Confederate Monuments Quotes

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.

Knowledge can never imprison you, but you can be captive to your ignorance.

It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality and justice. These Confederate monuments, strategically placed in public spaces, are deposits left by the high tide of white supremacy.

I've been here in Richmond for six years and I still don't get it. To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we're dedicated to no hope, no future. It's like having a monument to unrequited love.

It is no coincidence that most Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1920, the same period that lynching peaked in the South.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren't national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite; leaders of a rebellion against the nation - separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn't call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.

To those who say I am trying to change history, they should realize that the history of Confederate monuments represents a racist legacy all people should abhor. Moreover, many people did protest their construction. In 1900, Georgia's population was 46.7 percent African American and Virginia's was 35.6 percent, but Black people had been purged form the voting rolls and had no voice on the use of public land or money.

I, too, grew up in a place that could sometimes feel as limiting and final as being locked in an airtight closet, the air humid and rank with one’s own breath and panic. A place where for all the brilliant, sun-drenched summer days, there is sometimes only the absence of light: America, and the American South. A place where the old myths still hold a special place in many white hearts: the rebel flag, Confederate monuments, lovingly restored plantations, Gone with the Wind. A place where black people were bred and understood to be animals, a place where some feel that the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education are only the more recent in a series of unfortunate events. A place where black life has been systematically devalued for hundreds of years.

Redeemer governments write new constitutions; they put up monuments to Confederates and terrorists. In 1891, the Redeemer government of New Orleans erects a monument to the victors of the Battle of Liberty Place: the White League. In 1920, a committee erects a monument to honor the three white men who died in the attack on the Grant Parish courthouse as “heroes . . . fighting for White Supremacy.

The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them. The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

To proclaim 'America First' was to deny any need to fight fascism either at home or abroad. When American Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017, Trump said that some of them were 'very fine people.' He defended the Confederate and Nazi cause of preserving monuments to the Confederacy. Such monuments in the American South were raised in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when fascism in the United States was a real possibility; they memorialized the racial purification of Southern cities that was contemporary with the rise of fascism in Europe. Contemporary observers had no difficulty seeing the connection. Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: 'Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it's the KKK he's copying.' The great American social thinker and historian W.E.B. Du Bois could see how the temptations of fascism worked together with American myths of the past. He rightly feared that American whites would prefer a story about enmity with blacks to a reforming state that would improve prospects for all Americans. Whites distracted by racism could become, as he wrote in 1935, 'the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy,' what we call oligarchy.

I later learned from the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center that there were some seven hundred Confederate memorial monuments and statues erected well after the Civil War. According to its research, "two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African-Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second spike began in the 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.

Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

Trump was hardly in office when Democrats and their media allies began tarring him and his top aides as “white nationalists.” There were no facts to support the charge, only innuendo, and tortured interpretations of the word “nationalism” and of presidential rhetoric. One of the worst examples was the Charlottesville, Virginia, historical monument controversy. In that city, leftist protesters demanded the removal of “Confederate” monuments and memorials. The term “Confederate” in their usage extended even to statues of Thomas Jefferson and explorers Lewis and Clark (for being “white colonists”). This sparked a protest by conservatives who objected to the statue removals—not because they were racists, but because they didn’t want to see the removal of these reminders of America’s history. A “Unite the Right” rally was planned for August 11–12, 2017, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately, the rally attracted extremist groups, including neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and the KKK. During the rally, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of leftist protestors, killing a woman. In response, Trump made a series of statements condemning the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and racism in general. In one of those speeches, he added, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”115 Even though he had just condemned racism in his previous breath, many Democrats and pundits condemned Trump for calling racists “fine people.” This was not only absurd but dishonest. The “fine people on both sides” to whom he referred were those who wanted to remove the statues because they were reminders of slavery and those who wanted to preserve the statues because they were reminders of history. Trump never praised racists as “fine people”—he condemned them in no uncertain terms. But to the

Stevenson said he wants to start a campaign to erect monuments to that history on the sites of lynchings, slave auctions, and slave depots. “When we start talking about it, people will be outraged,” he said. “They will be provoked. They will be angry.” The Confederate memorials, plaques, and monuments we passed, Stevenson said, “have all appeared in the last couple of decades.” A massive Confederate flag, placed by the “Sons of Confederate Veterans,” was displayed on the highway into the city. Whites in Montgomery, which is half black, had recently reenacted the inauguration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis by parading through the streets in Confederate uniforms, holding Confederate flags, and surrounding a carriage that carried a man dressed up as Davis. They held the ceremony of the inauguration on the steps of the state capitol. At

But I had planted a flag here. Answering a question about the Confederacy was even more foolhardy than investing campaign time. We had convened in the shadow of a Civil War battle, but I had every intention of responding to a question that might undo the goodwill I’d accrued. Patiently, I explained my deep animosity toward the Confederate generals’ carvings. The men glorified in the etchings had fought to keep blacks as slaves, and they had been willing to terrorize a nation to achieve their ends. I had grown up in a town where visiting the last home of the president of the Confederacy was a rite of passage for some, even though it meant tourists tromping around shacks where enslaved black men and women had lived in squalor and horror. Still, I explained, while I despised the monument to their evil, its removal wasn’t top of my to-do list. I’d not campaigned on the issue, but I refused to mince words when the question had been put to me in the wake of the tragic death in Charlottesville, Virginia. My beliefs and my biography could not change because of controversy.

