Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials
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."
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.
"[23] 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.
"[24] 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.
[26] 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".
"[27] 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.
"[8] Historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts asked: 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?
[29]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.
[30] 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.
"[32] Cheryl Benard, president of the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage,[33] 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.
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.
[8] 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."
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.
[76] In August 2017, Governor Roy Cooper asked the North Carolina Legislature to repeal the law, writing: "I don't pretend to know what it's like for a person of color to pass by one of these monuments and consider that those memorialized in stone and metal did not value my freedom or humanity.
Unlike an African-American father, I'll never have to explain to my daughters why there exists an exalted monument for those who wished to keep her and her ancestors in chains...We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.
[82] On March 8, 2020, the Virginia legislature "passed measures that would undo an existing state law that protects the monuments and instead let local governments decide their fate.
"[88][89] On July 22, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 305–113 to remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney from the old robing room next to the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol Building.
7573 (116th)) would also have removed statues honoring Confederate figures and create a "process to obtain a bust of [Justice Thurgood] Marshall...and place it there within a minimum of two years.
In Baltimore, one of the four empty plinths was used in 2017 for a statue of a pregnant black woman, naked from the waist up, holding a baby in a brightly-covered sling on her back, with a raised golden fist: Madre Luz (Mother Light).
[93][94] For the toppled Silent Sam monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, two scholars proposed leaving the "empty pedestal — shorn all original images and inscriptions — [which] eliminates the offending tribute while still preserving a record of what these communities did and where they did it....
The most effective way to commemorate the rise and fall of white supremacist monument-building is to preserve unoccupied pedestals as the ruins that they are — broken tributes to a morally bankrupt cause.
[98] The U.S. Navy has similarly prohibited the display of the Confederate flag, including as bumper stickers on private cars on base; a wave of corporate product re-branding has also ensued.
In 2021, Congress ordered the Defense Department to establish a commission to consider whether to rename various bases, ships, buildings, streets, and other things named to honor Confederate figures.
West Point also removed several displays related to former superintendent Robert E. Lee, including a portrait, bust, quotation, and bronze panels depicting him and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
[124] They will be replaced with statues of Johnny Cash and journalist and state NAACP president Daisy L. Gatson Bates, who played a key role in the integration of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.
[150] The 2016 Tennessee Heritage Protection Act puts "the brakes on cities' and counties' ability to remove monuments or change names of streets and parks.
