The Fate of Confederate Monuments Should Be Clear
In the
year since the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, and the mass
protests that followed, Confederate monuments have come down with astonishing
speed. According to a February 2021 report by the
Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps the most exhaustive database of
Confederate symbols nationwide, 94 monuments were taken down in 2020—nearly
twice as many as in the four years prior combined. Even the removal of 54 monuments
between 2015 and 2019 was a notable break from the past. Few had been removed
since Southern states began erecting them en masse in the 1890s; in fact, the trend
has gone almost entirely in the opposite direction, with a burst of Confederate
monuments going up during the civil rights era, and another round dedicated at
the turn of the twenty-first century.Surveying
the speed of the recent removals, it’s tempting to see such statues becoming a
thing of the past. But a closer look reveals a more troubling picture. More
than 700 Confederate monuments remain standing, and not only in the South. And
while some statues came down, Southern Republican lawmakers immediately began enacting a raft of
“heritage protection acts” in response. Often modeled on South Carolina’s
Heritage Protection Act, passed in 2000, these laws make it nearly impossible for Southern cities, many of them majority Black, to democratically remove
Confederate symbols from public grounds, requiring, for instance, the approval
of two-thirds of the state legislature—usually dominated by Republicans. In
2016, Tennessee strengthened its monument protection law to resemble South Carolina’s,
and similar bills followed in Alabama in 2017 and Georgia in 2019. Not to be
outdone, Donald Trump, amid the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, issued
an executive order criminalizing vandalism of Confederate monuments nationwide.To many
Americans, the heated debates over Confederate monuments might seem new. But
Karen L. Cox, a leading historian of
Confederate memory, reminds us in No Common Ground, her brief, excellent
overview of Confederate monument history, that these statues have been hotly
contested since their inception. Through a swift survey of news reports,
speeches, pamphlets, and legislative debates, she shows that in the minds of their Southern white creators and to Black communities, these monuments “have always
been attached to the cause of slavery and white supremacy.”It is
hard, in fact, to ignore that Confederate monuments are part of a much larger
culture of Confederate glorification. There’s little doubt why the monuments
were erected; the question is why they have attracted more attention than other
Confederate symbols and how we should deal with the myriad of forms of Confederate nostalgia—in films, books, plantation sites—that surround us.Almost
as soon as the Confederacy was defeated, Southern white elites began to craft
an alternative history of the Civil War. In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, a
journalist for the Richmond Examiner, wrote a 752-page revisionist history
of the war titled The Lost Cause, which created the template for how
many white Americans, and not only Southerners, would remember the conflict. In
this telling, the South fought nobly in a war of Northern aggression. They were
simply defending the constitutional principle of states’ rights—not slavery—and
in so doing were upholding the constitutional principles of the Founding
Fathers. Slavery became a nonissue in this telling, with the institution construed
as “improving the African race humanly,
socially, and religiously,” as Pollard wrote.Though
this Lost Cause mythology quickly captured the imaginations of many white Southerners—and continues to today—public monuments honoring Confederate
leaders were rare before the 1890s. During Reconstruction, the 12-year period following
the Civil War, the federal government oversaw the massive enfranchisement of
Black male voters, and so long as Black officials were elected to office, public
monuments honoring Confederate enslavers remained rare. But that changed
dramatically after the overthrow of Reconstruction. Confederate veterans and
their descendants began a massive campaign not only to disenfranchise Black
voters and impose legal segregation but to reshape the Southern landscape in
the Confederacy’s image.Monuments
to the Confederate dead were a central piece of this campaign. The overwhelming
majority of Confederate monuments—nearly 80 percent—were erected between 1890
and 1940, which was, not coincidentally, the height of the Jim Crow era. Southern
white women played a leading role in this campaign. The United Daughters of the
Confederacy, a group for the descendants of Confederate soldiers and
politicians, was founded in 1894 with a mission to preserve the Lost Cause
mythology, “unto the third and fourth generations,” as one chapter’s
constitution put it. They enacted that mission in a broad public education
campaign that included monitoring textbooks, placing Confederate flags in
classrooms, and creating youth groups, as well as raising monuments. Their
embrace of white supremacy was no secret. In 1914, Laura Martin Rose, a UDC member,
published a book praising the Ku Klux Klan for having “maintained white
supremacy and secured Caucasian civilization.” Rebecca Latimer Felton, the
first woman elected to the U.S. Senate, a suffragist, and a champion of the UDC’s
work, ardently defended lynchings: “If it needs lynching to protect women’s
dearest possession from ravening beasts, then I say lynch, a thousand times a
week if necessary.”If
there is any doubt that Confederate monuments were ever anything but bitterly
contested, Cox devotes equal space to the unceasing protests of Black
communities to their every appearance. Even before the explosion of Confederate
monuments in the 1890s, Black Americans were denouncing Confederate nostalgia. In
the 1870s, Frederick Douglass regularly mocked the “nauseating flatteries
of the late Robert E. Lee,” the Confederate general who died in 1870, calling
subsequent statues in his honor “monuments of folly.” The Chicago Defender,
founded in 1905 and the nation’s most audacious Black newspaper, routinely
covered—and crusaded against—new statues. “Every Confederate monument standing
under the Stars and Stripes should be torn down and ground into pebbles,” it declared
in 1920.Given
the threat of violence, Black people within the South were more discreet, but
their disgust at Confederate monuments was equally apparent. Black
Charlestonians routinely defaced a statue erected in 1887 to John C. Calhoun,
who, though he died before the Civil War, was revered as the intellectual
architect of the Confederacy’s states’ rights ideology. “Blacks took that
statue personally,” remembered Mamie Garvin Fields, born in 1888. “We thought
like [Frederick] Douglass, we hate all that Calhoun stood for.” Fields recalled
how, early in the twentieth century, Black Charlestonians would “scratch up the
coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose” each time they passed
it.No
Common Ground also corrects some recent misconceptions. Last
summer, several media
outlets misleadingly suggested that many of today’s Confederate monuments went
up during the civil rights era. In fact, Cox tells us, only 5 percent of the
roughly 800 known monuments were erected between 1950 and 1970, and many of
those were erected for the Civil War’s centennial. To be sure, the convergence
of the civil rights movement with the Civil War centennial, in the early 1960s,
offered white supremacists an opportunity to deliberately create Confederate
monuments to “rebel against the Second Reconstruction”—that is, civil rights
legislation. But more telling than the number of new monuments raised in
this period was the significance that existing monuments took on.Cox
makes the compelling point that during the civil rights era, existing monuments became
focal points around which both pro- and anti-integrationists rallied. For
instance, when James Meredith, an Air Force veteran and Black Mississippian,
was about to integrate the University of Mississippi’s campus in September
1962, white protesters staged an anti-integration rally at a Confederate
monument on campus (which soon turned into a riot that left two people dead).
