and still explain how the bell got its most famous name. They might as well call the bell something else in that case. “Liberty,” this is not.
