LAST SPRING a work crew tore up the pavement on the segment of Windom Road separating the Prince George’s County towns of Brentwood and North Brentwood, removing a corrugated metal crash barrier that spanned its center. The barrier was erected in 1957 to enforce Brentwood’s status as a “sundown town” which the residents of North Brentwood, a historically Black community founded by formerly-enslaved Union Army veterans, could not enter after dark under threat of violence. The barrier’s removal was a project almost ten years in the making, first initiated by Brentwood and North Brentwood mayors Rocio Treminio-Lopez and Petrella Robinson. The call for a work of public art to replace the barrier was issued in 2019 by the Neighborhood Design Center (NDC), a non-profit that offers pro-bono and sliding-scale architecture, landscape design and urban planning services to municipalities and community groups in the Baltimore-Washington, DC corridor. Though the removal of the barrier and the creation of the park marking its place was postponed by the pandemic, it would ultimately gain the financial and logistical support of over a dozen state and county agencies and non-profit organizations.

‍The Windom Road barrier was taken down in June 2024, but rather than being thrown away, it was incorporated into its own replacement, knocked off its axis to form a sculpture designed by artists Nehemiah Dixon III and Wesley Clark. Dixon and Clark reimagine the barrier in the grip of two massive hands cast from epoxy foam and steel. One fist placed on top of the other, the formerly horizontal piece of steel is inserted at a 110 degree diagonal between them and braced by a gleaming thumb. While the gesture is unambiguously liberatory, it is also multivalent. As a perpetual dramatization of the barrier’s removal and the creation of a more pedestrian-friendly passageway and gathering place, the monument serves as an object lesson in the act of physical and symbolic opening. The forward sweep of its pyramidal composition suggests progress. The monument’s composition is clearly influenced by works such as Hank Willis-Thomas’ 2018 Strike, a stainless steel sculpture depicting a moment of confrontation between two outsized, disembodied arms—one wielding a police baton and the other arresting it, mid-blow. According to Willis-Thomas, “the gesture of just stopping the brutality begins the opportunity for us to find peace.”

At the same time, the monument maintains a literal hold on a trace of the ignoble past. This serves as a reminder of the work that remains to be done toward achieving anything resembling racial justice as material reality in the United States. Like sculptor Gunter Demnig’s iconic stolpersteine Holocaust memorials– small, brass-covered “stumbling blocks” bearing the names and arrest dates of German-Jewish families murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators– inserted into the sidewalks in front of the homes where they used to live, the Windom Road Barrier still gets in the way. The confrontational nature of the monument speaks to recent struggles over the public commemoration of the legacy of slavery in the United States. It reminds the broad political Left that local history is an important site of contestation between progressive and reactionary political ideologies. On the eve of a second Trump presidential administration, which promises to distinguish itself by continued political repression against the Left and continued attacks on public funding of the arts, confrontational monuments also prompt inquiry into how progressive movements can secure the resources to continue contesting for symbolic power in a drastically-diminished public sphere.

The Windom Road Barrier Monument is the product of the past decade and a half of public reckoning with racism in the United States, bolstered by the rise in visibility of the Movement for Black Lives and spurred by defiance toward the first presidential administration of Donald Trump. Between the 2015 killing of nine Black churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, SC and the 2020 uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd, hundreds of municipalities across the United States were pressured to remove public monuments and memorials to the architects of and apologists for slavery and white supremacy. This was accompanied by a nationwide discussion, facilitated in large part by critics and cultural workers of color, about the role that public art and cultural institutions play in celebrating, commemorating or critically interpreting the national past. Organizations such as the non-profit Philadelphia design firm Monument Lab, or the artists’ collective and public art commissioning body For Freedoms, championed site-specific, conceptual artworks that, like the Windom Road Barrier Monument, brought attention to local or little-known histories of liberation struggle.

Perhaps the most comprehensive undertaking of this kind was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ), also known as the National Lynching Memorial. A project of the human rights non-profit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the NMPJ was inaugurated in 2018 to humanize over 6,000 lives lost to racist terror with powerful simplicity in Montgomery, AL. At the NMPJ, 4,400 names are engraved on 800 Corten steel blocks symbolizing the southern US counties in which their murders took place. These are arranged within and around a partially-enclosed Memorial Square situated on six acres overlooking EJI’s larger “Legacy Site” complex, which includes a museum dedicated to the enduring effects of the slave trade and white supremacy. In line with the EJI’s broader mission, the complex highlights the ways in which this “legacy” continues in the form of poverty, police brutality, and racialized bias in the US criminal justice system.

