Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

Based on Wikipedia: Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

The Statues That Weren't Really About the War

Here's a curious fact about Confederate monuments: most of them weren't built by grieving widows in the aftermath of the Civil War. They were built decades later, during two very specific periods in American history—and the timing tells you everything you need to know about their purpose.

The first wave crested between the 1890s and 1920, right when Jim Crow laws were being written into the fabric of Southern society. The second wave came in the 1950s and 1960s, precisely when Black Americans were marching for civil rights. These weren't coincidences. They were messages.

More than seven hundred monuments to the Confederacy have been erected on public land across the United States. Since 2015, over 160 of them have come down—some by government order, others torn down by protesters in the night. The debate over what to do with these bronze and marble figures has become one of the most contentious cultural battles in modern America.

What the Historians Say

The American Historical Association, the largest professional organization of historians in the country, weighed in on the controversy in August 2017. Their conclusion was blunt: removing a monument "is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history."

Most of these monuments, the AHA pointed out, were erected without anything resembling a democratic process. The undertaking was, in their words, "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South." The memorials built during that era "were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life."

Jane Dailey, a historian at the University of Chicago, put it even more directly. In many cases, she wrote, the purpose of the monuments was not to celebrate the past but to promote a "white supremacist future."

Judith Giesberg, a Civil War historian at Villanova University, agrees: "White supremacy is really what these statues represent."

The Benedict Arnold Comparison

Michael J. McAfee, curator of history at the West Point Museum, offered a striking comparison. "There are no monuments that mention the name Benedict Arnold," he observed. Arnold, of course, was the Revolutionary War general who defected to the British side—the most famous traitor in American history.

What does this have to do with Confederate monuments? McAfee's answer was pointed: "They, like Arnold, were traitors. They turned their backs on their nation, their oaths, and the sacrifices of their ancestors in the War for Independence." The difference, McAfee argued, is that Arnold switched sides for personal gain, while Confederate leaders "fought for white racial supremacy."

His recommendation: leave monuments marking participation on battlefields, but tear down those that only commemorate "the intolerance, violence, and hate that inspired their attempt to destroy the American nation."

The Other Side of the Story

Not everyone sees it this way.

Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. rejected the idea that the monuments were a "Jim Crow signal of defiance." He called the current push to remove them an "age of idiocy," motivated by "elements hell-bent on tearing apart unity that generations of Americans have painfully constructed."

In 1993, author Frank McKenney wrote about the women who actually organized many of these memorials—the "mothers, widows, and orphans, the bereaved fiancées and sisters" of soldiers who had died. Ex-soldiers and politicians struggled to raise funds, so the task often fell to ladies' memorial associations, many of which eventually joined the United Daughters of the Confederacy after its founding in 1894. These women, McKenney noted, "were advised to remember that they were buying art, not metal and stone."

Cheryl Benard, president of the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage, argued against removal in The National Interest: "From my vantage point, the idea that the way to deal with history is to destroy any relics that remind you of something you don't like, is highly alarming."

Whose History Gets Told?

But here's what the defenders of the monuments often leave out: these memorials told only one side of the story.

Dell Upton, chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA, pointed out that the monuments were "openly pro-Confederate" and were erected without the consent—or even input—of Southern African Americans. Black Southerners remembered the Civil War very differently. They had no interest in honoring those who fought to keep them enslaved.

Robert Seigler documented more than 170 Confederate monuments in South Carolina. Of those, he found exactly five dedicated to African Americans who had served the Confederacy—building fortifications, working as musicians, teamsters, cooks, or servants. Four of those memorials honored slaves. One honored a musician named Henry Brown.

Five out of 170.

The Psychological Weight

Elijah Anderson, a sociology professor at Yale, observed that the statues' continued existence "really impacts the psyche of black people." Harold Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, went further—he argued this psychological impact was intentional. The statues, he said, were designed to belittle African Americans.

Upton agreed. The monuments "were not intended as public art," he wrote. They were installed "as affirmations that the American polity was a white polity." Because of their explicitly white supremacist intent, removing them from civic spaces was a matter "of justice, equity, and civic values."

Historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts posed a question that cuts to the heart of the debate:

Why, in the year 2015, should communal spaces in the South continue to be sullied by tributes to those who defended slavery? How can Americans ignore the pain that black citizens, especially, must feel when they walk by the Calhoun Monument or any similar statues, on their way to work, school or Bible study?

The Three Waves of Removal

For more than a century and a half after the Civil War, almost nothing happened. Just five Confederate memorials were removed in all that time.

Then came the Charleston church shooting.

On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The killer had posed with Confederate flags in photographs. Suddenly, those monuments that had stood for decades became impossible to ignore.

In the two years following Charleston, eight memorials came down. In New Orleans, no local crane company would take the job—the city had to bring in equipment from an unidentified out-of-state company.

The second wave hit in August 2017, triggered by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. White nationalists had gathered to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. A counter-protester named Heather Heyer was killed when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd. The rally featured open displays of Nazi flags and white supremacist symbols.

