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…
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