What Was Heterodoxy?

The stars fell in 1833, the year of a great Leonid meteor shower that provided an alternative numeracy for people living without calendars and ledgers in the antebellum South. The event’s long afterlife is marked on the American songbook (thanks to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s interpretation of “The Stars Fell” by Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish) and on Alabama license plates. But the statues fell in recursive waves from 2017 to the summer of George Floyd, periods from which we may now date certain habits of mind and public discourse. Those that tumbled early were often low-hanging fruit; Pittsburgh removed a statue of songwriter Stephen Foster with an elderly Black man at his feet from Schenley Plaza in 2018. No one complained; I wager many residents had no idea who he was, though they might recognize a bar of “Camptown Races” or “Oh! Susanna.”