In a Facebook post announcing her recent profile of EJI founder, public interest lawyer, and racial justice activist Bryan G. Stevenson, art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis writes that visiting EJI’s “Legacy Sites” in Montgomery is "as important as visiting any monument in Washington, DC." Lewis is known for her research into how popular visual representation, viewership inflected by white supremacist ideology, and bias built into the development of photographic technology itself have shaped racialized understandings of US citizenship since the mid-19th century. Unlike the national history proclaimed by the temples, cenotaphs and other baubles on the National Mall, the NMPJ does not hold progress to be inevitable based on the correctness of a unified American Idea. Spurred by the nationwide interest in the ways in which local and national histories of struggle against white supremacy intersect, Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs saw their own local history initiatives aimed at confronting white supremacist history, of which the Windom Road Barrier Monument is only the most recent. The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project (MLMP) was founded in 2018, the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation (MCCRC) in 2019, and the Greenbelt Reparations Commission in 2021. Indeed, EJI is a partner organization that supports both the MLMP, which seeks to research, document, and encourage public memorialization of the 38 known lynchings that took place across the state of Maryland between 1865 and 1950, and the MCCRC, overseen by the Montgomery County Office of Human Rights.

The founding of dialogic memorial sites like the NMPJ and the Windom Road Barrier Monument represent the triumph of private philanthropy almost as much as they do a rapprochement between micro-and macro-histories of anti-racist struggle in the US. When grant funding for the NMPG was threatened by a reactionary state government, or when the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the inauguration of the Windom Road Historic Barrier Park, both initiatives relied on independent sources of funding for stability. The NMPJ and the EJI’s support of local efforts to grapple with the past and present of both racist terror and more subtle forms of white supremacist exclusion is exemplary of the way social justice nonprofits can successfully contest for cultural power within a changing national symbolic landscape. It is worth asking, however, if relying on politically-progressive non-profits for the commemoration of People’s History is a sustainable strategy for the Left.

This past November, the House of Representatives passed the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” the so-called “Nonprofit Killer” bill, which aims to give the Secretary of the Treasury the power to strip charities of their 501(c)3 status for supposedly supporting terrorism. The bill was written to censor political speech that is critical of Israel and straightjacket pro-Palestinian lobbying, political advocacy, and legal defense. Its language is broad enough, however, to put progressive civil society organizations in general on notice. It is a harbinger of the political climate the Left can expect from a second Trump term in which all branches of the national government, including both houses of the legislature, have been bought and paid for by the Heritage Foundation.

The bill passed with the support of over a dozen members of the Democratic Party. Bipartisan support for the “Nonprofit Killer” bill only reinforces what many on the socialist Left have known at least since the Democrats showed themselves to prefer losing the presidency over ceding ground to their own Left wing in the lead-up to the 2016 general election: The two-party system exists to serve and protect capital and, more often than not, even its liberal enablers will close ranks with their supposed enemies before they bring themselves to work for the public good. There is little reason to believe that in an increasingly reactionary political climate, most members of the donor class won’t begin to reconsider their support for “risky” progressive causes.

Confrontational, dialogic public art such as the Windom Road Barrier Monument can remind socialist viewers of the role they play in breaking the iron grip that corporate greed, and the murderous ideological formations with which it maintains a symbiotic relationship, have on nothing less than the future of human life on Earth. The site-specific nature of the monument, and the way in which it serves to highlight a small-town faultline of the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle, underscore that seemingly peripheral histories should not be neglected when imagining a better possible world. Finally, consideration of ways in which state and public funding for critical cultural projects are contingent on the political ambitions of a two-party system increasingly hostile to the Left should prompt socialists to continue planning for crisis. In the space of territorial contestation represented by the Windom Road Barrier Monument, one fist wrests a Jim Crow post from its foundation, another plants it on a barricade; one hand forges a plowshare, another takes up the sword again.