Post
by lrob123 » Sun Jun 21, 2020 7:48 pm
Also, I should have mentioned, it is easy to get through school without learning about Confederate monuments. Schools aren't going to teach about something like that so it is easy for people to not know when and why the monuments were erected.
I had written up this summary on this subject for a different forum but will post it here in case anyone is interested.
This summary is based on excerpts and quotes from Wikipedia, bustle.com, history.com, Town and Country Magazine, vox.com, and USA Today:
Most Confederate Monuments Weren't Built Until the Rise of Jim Crow. They largely symbolize a romanticized version of Antebellum racism, not the Civil War dead.
Some can be found in Union states (New York, for example has three, Pennsylvania, four) and at least 22 of them are located in states that didn't even exist during the Civil War.
How can that be possible? Because largely Confederate monuments were built during two key periods of American history: the beginnings of Jim Crow in the 1920s and the civil rights movement in the early 1950s and 1960s.
Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina. "The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s. All of those monuments were there to teach values to people. That’s why they put them in the city squares. That’s why they put them in front of state buildings." Many earlier memorials had instead been placed in cemeteries. The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War."
In contrast to the earlier memorials that mourned dead soldiers, these monuments tended to glorify leaders of the Confederacy like General Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.
"They were built during a period of racial violence and strong beliefs about Anglo-Saxon supremacy," Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina said. "The fact that they were placed on the grounds of county and state courthouses was intentional. The message: white men are in charge."
"Tributes to the Confederacy — placing statues, naming streets and other public facilities were part of the Lost Cause ideology that focused on an idyllic era of stately mansions, beautiful women, and gallant Confederate officers," said Charles S. Bullock, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia.
Many monuments were created by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was advancing the spurious idea that the South left the Union and fought the Civil War over states’ rights, not slavery. The UDC had grown out of groups formed after the Civil War by war widows and other white women to give Confederate veterans a decent burial.
But over time they became invested in the white battle against the black vote. To that end, they promoted the "Lost Cause" theory of the war: that it was fought not because of the South’s insistence on slavery, which benefited slaves as much as their masters, but on states’ rights.
Many monuments went up around the time of the infamous 1915 movie "The Birth of a Nation", a 1915 American silent drama film, adapted from the 1905 novel and play The Clansman. The film presents the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force necessary to preserve American values and a white supremacist social order.
Confederate monuments continue to be built. USA Today notes that 35 Confederate monuments have been erected in North Carolina since 2000.
One, dedicated in Mitchell County in 2011, commemorates 79 men “who died for their freedom and independence." And not for slavery.
Confederate symbolism, particularly the flag, reemerged in US culture as a backlash to the rise of the civil rights movement. In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag; and in 1962, South Carolina placed the flag atop its capitol building.
Southerners were clear at the time about what they were doing and what the Confederate flag stood for: "It means the Southern cause," Roy Harris, the legendary Georgia politician, said in 1951. "It is becoming … the symbol of the white race and the cause of the white people.”
Since then, the Confederacy’s purpose has been obfuscated in attempts to whitewash an ugly period of US history, framing the Confederate flag and monuments more as symbols of white heritage and states’ rights rather than explicit symbols of racism. And the flag has in some ways become a dog whistle — another example of the sneaky language public officials use to wink to the public about racism while claiming its use as a point of heritage.
The fact that white supremacists, including literal neo-Nazis, are marching onto cities like Charlottesville to defend Confederate monuments shows that this isn’t just some innocent quest to preserve history; there’s a clear racist interest behind much of this too. Such monuments have been embraced or embellished by the right-wing neo-Confederate movement, which calls the Civil War “the War of Southern Independence", advocates Confederate doctrines such as secession and legislative nullification, and longs for the day of white Christian cultural and political dominance.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said "They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots."
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