“I’m unequivocal about this: It is time that women and people of color are represented in all aspects of our lives where we commemorate our history and our legacy and what our nation stands for,” she said. “To have Confederate statues standing to represent that is a disgrace to our country. I can’t see that adding African-American statues and statues of women can make it OK to have those.”
Larson continued, “When people say today that those statues represent Southern heritage, it infuriates me because I feel that historians like myself and others have done a bad job teaching Americans that there were also 4 million Southern enslaved people of color during the Civil War, and their heritage is not to have a statue of (future Ku Klux Klan leader) Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
Larson will also touch on tributes to Tubman through other mediums, such as a Dorchester County mural painted by a descendant and an underwater tunneling machine in Miami given her name after a campaign by local Girl Scouts. The historian said it was symbolic to bestow Tubman’s name upon a machine that “moves obstacles out of the way so they can get where they need to go.”