by Jodi L. Miller
The debate over whether Confederate monuments and other testaments to the Confederacy merit a place in public spaces continues. Some believe that these monuments are simply a celebration of Southern heritage, while others see them as a sign of oppression and hate.
In 2015, after nine members of a Black church in Charleston were killed by a white supremacist, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit organization that monitors hate groups, started collecting data on public Confederate displays. In the aftermath of the attack, photos surfaced of the shooter holding the Confederate battle flag, which prompted debates over the removal of the flag, which at the time still flew over the South Carolina Statehouse. Eventually, the debate expanded to the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials.
Over the years, SPLC has identified more than 2,600 memorials to the Confederacy around the country. For their purposes, “memorial” includes monuments and statues, as well as public schools, cities, counties or military bases named after Confederate icons. In addition, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas celebrate at least one Confederate holiday.
Timing is everything
Supporters of Confederate monuments argue that it is “heritage not hate” that drives pride in the Confederacy and support for these monuments. That argument, however, contradicts the timing of the creation and installation of most of these monuments, which wasn’t immediately following the Civil War. According to SPLC, there are two periods when the creation of Confederate memorials spiked—the early 1900s when Jim Crow Era laws, which disenfranchised Black Americans, were being enforced and then again in the 1950s and 60s during the civil rights movement. Jim Crow laws, primarily instituted in the South after the Civil War, enforced racial segregation on the state and local level.
According to Donnetrice Allison, Ph.D., a professor of Africana Studies at Stockton University, the installation of Confederate monuments was calculated and meant to send a message to Black Americans.
“It was a way to reassert their dominance and control,” Dr. Allison says. “The reality is that had things gone the way they were supposed to after the Civil War, Confederate generals would have been prosecuted for treason, lost their land and their power.”
What actually happened is that then President Andrew Johnson issued pardons to many Confederates and gave them back their land instead of using it to pay reparations to newly freed Black Americans.
“President Johnson handed them [Confederates] back the power to continue to terrorize Black people,” Dr. Allison says. “As part of this process of terrorizing Black people and ‘putting them in their place,’ they erected large monuments in celebration of the very leaders who sought to keep Black people enslaved.”
Jane Dailey, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, told National Public Radio (NPR), “I think it’s important to understand that one of the meanings of these monuments when they’re put up, is to try to settle the meaning of the war.”
For example, a monument erected in South Carolina in 1902 reads, in part: “The world shall yet decide, in truth’s clear, far-off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray, and died with Lee, were in the right.”
In a New York Times op-ed, Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University, noted that historical monuments represent “an expression of power” and “an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.”
“If the issue were simply heritage, why are there no statutes of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, one of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s key lieutenants?,” Professor Foner wrote. “Not because of poor generalship; indeed, Longstreet warned Lee against undertaking Pickett’s Charge, which ended the battle of Gettysburg. Longstreet’s crime came after the Civil War: He endorsed Black male suffrage…Longstreet is not a symbol of white supremacy; therefore, he was largely ineligible for commemoration by those who long controlled public memory in the South.”
Lost Cause
It is said that the winners of a war are the ones that write the history of that war. In the case of the Civil War, the South was able to seize the narrative, reframing it as a Southern “noble cause,” giving rise to The Lost Cause myth.
The Lost Cause narrative, among other things, reframed the Civil War in the context of state’s rights, with the South’s rebellion a reaction to Northern aggression. In fact, there are still many places in the South that don’t mention the Civil War, referring to it as the War of Northern Aggression or the War Between the States. In the South’s view, the war was about sovereignty and the Southern way of life. The problem with that narrative is that the “Southern way of life” included the defense and support of slavery.
According to SPLC, monuments to the Confederacy can be found in Washington, DC and 31 states—not just in the 11 states that seceded from the Union. Why would Northern states like New York and Massachusetts, as well as a western state like California erect monuments to the Confederacy?
“This varies according to the timing of the monument and the circumstances of its construction. But in general, it’s because the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’ and a South that was about chivalry and rural romanticism took hold on a national level,” says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association in Washington, DC and a history professor at the University of Chicago. “The Confederacy became a noble cause; the Civil War a tragic event rather than the war of liberation that it actually was.”
Dr. Allison says historically there is no clear indication that the North tried to fight the Southern reinterpretation of history or the myth of The Lost Cause.
“This is likely due to the fact that President Johnson was only interested in reunification, and the key to reunification, for him, was making concessions with Southern whites,” Dr. Allison says.
Teaching the children
No group promoted the Lost Cause myth more than the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a heritage group founded in 1894. According to a Washington Post investigation, the UDC was responsible for erecting more than 700 Confederate memorials across the country. In addition, the UDC provided Southern schools with catechisms that students were required to learn all promoting the Lost Cause myth, which included, among other things, the false narrative that the enslaved were happy and their owners were benevolent.
“By targeting the region’s middle- to upper-class children, they [the UDC] ensured an army of future teachers and leaders would carry forward and defend their message for decades to come,” Daniel L. Fountain, a history professor at Meredith College who was raised in the South and taught these catechisms as a child, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “Embedding their version of Confederate history into the sacred spaces of Southern society (the home, cemeteries, churches, city squares, street names, colleges and schools) made erasing it physically difficult and personally painful.”
With its propaganda efforts the UDC shaped how generations of Southern white people understood the Civil War.