Within days, cities across America began taking action. In Baltimore, Confederate statues were removed in the dead of night on August 15–16. Mayor Catherine Pugh said she ordered the overnight removals to preserve public safety. In Lexington, Kentucky, the mayor asked the city council the very next day to approve removing two statues from a courthouse.

Then came the third wave.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. The protests that followed swept across the country—and around the world. According to The Washington Post, 110 Confederate monuments were removed in the two years following Floyd's death. That's more than twice as many as had come down in the three years after the Unite the Right rally.

What Americans Actually Think

Public opinion has shifted, but it's complicated.

A 2017 Reuters poll found that 54% of American adults said the monuments should remain in all public spaces. Only 27% said they should be removed. But the numbers were sharply divided along racial and party lines—whites and Republicans largely favored preservation, while Democrats and minorities were more likely to support removal.

A HuffPost/YouGov poll from the same year found 48% for keeping the monuments, 33% for removal. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll found that most Americans—including 44% of African Americans—believed the statues should stay.

By April 2020, during the George Floyd protests, the numbers had flipped. For the first time, a majority—52%—favored removal, with 44% opposed.

The State Laws Fighting Back

Seven states have passed laws making it harder—or impossible—to remove Confederate monuments.

Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama prohibit removal or alteration outright. South Carolina, Mississippi, and Tennessee have laws that impede such actions. Virginia had a law dating back to 1902, but it was finally repealed in 2020.

In 2023, Florida Republican Dean Black filed legislation that would punish lawmakers who vote to remove "historical monuments and memorials." Under his proposed bill, local officials who vote for removal could be fined or removed from office by the governor.

These laws haven't stopped everyone. At least three monuments were torn down by protesters in states with protective laws: Silent Sam in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; the Confederate Soldiers Monument in Durham, North Carolina; and the Screven County Confederate Dead Monument in Sylvania, Georgia. The Durham and Screven County monuments were damaged beyond repair. Silent Sam, which survived relatively intact, was placed in storage while officials debated its fate.

A Third Way: Re-Contextualization

Not everyone thinks the choice has to be keep them or tear them down.

Julian Hayter, a historian at the University of Richmond, supports what he calls re-contextualization—adding what he describes as "a footnote of epic proportions." This could mean prominent historical signs or markers explaining the context in which the monuments were built, helping people see old statues in a new light.

"I'm suggesting we use the scale and grandeur of those monuments against themselves," Hayter said. "I think we lack imagination when we talk about memorials. It's all or nothin'.... As if there's nothin' in between that we could do to tell a more enriching story about American history."

When Symbols Get Co-Opted

Adam Goodheart, director of the Starr Center at Washington College and a Civil War author, offered National Geographic a useful way to think about what the statues originally meant: "They're 20th-century artifacts in the sense that a lot of it had to do with a vision of national unity that embraced Southerners as well as Northerners, but importantly still excluded black people."

Goodheart predicted that white supremacists rallying around the statues would hasten their demise. Eleanor Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, agreed—but she framed it differently. When white nationalists and neo-Nazis claim these monuments as part of their heritage, she said, "they have essentially co-opted those images and those statues beyond any capacity to neutralize them again."

In other words, even people who might have seen the statues as innocent historical markers now have to reckon with what those statues have come to represent in the present.

The Threats

The debate has sometimes turned ugly—and dangerous.

In 2017, Georgia state legislator Jason Spencer, who is white, sent a threatening message to an African-American colleague who had called for removing Confederate monuments. Spencer warned that she wouldn't be "met with torches but something a lot more definitive," and that people who want the statues gone "will go missing in the Okefenokee.... Don't say I didn't warn you."

The Okefenokee is a swamp covering more than 400,000 acres along the Georgia-Florida border.

Beyond America

The campaign to remove Confederate monuments has rippled outward. Around the world, statues and public works of art connected to the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism have been toppled, defaced, or officially removed.

In Bristol, England, protesters threw a statue of slave trader Edward Colston into the harbor. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold II—whose brutal rule of the Congo resulted in millions of deaths—were vandalized and, in some cases, removed. The conversation that began with Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville has become a global reckoning with how public spaces commemorate—and sanitize—history.

What Gets Remembered

Alfred Brophy, a law professor at the University of Alabama, acknowledged a tension at the heart of this debate. Removing the statues, he said, "facilitates forgetting"—even though the statues themselves were "re-inscribed images of white supremacy."

But forgetting what, exactly? And whose memory matters?

The monuments told a story about the Civil War—a story where Confederate generals were noble heroes fighting for their homeland. It was a story that conveniently omitted slavery as the cause of the war and terrorism as the tool that ended Reconstruction. It was a story that had no room for the four million people who were freed when the Confederacy fell.

In 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals would be renamed, along with other Defense Department property honoring Confederates. Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty. Fort Hood became Fort Cavazos. Fort Benning became Fort Moore.

The old names are already fading from memory. New stories are being told in bronze and stone. And the debate over what America chooses to remember—and what it chooses to honor—continues.