The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

As the first cultural expression of the Confederate tradition, the memorial movement began the process in which southerners interpreted the meaning and implications of defeat. Throughout the region, communities created cemeteries, erected monuments, and established a memorial day for the Confederate dead. These activities honored the dead and their cause, placed distance between the Confederacy and the daily lives of southerners, but also offered a vague hope of its future vindication. In the process, the memorial movement helped to ensure that the Confederate dead became powerful cultural symbols within the New South—gave power, in other words, to the ghosts of the Confederacy.

White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler's Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost–more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be–and still is–teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.

Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols, and many symbols involve remembering the dead. Which heroes do we valorize, which victims do we mourn? The United States has hundreds of monuments depicting a noble-looking Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army. In 2018, Bryan Stevenson dedicated a national monument to honor the victims of lynching, but where are the national monuments to the freedom fighter John Brown—or at least to Harriet Tubman? There are no monuments to the Nazis in Germany, East or West, but only after reunification did West Germany build significant monuments to the victims.

The 2017 demonstrations against the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, established one thing beyond doubt: Nazis are not just a German problem. You may prefer to call the demonstrators white supremacists, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The deliberate use of Nazi symbols—swastikas, torches—and slogans—Blood and Soil! Jews will not replace us!—leaves no room for doubt. Not everyone who wants to preserve those symbols is a Nazi. But American Nazis’ embrace of the Confederate cause made clear that anyone who fights for those symbols is fighting for values that unite Nazis with racists of all varieties.

Participating in Southern debates about Confederate monuments led me to try, over and over, to imagine a Germany filled with monuments to the men who fought for the Nazis. My imagination failed. For anyone who has lived in contemporary Germany, the vision of statues honoring those men is inconceivable. Even those who privately mourn for family members lost at the front, knowing that only a fraction of the Wehrmacht belonged to the Nazi Party, know that their loved ones cannot be publically honored without honoring the cause for which they died.

do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are, too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth. And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing, and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile, and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yes, with violence. To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong. And in the second decade of the twenty-first century, asking African Americans—or anyone else—to drive by property that they own occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth: We are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate

Even though Confederate monuments are extensively about remembering the past, "[they] can also be about facilitating forgetting... the public is encouraged to see the past in one way. So inherently it is being encouraged not to remember another part of the past.

Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.

These men, knowing full well that they were eyewitnesses to monumental events, read meaning and purpose into every detail of the surrender conference, and their accounts reveal that the seeds of continuing strife were sown at the very moment of Union victory and Confederate defeat.

The relatively new “Kingdom Diversity” department hosted talks on kneeling at football games, taking down Confederate monuments, and honoring people like black liberation theologian James Cone.

Hon. Alexander H. Stephens, who was one of its authors, very properly says: "The whole document utterly negatives the idea, which so many have been active in endeavoring to put in the enduring form of history, that the Convention at Montgomery was nothing but a set of 'conspirators,' whose object was the overthrow of the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and the erection of a great 'slavery oligarchy,' instead of the free institutions thereby secured and guaranteed. This work of the Montgomery Convention, with that of the Constitution for a Provisional Government, will ever remain, not only as a monument of the wisdom, forecast, and statesmanship of the men who constituted it, but an everlasting refutation of the charges which have been brought against them. These works together show clearly that their only leading object was to sustain, uphold, and perpetuate the fundamental principles of the Constitution of the United States.

Journalist Tony Horwitz describes its laser show as an unfortunate mix of Coca-Cola, the Beatles, the Atlanta Braves, and Elvis sining "Dixie," followed by the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Television ads end with the inclusive slogan, "Stone Mountain: A Different Day for Everyone." Eventually the desire for everyone's dollar may accomplish what the physical elements cannot: eradicating Stone Mountain as a Confederate-KKK Shrine.

A 2018 report by Smithsonian magazine and the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund (now Type Investigations) found that over the previous ten years, US taxpayers had directed at least forty million dollars to Confederate monuments, including statues, homes, museums, and cemeteries, as well as Confederate heritage groups.

The historical witness is clear: as confederate symbols migrated from cemeteries and veterans’ parades, they became less about honoring the past and more about upholding white supremacy in the present. In fact, the relationship is inversely proportional. The further the distance from the cemetery and the past, the more nakedly obvious their role in asserting white supremacy becomes.

