Monuments: Human Values or States’ Rights

Review by Bill Doughty

Last summer some of the statues of heroes of the Confederacy were removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Gone are JEB Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. The removal of Robert E. Lee and his horse, Traveler, seems just a matter of time.

Lee and the horse, like other monuments to the insurrection of the 1860s, will likely travel to a cemetery, museum, or warehouse. How those monuments came to be on display in the first place is revealed in “No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice” by Karen L. Cox (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Cox dedicated her book: “For everyone who speaks truth to power.”

A photo of General Lee and horse –– and a Black Lives Matter projection –– are featured prominently on the cover of “No Common Ground.”

Cox explains why monuments were erected and why some military bases were named (or renamed) for leaders of the Confederacy. She shows how believers and supporters of the “Lost Cause” wanted desperately to hold onto their positions of privilege and power in the face of a changing culture of inclusion, integration, and equal rights.

Above all, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and white supremacists said they believed in vindication and “states’ rights,” even if those rights included the right to own other people as property.

“Through a broad-based agenda to perpetuate Confederate memory, the Daughters gave inspiration to southern white men intent on dominating black Southerners at every step, and by violence if necessary. Two generations removed from the Civil War, these women saw their efforts as part of an overall program of vindicating the Confederacy and those who sought to preserve it. Their battle to maintain Confederate culture –– by perpetuating pro-southern history, educating white children, and yes, building monuments –– required that the men of their generation be victorious in creating a southern power structure that their forefathers had failed to achieve. And they were. Those men established a political foundation based on white supremacy, disenfranchised black men, compelled entire black communities into submission through racial violence, and wielded states’ rights like a saber to thwart racial progress, while the federal government turned a blind eye and the Supreme Court upheld segregation. While states’ rights for the Confederate generation meant maintaining the racial status quo through laws and customs that gutted African Americans’ rights as citizens, underfunded their schools, re-enslaved them through mass incarceration, and made it nearly impossible for black southerners to break free from systems of inequality that limited where they could live and work.”

Robert E. Lee statue is unveiled in Richmond, Virginia, in summer of 1890.

Monuments to the Confederacy, especially at court houses and state capitols, were polarizing symbols inspiring either continued white supremacy or greater civil rights. 

“To understand their history is to understand how white southerners memorialized men who fought in a war to preserve slavery and created a ‘new’ South that sought to limit the freedom of black southerners whose ancestors were enslaved. Yet at the same time, to fully understand their history is also to understand how generations of black southerners have demonstrated their scorn for monuments they have always believed were symbols of slavery and oppression.”

Forrest

Despite initial institutional racism, the United States military has been on the leading edge of gradual integration and equality throughout American history. In fact, the UDC, KKK, and other white supremacists built more monuments as they witnessed that greater post-war integration in the United States after World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. The building of Lost Cause monuments saw an uptick in the mid-60s during the civil rights movement and the centennial of the Civil War in 1965.

Cox presents some history pertinent to military readers:

• How the Army renamed Camp Peay in Tennessee, as Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Dec. 7, 1940.
• How Air Force Sgt. James Meredith, an African American, tried to get an education at the University of Mississippi in 1961 but was blocked by a crowd led by retired Air Force Gen. Edwin Walker, a white supremacist, at the pedestal of a Confederate monument.
• How 21-year-old Sammy Younge Jr., a black U.S. Navy veteran and student at Tuskegee University, was murdered in 1966 and how his white murderer was acquitted by an all-white jury. Protesters gathered at the town’s Confederate monument.
• How middle-aged WWII veteran James Holley –– Portsmouth, Virginia’s first African American elected to the city council –– fought the UDC to decorate the town’s Confederate monument on Memorial Day with American flags instead of the traditional Confederate flags, “primarily battle flags.”

Marines of Range Company, Weapons and Field Training Battalion, walk through a museum on Fort Sumter during an educational trip Feb. 21, 2014, to Charleston, S.C. The Marines visited Battery Park, the Fort Sumter National Monument and rode a ferry to Fort Sumter itself, which is the site of the first shots of the Civil War. The trip was part of the company’s professional military education program, which helps Marines expand their knowledge outside their primary occupational specialties. The Marines of Range Company train recruits and Marines in marksmanship on Parris Island, S.C. (Photo by Cpl. Octavia Davis)

Cox considers monuments to be weapons of the culture wars, erected ostensibly to teach history but in reality teaching or perpetuating something else.

“Confederate monuments are not innocuous symbols,” she writes. “They are weapons in the larger arsenal of white supremacy, artifacts of Jim Crow not unlike the ‘whites only’ signs that declared black southerners to be second-class citizens. Removing a monument from the public square is no more an act of erasing history than removing those signs from public accommodations.”

The war over secessionist monuments to the Civil War includes marches and battles for voter registration and against gerrymandering as well as fights over flying the Confederate flag or keeping it as part of several southern states. The Lost Cause is losing this war too, with symbols falling and statues being removed. Selma, Alabama became the first city in the nation to remove a Confederate monument and relocate it to a cemetery. New Orleans removed several monuments exactly six months after nine people were murdered at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by a white nationalist June 17, 2015.

Karen L. Cox

Yet, state laws about monuments remain an obstacle to change, Cox notes, where “states rights” overrule local communities’ votes. Legislatures that came into power thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering through voter suppression are passing laws to keep the Lost Cause monuments in their states. “Voter suppression, in fact, is key to understanding not only the current state of Confederate monuments but also the battle over their construction in the nineteenth century,” Cox writes.

While some southern leaders, notably in Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee, have resisted removal of Confederate monuments, the trend to reject and remove the memorials, especially from public land, continues to grow. Monuments came down this summer in Charlottesville, Virginia –– site of a deadly riot at a white nationalist rally centered around a monument to Robert E. Lee. A statue of Confederate General Alfred Mouton was removed July 17 in Lafayette, Louisiana. Even officials in Tennessee voted to remove a bust of KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest this summer from the Tennessee Capitol.

But removal of statues, like the monuments themselves, is just symbolic unless people consider human values and American ideals of equality and justice.

“Removing a monument does not remove the systemic racism with which it has long been associated. It is a symbolic act only, although it may also serve as an important first step. The hard work of dismantling racism and honestly confronting racial inequality within that community must come next. After all, it was a movement against white supremacy that initially brought public concerns about Confederate monuments into the open. Today’s protests against Confederate monuments, therefore, are but one stage in a much longer fight for racial justice.”

Truth to power.

DOD will likely rename hundreds of names of bases, buildings, and streets, etc. in coming years. The “Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America” –– commonly called the “Naming Commission –– is chaired by retired Navy Adm. Michelle Howard, former VCNO. The commission, which includes retired Gen. Robert Neller, former Marine Corps commandant, is visiting Army bases this summer. The Naming Commission is mandated to update Congress by Oct. 11 and continue its work through FY22.

Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class Teven Reed (left), from Cottonport, La., and Aviation Maintenance Administrationman 3rd Class Makayla Cabel, from Smithville, Mo., shift colors on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) April 5, 2021, in San Diego. Abraham Lincoln is underway conducting routine operations in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations. (MC3 Michael Singley)

TOP PHOTO:

Ward Zischke, a native of Cedar Falls, Iowa, and historian for the Army Reserve 88th Regional Support Command, explains the Confederacy mind-set to an audience, April 19, 2012, during a Civil War lecture series at the Deke Slayton Memorial Space Museum in Sparta, Wis. Zischke is also an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel with 3rd Brigade of the 75th Battle Command Training Division. (Sgt. 1st Class Osvaldo Sanchez)