Professor Fountain wrote, “At times, the contradictions between what I was taught as a child and what I discovered as a college student left me with intellectual whiplash and feeling saddened or even betrayed.”
State protection
Seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—have preservation laws that protect Confederate monuments from removal.
Passed in 2017, Alabama’s Memorial Preservation Act, which prohibits the removal of monuments located on public property that are more than 40 years old, was challenged in 2019. Birmingham officials wanted to remove a 52-foot-tall statue that was erected in 1905 to honor Confederate veterans. At the time, the city’s mayor pointed out that Birmingham was not even a city during the Civil War. The state of Alabama sued the city of Birmingham under the Act.
In January 2019, an Alabama circuit court decided in favor of the city, ruling that the Act was ambiguous and infringed on the free speech rights of Birmingham’s residents, who are 70% Black. In November 2019, the Alabama Supreme Court reversed that decision. In a 9-0 decision, the state’s highest court ruled that the city of Birmingham violated state law.
In a press statement after the court’s ruling, the city’s director of communications said, “We are carefully reviewing the opinion to determine our next step, but clearly the citizens of Birmingham should have the final decision about what happens with monuments on Birmingham city grounds.”
Following protests in 2020, the Birmingham City Council had the monument removed. The Alabama Attorney General sued the city again for violating the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act. The city had to pay a $25,000 fine, which the mayor of Birmingham said was “much more affordable than the cost of continued unrest in the city.”
One Southern town’s fight
In New Orleans, leaders had been trying to remove several Confederate monuments since 1981 with little support and no success. Motivated by the 2015 church shooting in South Carolina, the effort began anew. In December 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted 6 to 1 to remove four Confederate memorials. Preservation groups, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans, attempted to block the removal, but in January 2016 a federal judge dismissed those attempts. In March 2017, a U.S. appeals court ruled the monuments could come down.
In an impassioned speech delivered before the removal, then New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu explained how New Orleans was America’s largest slave market, where hundreds of thousands of people were sold into slavery.
“America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched…where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So, when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well…” Mayor Landrieu said. “And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame…So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.”
Erasing history
Proponents of saving Confederate monuments often use the argument that to remove these monuments is to erase history, and if you remove them, it is a slippery slope leading to the removal of other historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who were both slaveholders. Historians take issue with the comparison of Confederate soldiers and generals to the Founding Fathers.
Professor Grossman points out that Washington and Jefferson have monuments to them based on genuine accomplishments, whereas the monuments to Confederate heroes are honoring people for their roles in the creation and defense of the Confederacy.
“There is not honor in that; there are no accomplishments,” Professor Grossman says. “Yes, Washington and Jefferson are flawed heroes, and should be called to account by history for being slaveholders. But they also accomplished great things worthy of honor. To commit treason on behalf of the right of some human beings to own other human beings is not an accomplishment.”
As to the accusation that removing Confederate monuments is erasing history, Dr. Allison disagrees.
“Putting them up in the first place was an attempt to erase history,” Dr. Allison says. “They were erected to rewrite history and romanticize the South and its leaders, who were actually guilty of treason and terror.”
According to SPLC data, as of April 2023, 482 Confederate memorials have been removed, relocated, or renamed.
Discussion Questions
- In the article, Professor Grossman makes the case that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, even though they were slaveholders, should not be compared to Confederate icons. Do you agree or disagree with his argument. Explain your answer.
- The former mayor of New Orleans said, “There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.” What do you think he meant by that? Explain your answer.
BONUS CONTENT:
National Monuments Honor Emmett Till and Start of the Civil Rights Movement
There are more than 100 national monuments across the country that are protected by the National Park Service. In July 2023, President Joseph Biden declared three sites as national monuments in honor of Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley.
A 14-year-old Black teenager from Chicago, Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was killed in 1955 by two white men. The men claimed Till had whistled at a white woman.
Till’s death, along with his mother’s efforts after his death, inspired the Civil Rights Movement. For example, Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket at her son’s funeral even though his remains could only be identified by a silver ring on his finger. “They had to see what I had seen,” she wrote in her memoir. “Let the people see what they did to my boy.”
Till-Mobley granted permission to publish photos of Emmett’s body, and she continued to tell her son’s story, visiting more than 30 cities before her death in 2003.
According to the proclamation, read by President Biden on July 25, 2023, which would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, the national monument consists of three sites in two states—Illinois and Mississippi. The sites include the Chicago church where Till’s funeral was held—more than 250,000 mourners paid their respects over four days. The other two sites in Mississippi include the surrounding area where his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Mississippi courthouse where the two men were tried and acquitted of Till’s murder by an all-white jury. The men later admitted that they had killed Till.
At the signing ceremony, President Biden talked about the importance of learning history with nothing hidden.
“We should know everything; the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation,” President Biden said. “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know.” —Jodi L. Miller
Glossary Words
acquitted — cleared of a criminal offense.
ambiguous—unclear.
catechisms—a summary of religious doctrine in the form of questions and answers.
disenfranchise — to deprive of a privilege or right (i.e., the right to vote).
malfeasance—wrongdoing especially by a public official.
propaganda—information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
reparations — financial compensation.
reverse — to void or change a decision by a lower court.
segregation — the policy of separating people from society by race or social class.
sovereignty — the ultimate supreme power in a state or nation.
suffrage—the right to vote.
treason — the offense of attempting to overthrow the government.