Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials
There are more than 160 Confederate monuments and memorials to the Confederate States of America and associated figures that have been removed from public spaces in the United States, all but three of them since 2015. Some have been removed by state and local governments; others have been torn down by protestors.
More than seven hundred monuments and memorials have been created on public land, the vast majority in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws from 1877 to 1964. Efforts to remove them began after the Charleston church shooting, the Unite the Right rally, and the murder of George Floyd later increased.
Proponents of the removal of the monuments cite historical analysis which supports their belief that the monuments were not built as memorials, instead, they were built to intimidate African Americans and reaffirm white supremacy after the Civil War; and that they memorialize an unrecognized, treasonous government, the Confederacy, whose founding principle was the perpetuation and expansion of slavery. They also argue that the presence of these memorials more than a hundred years after the defeat of the Confederacy continues to disenfranchise and alienate African Americans. However, opponents believe that the removal of the monuments is the erasure of history, or they believe that it is a sign of disrespect for their Southern heritage. Some Southern states passed state laws restricting or prohibiting the removal or alteration of public monuments.
According to The Washington Post, five Confederate monuments were removed after the Civil War, eight in the two years after the Charleston shooting, 48 in the three years after the Unite the Right rally, and 110 in the two years after George Floyd's murder. In 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he would order the renaming of U.S. military bases which are named after Confederate generals, as well as the renaming of other Defense Department property that honors Confederates.
The campaign to remove monuments has been extended beyond the United States; around the world, many statues and other public works of art which are related to the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism have been removed or destroyed.
Background
Most of the Confederate monuments on public land were built during periods of racial conflict, such as the period when Jim Crow laws were being passed during the late 19th century as well as at the start of the 20th century or the period of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. These two periods also coincided with the 50th and 100th year after the end of the Civil War, including the American Civil War Centennial. The peak in construction of Civil War monuments occurred between the late 1890s up to 1920, with a second smaller peak in the late-1950s to mid-1960s.Academic commentary
In an August 2017 statement on the monuments controversy, the American Historical Association said that to remove a monument "is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history". The AHA said that most monuments were erected "without anything resembling a democratic process", and recommended that it was "time to reconsider these decisions". Most Confederate monuments were erected during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and this undertaking was "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South". Memorials to the Confederacy erected during this period "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". A later wave of monument building coincided with the civil rights movement, and according to the AHA, "these symbols of white supremacy are still being invoked for similar purposes."Michael J. McAfee, curator of history at the West Point Museum, said, "There are no monuments that mention the name Benedict Arnold. What does this have to do with the Southern monuments honoring the political and military leaders of the Confederacy? 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.... They attempted to destroy their nation to defend chattel slavery and from a sense that as white men they were innately superior to all other races. They fought for white racial supremacy. That is why monuments glorifying them and their cause should be removed. Leave monuments marking their participation on the battlefields of the war, but tear down those that only commemorate the intolerance, violence, and hate that inspired their attempt to destroy the American nation."
University of Chicago historian Jane Dailey wrote that in many cases the purpose of the monuments was not to celebrate the past but rather to promote a "white supremacist future". Civil War historian Judith Giesberg, professor of history at Villanova University agrees: "White supremacy is really what these statues represent."
Historian Karyn Cox of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has written that the monuments are "a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian James Leloudis wrote, "The funders and backers of these monuments are very explicit that they are requiring a political education and a legitimacy for the Jim Crow era and the right of white men to rule."
Adam Goodheart, Civil War author and director of the Starr Center at Washington College, told National Geographic, "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 said that the statues were meant to be symbols of white supremacy and the rallying around them by white supremacists will likely hasten their demise. Eleanor Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a scholar of Civil War history, said, "If white nationalists and neo-Nazis are now claiming this as part of their heritage, they have essentially co-opted those images and those statues beyond any capacity to neutralize them again".
Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale University, said the statues' continued existence "really impacts the psyche of black people". Harold Holzer, the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, argued that this was intentional: the statues were designed to belittle African Americans. Dell Upton, chair of the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote that "the monuments were not intended as public art," but rather were installed "as affirmations that the American polity was a white polity," and that because of their explicitly white supremacist intent, their removal from civic spaces was a matter "of justice, equity, and civic values".
Historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts asked:
In a 1993 book on the issue in Georgia, author Frank McKenney argued otherwise: "These monuments were communal efforts, public art, and social history," he wrote. Ex-soldiers and politicians had difficult time raising funds to erect monuments so the task mostly fell to the women, the "mothers widows, and orphans, the bereaved fiancees and sisters" of the soldiers who had died. Many ladies' memorial associations were formed in the decades following the end of the Civil War, most of them joining the United Daughters of the Confederacy following its inception in 1894. The women 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 the removal of Confederate war monuments in an op-ed written for 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."
Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. said that the monuments were not a "Jim Crow signal of defiance". He called the current climate to dismantle or destroy Confederate monuments as an "age of idiocy", motivated by "elements hell-bent on tearing apart unity that generations of Americans have painfully constructed".
But Dell Upton argues that the monuments celebrated only one side of the story, one that was "openly pro-Confederate". The monuments were erected without the consent or even input of Southern African-Americans, who remembered the Civil War far differently, and who had no interest in honoring those who fought to keep them enslaved. Robert Seigler, who documented more than 170 Confederate monuments in South Carolina, found only five dedicated to the African Americans who had been used by the Confederacy to build fortifications or "had served as musicians, teamsters, cooks, servants, and in other capacities". Four of those were to slaves and one to a musician, Henry Brown.
Alfred Brophy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, argued the removal of the Confederate statues "facilitates forgetting," although these statues were "re-inscribed images of white supremacy". Brophy said that the Lee statue in Charlottesville should be removed.
Julian Hayter, a historian at the University of Richmond, supports a different approach for the statues: re-contextualization. He supports adding a "footnote of epic proportions" such as a prominent historical sign or marker that explains the context in which they were built to help people see old monuments in a new light. "I'm suggesting we use the scale and grandeur of those monuments against themselves. 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."