Four years later, Black activists, including Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther
King Jr., and Floyd McKissick, deliberately gathered at a Confederate monument
in Mississippi during their campaign to register Black voters, as a way to
“reclaim the public sphere for themselves,” Cox writes. Indeed,
Cox argues that it was the partial successes of the civil rights movement that
account for the limited number of monument dedications since the early 1970s. When
Black people hold political office, she suggests, monuments to white supremacy are
difficult to erect. It should come as no surprise, then, that few Confederate
monuments were built during Reconstruction, and few have been built since the
1960s. Yet Cox also teases out the political sophistication of Confederate
apologists. What has made it so difficult to take down Confederate monuments is
not only the laws that apologists have passed to prevent removal but also how they
have shifted their defense in a way that, to the uninformed observer, might
sound reasonable, even positively liberal. In
1977, when Harvey Gantt, at the time Charlotte’s only Black city councilman, objected
to a Confederate monument being placed in front of city hall, the statue’s
defenders successfully argued that it was a matter of “equity and diversity,”
Cox writes. Since the city recently erected a statue in honor of Martin Luther
King, the Confederate monument’s defenders claimed it was only equitable for
white Southerners to have a statue honoring “Southern heritage.” During the
1990s, when multiculturalism was the liberal term of art, apologists framed Confederate
monuments as odes to white Southerners’ hyphenated identity: They honored “Confederate
Americans,” just as civil rights statues honored Black Americans. Most
recently, Confederate monument defenders have drawn upon the rhetoric of Black
Lives Matter, rallying around slogans like “All Lives Matter” to defend these
seemingly innocuous paeans to “Southern heritage.”Though
Cox occasionally gestures toward the complicity of non-Southern whites in
defending Confederate statues, readers would have been well served by a more
sustained focus on how and why Confederate symbols ended up in places like New
York, Maine, Utah, and California. Unquestionably, it would have strengthened
her basic point: These symbols have little to do with honoring “Southern
heritage” (in the Bronx?) and
everything to do with obscuring the central role slavery played in our nation’s
history. These symbols have little to do with honoring “Southern
heritage” and
everything to do with obscuring the central role slavery played in our nation’s
history. No
Common Ground was initially conceived in response to the 2017
white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—which, Cox reminds us, white
nationalists organized to protest the city’s decision to remove a Robert E. Lee
statue from a public park. Perhaps as a result, the book focuses only on
monuments, though it sometimes detours into debates that are actually about
Confederate flags. That conflation—between monument and flag—gets at a problem the
book never really elucidates: Why do monuments
honoring Confederates deserve our attention any more than schools or cities
that do? As Cox herself notes, monuments are only one piece of a much larger
range of public Confederate markers—school, park, and street names; U.S.
military bases; state holidays—that saturate the Southern, indeed national,
landscape.Focusing
on Confederate monuments has the benefit of offering specificity to the larger
campaign to remove symbols of white supremacy from our cultural landscape. But
it can also obscure the breadth of Confederate memorialization that hides in
plain sight. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that, apart
from the more than 700 Confederate monuments that remain standing, at least 900
public schools and universities, cities and counties, state holidays, and
military bases still bear Confederate names. Meanwhile, in the private sphere,
Confederate nostalgia remains strong. Plantation weddings are still popular. Private companies continue
to sell Confederate T-shirts, hats, and bumper stickers unabated. And
while Amazon no
longer sells Confederate memorabilia, you can still purchase Gone With the
Wind and similar books and films that sanitize slavery’s past on its
website. None of
this should discourage efforts to remove Confederate monuments from public
grounds. But it is a reminder that the problem of Confederate nostalgia is far
larger and more complex than a narrow focus on monuments allows. Heritage Protection
Laws notwithstanding, the decision to take down a Confederate monument seems
far easier than a decision regarding what to do with films or books or private
companies that traffic in a similar Lost Cause mythology. Indeed, the relative
simplicity of dislodging racist statues seems to highlight the enormity of the
problem—the Lost Cause, and all it represents, lives on not only in a few
hundred statues but in the culture of millions more people who may have never
seen one.
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