There’s a story that hundreds of Confederate monuments in 31 states in the U.S. and the display of the Confederate battle flag simply reflect a love of Southern heritage, and a commitment to preserving history. However, most of the Confederate monuments were erected long after the Civil War, specifically during periods of civil rights tensions between 1900 and 1920, and again between the 1950s and 1970s. And displaying the Confederate battle flag was something that had a resurgence in popularity after World War II – it was a way to show opposition for Civil Rights and racial equality.
For instance, it wasn’t until 1956 that Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag, and South Carolina placed the flag on top of its capitol building in 1962.
The majority of Confederate monuments were built between about 1900 and the 1950s, the era of Jim Crow segregation. The two largest spikes in construction occurred during times of exteme civil rights tensions - around 1900 to 1920, and then again in the 1950s and 60s.
The years between 1900 and 1920 included the continued lynchings of black Americans; an increasingly popular “Lost Cause” myth about an idyllic antebellum South brimming with benevolent slave owners and happy slaves; and a resurgence of groups like the KKK.
During the 1920s, the Klan had hundreds of thousands of members across the U.S. More than 30,000 KKK members marched through Washington, DC in full costume in 1925. The next day, The Washington Post front-page headline read, “White-robed Klan cheered on march in nation’s capital.” The small agricultural community in Indiana where I grew up was home to the state’s Grand Dragon of the KKK during the 1920s. He was also a wealthy attorney. It’s not surprising that this was an era when many new Confederate statues were erected. Most were cheaply mass-produced in cast bronze or zinc and their installation was shoddy.
Another surge in erecting Confederate monuments began around 1954 after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that Jim Crow laws were unconstitutional.
About half the Confederate statues in Southern states are of nameless soldiers, with titles like “Silent Sentinel”, and depict a soldier in Confederate uniform. Groups such as United Daughters of the Confederacy raised funds for them and had them installed in places like town squares many decades after the Civil War.
For example, “Silent Sam” was a Confederate monument located on the north campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Julian Carr, a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan and North Carolina industrialist, gave a speech at the 1913 dedication of the monument. His long dedication speech credited Confederate soldiers with saving “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.” He also declared that “today, as a consequence, the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.” In his speech, Carr also bragged that, “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.”
The appropriate places to see Confederate monuments and flags are in museums, the sort of curated spaces where we also see objects from the Nazi reign or the rule of Stalin and learn about their tragic context. They should not in places of honor atop capitol buildings or in town squares.
Artist Bree Newsome, known for climbing the flagpole at the South Carolina Capitol building in 2015 and lowering the Confederate battle flag there, recently wrote, “folks will continue to resurrect the false argument that taking down Confederate monuments is erasing history. But, again, these monuments to the Confederacy erected in early 20th century are themselves a form of deliberate historical erasure intended to justify slavery and racism.”
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