A new approach to Confederate monuments

The question of how to handle Confederate monuments and memorials has proven far more difficult than you might imagine.

It would seem a simple matter to remove them, if only from a patriotic standpoint: The fact that they honor an effort to divide the nation by taking up arms against our fellow citizens should make it a no-brainer. That’s without even considering the fact that the Civil War was fought largely over the barbaric practice of race-based slavery and the economy it supported.

But there are a lot of these monuments scattered across the South and elsewhere: statues in courthouse squares and cemeteries, and names on public roads and buildings. More than 2,000 of them, all told.

As a historical author, I’ve faced this problem a couple of times. First, in my book Martinsville Memories, I declined to include a photo of a Confederate monument on the cover, because I didn’t want to give it a place of prominence.

But in my latest release, Highways of the South, I did include photos of some Confederate symbols in a chapter titled “Pride and Prejudice: The South Divided” because I thought it was important to acknowledge their existence and the difficulty they presented.

What price nostalgia?

As I point out there, many people have fond memories of the Lee Highway (U.S. 11) that have nothing to do with the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. They may remember it from family trips in their childhood or outings to the bowling alley or drive-in.

But the fact remains that the highway was named for a Confederate general, and that can cause a great deal of pain to Black Americans who see them as brazen reminders of slavery and Jim Crow. They see the highway’s name as a way to honor a man who fought for race-based enslavement and dehumanization, pure and simple.

When deciding what to do, it’s important to weigh the nostalgia of one group against the pain of another, and in this case, the conclusion is clear: The pain outweighs the nostalgia. (This is one reason I believed strongly that the Washington Football Team should abandon its former name — which it ultimately did. Many people had fond memories of the team under that old name, but the name itself was patently racist, and was adopted by a team owner who was racist against Black people, as well.)

But monuments carved in stone pose a practical problem, as well as an ethical one. It’s not just that they’re harder to remove. Heck, if we can tear down a skyscraper or a sports stadium, we can certainly do the same for them — nearly 170 were taken down in 2020 alone, almost all of them following the death of George Floyd. Others took matters in to their own hands, tearing them down in protest without waiting for government sanction.

I understand the pain that led to these actions, but I can’t condone the violent destruction of property, if for no other reason than it sets a precedent. We can’t simply violate the law by destroying something that belongs to someone else because we don’t agree with it, even if we’re sure we’re right.

Still, the protesters are right about this: The monuments should go.

Confederate statue in courthouse square at Yanceyville, N.C.

Roadblocks

Unfortunately, at least six Southern states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, the Carolinas, and Tennessee — have laws explicitly protecting such monuments, according to Lecia Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Beyond this, many are on private property and/or privately owned. Sometimes, the property owner and the owner of the statue are two different entities.

Many of the monuments were erected by an organization called the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which paid for them to be placed on public property, such as in a courthouse square, with the local government’s approval. So, the government owned the property, but the statue belonged to the UDC. Even if the property later passed into private hands, the UDC remained the owner of the monument, so simply petitioning the property owner for removal might not be enough.

The UDC still exists, and once even built a monument to the Ku Klux Klan. Today, however, it is very much seeking to have things both ways. On the one hand, it says it “appreciates the feelings of citizens across the country ... concerning Confederate memorial statues and monuments that were erected by our members in decades past.”

Its website explicitly denounces “any individual or group that promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy.” Yet this is exactly what the Confederate States of America did. And the UDC continues to include the name “Confederacy” in its title: If it were serious in its repudiation it would rebrand itself. If Quaker Oats can ditch the Aunt Jemima name in favor of Pearl Milling Company, the UDC could certainly rename itself United Daughters of the South.

Its refusal to do something like that makes its refusal to consider removing the monuments no surprise. Indeed, it affirms that they “are part of our shared American history and should remain in place.”  

Inscription on Confederate monument in front of old Henry County Courthouse, Martinsville, Va.

An alternative

If you’ve been the target of the racism that lingers from that era, or your family was enslaved and brutalized, how would you feel about such a stance? This is where “love your neighbor as yourself” comes in.

But in light of the organization’s refusal to take down the statues, and several states’ continued willingness to protect them, another remedy should be sought — at least in the near term.

Brooks, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, put her finger on the problem in a recent AP article.

“The truth of the matter is that most of these monuments and memorials don’t offer any historical context at all,” she said. “It is just a way to venerate people who fought for the continuation of slavery.”

The problem with these monuments is that, as Brooks said, they fail to offer any context. They glorify both the defense of slavery and the act of taking up arms against fellow citizens. It’s one thing to remember the evils of our own history, as we should, but it’s quite another thing to excuse or even celebrate them.

So, unless and until we can remove these monuments, why not do what we can to turn them into cautionary tales? Auschwitz is still there, but as a grim reminder of what we must never allow to happen again, not as a celebration of death camps and fascism.

We can do this by erecting our own monuments that provide context adjacent to every statue that honors men who fought to divide the country as heroes. They were not. We should not mistake hatred for heroism, or tyranny for truth. These things can and must be unequivocally stated in order to provide the proper context to any and all Confederate monuments.

The words “NEVER AGAIN” can be placed prominently next to these monuments, along with an explanation of how inglorious the Civil War actually was, and a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

 “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”

The accusation that we who object to Confederate monuments want to erase history by removing them couldn’t be further from the truth. We find it abhorrent to glorify these horrific events, but we want very much to remember them.

In fact, we need to remember them, so they will never happen again.

Featured photo: Confederate statue in front of the Franklin County Courthouse in Rocky Mount, Va.

Stephen H. Provost is the author of 11 books focusing on America in the 20th century, including five on the nation’s highways, two on sports, two local histories, a look at rock music in the 1980s, and a forthcoming history of shopping malls and department stores. All his books are available on Amazon.