Sarah Lewis is the John L. Loeb associate professor of the humanities and associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and the author of the forthcoming book “The Unseen Truth: How Race Changed Sight in America.”
Opinion How we learn to see history: A case study at the National Cathedral
In the summer of 2022, I went to the cathedral and found myself just feet from President Woodrow Wilson’s tomb and memorial. Along with others, I had been invited to speak about the new commission that the church had just unveiled: stained-glass windows and tablets by artist Kerry James Marshall and poet Elizabeth Alexander to replace those dedicated to Confederate generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The Confederates’ stained-glass windows had remained in the church for nearly 70 years, erected through a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The tomb of Wilson, the first Southerner elected president after the Civil War, had been deliberately installed beneath these stained glass windows.
What had gone unmentioned in all the reporting about this new commission is that Wilson’s memorial is directly next to the new Alexander tablets and Marshall windows replacing those Confederate stained glass windows. Joined by an open-air arched passageway, they are porous to one another, connected through place and time.
How do we tell the full story of who we are? How can we define the trajectory of a country founded on the tension between slavery and freedom? It is nearly impossible to put into one sentence. As soon as we try, we have left something out. To tell the history has required a way to articulate the unimaginable and the extraordinary at once, and this has required the arts to state what may never be said.
Wilson is the only president interred at Washington National Cathedral. His sarcophagus and cenotaph are in the nave next to the pews for worship. The church was built by an act of Congress and deliberately set on the highest point in the area as a house of prayer for all people. Initially, Wilson was buried one floor below ground in Bethlehem Chapel. More than three decades later, he was raised to the main-floor level and given his own bay, with three windows designed by Ervin Bossányi, portraying allegories of God’s blessing, forgiveness and destroyed peace. Through Wilson’s administration, federal segregation was both inaugurated and made commonplace. His achievements — his landmark New Freedom platform of progressive reforms — came alongside an easy disregard of racism of a kind that was, as renowned constitutional scholar and Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber put it, “significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time.”
In the 1950s, the cathedral’s dean, the Rev. Francis B. Sayre Jr., oversaw the installation of the Confederate windows and the prominent placement of Wilson’s tomb in the nave dedicated 100 years after his birth. Sayre was also Wilson’s grandson. Years earlier, the Rev. Canon Merritt F. Williams had advocated for the windows, rejecting a proposal from the UDC for a bronze plaque to honor Lee in the crypt. “Only a memorial commensurate with General Lee’s position among the nation’s great men would be acceptable to the cathedral,” he said. The date of the dedication in 1956 was chosen to coincide with the national UDC convention.
Yet Sayre would also speak to the very causes that later brought King to the cathedral, turning the house of worship into an arena for civil rights discussions during his tenure. Months before the dedication of the Confederate generals’ bay and windows, Sayre had delivered a speech critiquing segregation while advocating for equality and a presidential commission on human rights, published in The Post. It was a space that uncloaked the same histories of racial violence and conflict in American life for which Wilson had shown such studied disregard.
The June 2015 shooting deaths of nine Black worshipers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., carried out by a white supremacist who had previously posed for photographs with guns and the Confederate flag, prompted cathedral dean Gary Hall to reconsider the stained glass windows honoring the Confederates’ so-called Lost Cause. The irony of windows dedicated to obscuring the violent past was too much to ignore.
The new commission, by artist Marshall and poet Alexander, would be next to Wilson’s memorial bay. Together, Marshall and Alexander’s commission and Wilson’s grave constitute an American diptych. They symbolize the forces — culture and civic society — through which we revise the narratives about who counts and who belongs in American life.
It has long been overlooked: During this period of the “second founding” of the United States, visual culture and especially visuality, what was seen and unseen, became central for racial and civic contestation. The second founding has been defined as the period when Congress established the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which abolished slavery, made birthright citizenship a constitutional right along with the equal protection of the law, and granted the right to vote to black men. Together, these amendments worked to modernize the United States by instantiating equality in the law — and faced a powerful backlash.
Visual representation of all kinds — from images to performances — became central for showing the blind spots in norms and laws that did not honor the full humanity of all in the United States. Our debates about monuments are one example. As historian Eric Foner notes, the ongoing challenges to enact the second founding were so anticipated that the amendments end with a clause granting Congress power to enforce them. Ultimately, the second founding was gutted; the Supreme Court narrowed the amendments. This meant that representation itself — how we see one another — became the unstated testing ground for justice in American democracy.
“It takes so long for us to see,” the cathedral’s Rev. Canon Leonard L. Hamlin said after a long silence as we stood looking at the new windows with the tomb beside them. “Time has brought us to this point,” he added, turning to me. “It is easy to go to one side or the other, but that tension, that’s where we go to find answers and learn about ourselves.”
I had nearly missed the memorial bay for Wilson. To see it, I had to move up close, shift my vantage point, and stay aware of the full detail that surrounded me, not just what might be of interest for my current task. To see them together, I also had to stand back, to view them at a distance.
It takes so long for us to see. I thought of the canon’s words as I went back to my hotel, turned on the television and saw the Jan. 6 hearings. The focus of the House investigation that year was getting the public to trust that what we saw — rioters attacking the capital to stop a peaceful transfer of power, incited by the sitting president — was what we saw.
We are in the midst of a crisis of regard in the United States, amid our triumphs. Our persistent unwillingness to see one another has put pressure on the operation of vision itself. We have shaped our own self-portrait through omissions and negations. We have had debates about monuments and markers — even stained glass windows — because we know the facts of what they were meant to do.
The contradictions at the country’s founding — the tension between slavery and freedom, between equality and a commitment to the fabrication that upheld racial dominance — have played out nowhere more than in the visual realm. It has made vision, the work of seeing the full truth in this extraordinary history, the crucible of American democracy. In the United States, the history of unseeing is so pervasive that it takes will and work to acknowledge what is right before our eyes As King said that day from the pulpit, “human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability,” but comes from “tireless efforts,” which include those on display in the cathedral by Alexander, by Marshall.
The story of race in the United States can only be told while being attuned to the information that falls off the edges of our vision. It requires attention to the nuance, to the shard, to representations, as much as to recasting the history of racial formation we think we know. By not paying attention to what has been left out of sight, we have created a racial regime that is so devastating, that it is perhaps only possible to see, to withstand, to take in one fragment at a time.
To examine this history is to expose how we have learned not to see the fictions that legitimate racial injustice and inequity. The work of revision — of re-seeing — must continue. For where we once blocked our rightful view of one another, we now have the means to build windows. We can see the story tied to the representation all around us. The question is whether we still have the will.