Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials
More than 160 monuments and memorials to the Confederate States of America (CSA; the Confederacy) and associated figures have been removed from public spaces in the United States, all but five since 2015.[1] Some have been removed by state and local governments; others have been torn down by protestors.
See also: List of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests, List of monument and memorial controversies in the United States, and List of Confederate monuments and memorials
More than 700 such 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.[2] Efforts to remove them increased after the Charleston church shooting in 2015, the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and the murder of George Floyd in 2020.[3][4][5]
Proponents of their removal cite historical analysis that the monuments were not built as memorials, but to intimidate African Americans and reaffirm white supremacy after the Civil War;[6][7][8][9] and that they memorialize an unrecognized, treasonous[10][11] 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.[12][13][14][15][16]
Opponents view removing the monuments as erasing history or a sign of disrespect for heritage; white nationalists and neo-Nazis in particular have mounted protests and opposition to the removals. Some Southern states passed state laws restricting or prohibiting the removal or alteration of public monuments.[17]
By The Washington Post's count, five Confederate monuments were removed between 1865 and 2014, eight in the two years after the 2015 Charleston church shooting, 48 in the three years after the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and 110 in the two years after Floyd's 2020 murder.[1]
In 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he would order the renaming of U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals, as well as other Defense Department property that honored Confederates.[18]
The campaign to remove monuments extended beyond the United States; numerous statues and other public works of art related to the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism around the world have been removed or destroyed.
Academic commentary[edit]
In an August 2017 statement on the monuments controversy, the American Historical Association (AHA) 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."[20]
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."[21]
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".[22] Civil War historian Judith Giesberg, professor of history at Villanova University agrees: "White supremacy is really what these statues represent."[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."[25]
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."[12] 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.[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".[12]
Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale University, said the statues' continued existence "really impacts the psyche of black people."[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.[28] 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."[8]
Civil War historian David Blight asked: "Why, in the year [2016], 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 [John C.] 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 lost their lives.[31] 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."[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."[34]
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".[35]
But 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.[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." Four of those were to slaves and one to a musician, Henry Brown.[36]
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.[27]
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.[37][38]
Vestigial pedestals[edit]
The empty pedestals or plinths left after monument removal have met various fates.
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). The statue was first placed in front of the monument before its removal, then raised to the pedestal. Artist Pablo Machioli said "his original idea was to construct a pregnant mother as a symbol of life. 'I feel like people would understand and respect that'". The statue was vandalized several times before it was removed by the city.[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."[95] Instead, the plinth and its plaques were removed on January 14, 2019, at the direction of university Chancellor Carol Folt.
The plinths of the statues in Richmond, Virginia, were removed in 2022.[96] In some of Richmond's Monument Avenue intersections, the spotlights remain —pointed upward toward now-empty space.