[2]: 29 In recent decades, governors, legislators, courts, corporations, and anti-racism activists have emphasized the increasingly controversial public display of Confederate symbols—especially after the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the 2015 Charleston church shooting, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

[11] As of December 2024, the SCV's website says, "The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.

[3] Male descendants of those who served in the Confederate armed forces, or one of the constituent states, to the end of the war, died in prison or while in actual service, were killed in battle, or were honorably retired or discharged, are eligible for membership.

1, UCV, of Richmond, Virginia, to meet on June 30 and July 1, 1896, at the City Auditorium (present-day Virginia Commonwealth University Cary Street Gym),[4] for the purpose of forming a "national organization, adopting a constitution similar in every respect to that governing the United Confederate Veterans, and permanently organized under the name United Sons of Confederate Veterans" (USCV).

Its aims, objects, and purposes are "not to create or foster, in any manner, any feeling against the North, but to hand down to posterity the story of the glory of the men who wore the gray".

[4] Laura Martin Rose, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy[16] and propagandist for the Ku Klux Klan,[17] received an endorsement by resolution ("without a dissenting voice") of her 1914 book The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire from the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the May 1914 SCV Reunion in Jacksonville, Florida, along with a SCV commitment to "have it placed into the schools throughout the South.

In March 2021, the North Carolina Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans sued to restore the symbol, saying the Department of Transportation had acted in bad faith and that the action was driven by a lack of understanding of the state's history and hate for their inheritance as Southerners.

In 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that the Commonwealth would phase out the state-sponsored specialty license plate, which was then displayed by more than 1,600 Virginians.

[38][39] During the late 1990s, a granite marker stone for the Jefferson Davis Highway was removed from its prominent location in the city of Vancouver in Clark County, Washington, resulting in an outcry from the local Northwest Chapter of SCV.

The organization then surrounded the stones with large Confederate flags, thus creating a prominent display within an open space that the chapter named Jefferson Davis Park.

[41][42] The chapter's actions brought public outcries, but the governments of Ridgefield and Clark County could do little,[43] as the park is located on private property.

[50] A Union Army soldier, who subsequently received the Medal of Honor for his action, immediately shot and bayonetted Jackson, killing him.

[50] Shortly after their mutually fatal encounter, Jackson and Ellsworth became heroes to promoters of their respective causes, who hailed them as martyrs during recruiting campaigns.

[49][50] The SCV took a more active approach after both the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, and moves by some municipalities to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public places because of their racist symbolism and historical connection to white-supremacy movements.

Stanton, president of the Durham branch of the North Carolina chapter of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said the Confederate flag: "is a symbol of oppression, genocide and slavery".

[1] Heidi Beirich writes, "The conservatism of the scv's [sic] membership helped the extremists in another way—it made the group disinclined to publicly admit to infiltration, to the point of suspending and threatening to expel some 300 members, including Hilderman, who called for an end to extremism in its ranks.

[60] George Washington University professor James Oliver[61] said that the museum's "casting the Confederacy as a honorable force standing strong against Northern aggressors is a willful misreading of the historical truth that the institution of slavery was at the core of the Civil War".

[62] The SCV also own and maintain the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home in Chapel Hill[63] where the future Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard[64] spent parts of his childhood.

Notable members of the organization include former President Harry S. Truman, former senators Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Absalom Willis Robertson, political commentator Pat Buchanan, and actor Clint Eastwood.

He opposed the civil rights movement, claiming in a speech he gave in 1960 that "The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man's hands", and strived to prevent blacks from attending the University of Southern Mississippi.