Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall. Kristin Ann Hass

and the less tenacious but still successful maintenance of these boundaries by the various individuals and federal agencies involved in the memorial process. It also reveals the limits of the revival of the sacrificing soldier. Finally, it reveals how an obvious but, for some, untenable truth—that African Americans served in the Revolutionary War and that they are both figurative and biological creators of the nation—is repressed in the maintenance of these boundaries and remains outside the scope of soldiers celebrated on the Mall in this moment.

      A few years ago, Reverend Al Sharpton described the genealogical discovery that he is descended from slaves owned by the family of the late Senator Strom Thurmond as “probably the most shocking thing of my life.”¹ While Sharpton’s shock is entirely understandable, it is also useful for understanding the struggle over the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial. Removed from the personal circumstance of two larger-than-life public figures with radically different worldviews, the possibility that a Thurmond might have been owned a Sharpton, given where they come from in South Carolina, isn’t all that remote. Further, given the nature of the relationship, it is not at all surprising that it was unrevealed for generations. Of course, Sharpton knows this, and he is still shocked.

      A cousin of the late Senator Thurmond, Doris Strom Costner, responded to news of the connection to Sharpton by saying, “He’s in a mighty good family.”² There is a fascinating elision in Ms. Costner’s comment and, in this elision, a riot of U.S. histories. She moves immediately from “owned by” to “in the family” without contending with the ways in which these descriptions might and might not be distinct. The question of the Thurmond family genealogy is linked to the story of the still unbuilt Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial by the large questions it raises about race, legitimation, and nationalism in the United States. (The memorial is also linked in more specific terms to the not-white genealogy of the family of one of the twentieth century’s most ardent segregationists, whose mixed-race daughter would become an advocate.)

      Thurmond would likely have been shocked as well, despite his intimate knowledge of miscegenation and his lifelong (and failed) struggle to keep both his own family and the national family white. This shock is linked to the senator’s efforts to keep the Thurmonds and the Sharptons distinct despite what was actually happening between them. It is surprising that the famously white man and the famously black man are possibly kin because so much energy has been put into distinguishing between black and white, repressing the long formative history of miscegenation in the United States. The Black Patriots Memorial is an attempt to use the figure of the soldier to rewrite this history. The Sharpton-Thurmond story illustrates the ideological enormity of the project.