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Confederate Monuments

What do we memorialize?

Image courtesy of P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Statue located in Franklin, TN

  • 168 Confederate monuments were removed in 2020, but more than 700 remain.
  • They were removed after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
  • The SPLC began tracking the number of Confederate symbols in 2015. That year, a white supremacist fatally shot nine Black worshippers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The shooter, Dylann Roof, has since been found guilty on 33 counts of federal hate crimes and sentenced to death.
  • A renewed push to remove Confederate monuments came in 2017, after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly when a speeding car plowed through a crowd of counterprotesters.

It’s time to engage with this period of history in other ways.

Whose Heritage Do We Truly Represent?

There is a myth of the lost cause, the Confederacy, and its’s time we bury that myth and honor the people who experienced crimes against humanity because of it.

As mentioned above, the 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic “Mother Emanuel” church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy. Since then, 114 confederate symbols have been removed.

Many monuments are protected by state law in former Confederate states.

 

“These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for…[The Cult of the Lost Cause] had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”

– Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans 

Image courtesy of Brian Stansberry, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Statue located in Altamont, TN

This website aims to further the goal of shaping a just future. UNESCO Sites of Memory encourage dialogue, understanding, and peace at locations where people deserve to be honored for their sacrifices and bravery.

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