After reading these articles, it’s become very clear to me that Confederate statues were never really about preserving history. In the video, President Tr*mp calls these memorials insignificant tributes to America’s past, but this is incredibly misleading. Most of these statues were erected several decades after the Civil War, and while many may argue that they symbolize the sacrifice of fallen soldiers (which, by the way, why are we glorifying soldiers as heroes in a democracy? But I digress.), they were “installed as symbols of white supremacy during periods of U.S. history when Black Americans’ civil rights were aggressively under attack,” according to Ryan Best.
During the early 1900s (and as recently as 2011!), when Southern states created laws to disenfranchise and segregate Black Americans, over 400 monuments were built in order to reshape the history of the Civil War. This effort was largely led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (gag), a group whose purpose is to protect and revere Confederate memory after the Civil War (vomit). They claimed that their goal is to “prepare future generations of white Southerners to respect and defend the principles of the Confederacy,” according to Karen Cox, a historian and professor at the University of North Carolina. This group also denied that slavery was the central cause for the Civil War, and rejected any school textbook that says so. They praised the KKK, and gave speeches that twisted the cruel reality of American slavery and defended slave owners.
Black Americans have long understood the symbolism behind these monuments: they’re a reminder to stay in their place. Many of these were built outside of courthouses, a message of intimidation during a time when black Americans were fighting for civil rights. The people who argue that the taking down of these statues are erasing history truly don’t understand, in my opinion, just how much history has actually been erased, how Indigenous peoples and African-Americans’s histories were reshaped and erased. Hilary Green, a history professor at the University of Alabama, said that “Monuments do a very poor job in talking about history.” These are not the sources we go to in order to understand history. Removing a statue won’t change how people feel, and it won’t change what happened either. I hope, as more of these monuments are taken down, that more people will begin to ask themselves what history are we NOT telling through the worship of Confederate leaders?