To cement their perceived dominance, the Daughters had erected hundreds of Civil War monuments across the South as the Red Summer waned. Most of them were made of low-grade bronze or limestone, mass-produced and erected as fast and inexpensively as possible. These effigies served two purposes. To create a false narrative of honor and sacrifice that Confederate sympathizers could embrace in place of the shameful pall of treason that was their actual birthright. And to remind Black Southerners that to some of their white neighbors they were just escaped cattle meant to be sacrificed on the altar of the Lost Cause.

The legacy of monuments within the Confederate tradition is the legacy of historical distortion. As a revisionist narrative, the Lost Cause has not only damaged Americans’ ability to determine fact from fiction; It has also served as a bulwark against racial progress and is its most insidious legacy.

Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. After a decade of Reconstruction, just as African-Americans were seeking entry to mainstream society, the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them. The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness. It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen. Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come.

It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.

【咨询Q微:202 661 44 33】办毕业证（科廷大大学毕业证一模一样）证书购买CUT毕业证澳洲假学历，办理澳洲学位毕业证科廷大学毕业证成绩单文凭证书，在线在澳办澳洲文凭科廷大学毕业证2021年本科学位证书。 LSKJSKSSJSSSBSVSBNVSBSCSVCSBSVSHJSSKJLSSHJKSBeginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

Confederate monuments have, throughout their history, represented white supremacy. These statues are not, and have never been, static symbols. They are not simply physical memorials made of bronze or granite; they represent a system of beliefs. The groups that erected them, whether postwar Ladies Memorial Associations (LMAs), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), or men’s organizations that have erected the most recent ones, did not just build them and walk away. They were, and still are, reanimated on an annual basis through rituals held on Confederate Memorial Day, the birthdays of Confederate generals, and during Civil War–era reenactments. For more than a century, white southerners have gathered at these memorial sites to recall the Confederate past and reassert their commitment to the values of their ancestors, the very same values that resulted in a war to defend slavery, as well as the right to expand the institution.

The UDC’s monument campaigns were always supported by a narrative that Confederate veterans fought nobly and that defeat did not erase the justness of their cause. These monuments also reflected the beliefs held by the Jim Crow generation—whites who regarded African Americans as second-class citizens and whose leaders sought to preserve the racial status quo through both legal and extralegal means. And if there were any doubts about the larger meaning and purpose of Confederate monuments within the context of the Lost Cause, the Daughters made it clear in the minutes of their meetings, in the essays they wrote, in the speeches they gave, and in the actions they took. Moreover, the men they selected to give speeches at monument unveilings or on Confederate Memorial Day, as they reiterated the message of honor and sacrifice, also furthered the Lost Cause narrative about slavery, the war, and Confederate soldiers as valiant heroes who not only fought to defend the South against an invading North but who withstood Reconstruction and became stalwart defenders of white supremacy, sometimes as members of the Ku Klux Klan.

A letter from Scott Boydston of Birmingham, Alabama, began by calling out the Confederate cause, saying, “The dirtiest blot on the pages of American History was written by rebel statesmen of the South. Why honor them?” Boydston suggested that Confederate monuments were the equivalent of erecting a monument “to the memory of Benedict Arnold.” He believed that the South held the nation back and concluded that “only fools would want to glorify men who fought in defense of human slavery.

The Alamo, long used in a myth that demonized and gaslit Mexican-Americans and Indigenous people, might as well be a Confederate monument in the minds of conservative adherents to the Heroic Anglo Narrative.

The UDC’s monument campaigns were always supported by a narrative that Confederate veterans fought nobly and that defeat did not erase the justness of their cause.

Whether you grew up with the Confederate flag flying over your statehouse, or played in public parks anchored by bronzed tributes to slave owners, or were taught your country’s history through a canon formed almost exclusively by whiteness, you have those stories inside you. The Mellon Foundation recently funded a study of monuments around the United States, finding that the vast majority of them honored white men; half were enslavers and 40 percent were born into wealth. Black and Indigenous people made up only about 10 percent of those commemorated; women just 6 percent. Statues of mermaids outnumbered statues of female members of Congress by a ratio of eleven to one. I’ll

Obelisks don't grow from the soil, and stone men and iron horses are never built without purpose.

Sedgwick’s death came in dramatic fashion in May 1864 near Spotsylvania. As he positioned his troops, Confederate sharpshooters began finding their range. When his men dodged the bullets, Sedgwick chided them, saying, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” Shortly afterward, a sharpshooter proved Sedgwick wrong as his bullet found its mark, striking the general just under his left eye and killing him instantly. H-21: George Weikert Farm 39º48.127’N, 77º14.072’W On July 2, Brigadier General John C.

Most people could not imagine that so many poor people lived in rocking, good-times New Orleans, or that they had no means of transportation to escape a flood. They had always been in plain sight, in some ways like the Confederate monuments we walked and drove past every day. Always there, rarely noticed. Now, in full view, those desperate souls were impossible to ignore -- a legacy of the racially driven politics that controlled the city long before the civil rights era. The War on Poverty, so derided by the right, had lasted barely more than a decade, whereas a century had passed between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a century of disenfranchisement, political and economic. You cannot undo the legacy of enforced poverty in the blink of history's eye.