Statuary speaks to us. This past week has driven that home.

What it’s saying depends partly on the care of the listener.

One walking route from the Monitor newsroom to Boston Common – a site being prepared for a Saturday rally organized by groups calling themselves “libertarian” and “conservative” – leads down the middle of the city’s Commonwealth Avenue Mall, a broad and leafy thoroughfare.

The mall offers at least one monument per block. There’s a Cork-born Irishman who became state rep, a West African writer first brought to this Colonial port as a slave. There’s naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in cap and windbreaker. “Dream dreams then write them,” his plaque reads, “aye, but live them first.”

That’s uncontroversial. Inspiring, even. Beyond the plaque, however, some of Morison’s writings have been called out for exhibiting racist undertones. “No Great Man is all great,” wrote The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr in a piece on Boston monuments this summer.

But can knowing where we started help us to see progress? How might that be brought home?

Watch for a story soon from Richmond, Va., by the Monitor’s Story Hinckley. In that city, once capital of the Confederacy, a young African-American mayor promoted – and then withdrew – a plan to remind without lionizing. The idea: Add words of critical context to statues along the city’s Monument Avenue. 

If the statues now end up coming down, might something in that same spirit replace them?

Now, to our five stories for today.