Resistance has strong heritage
Racial reckoning with Confederate monuments seems recent. But it dates back more than a century.
The Norfolk newspaper carried an interesting development out of Raleigh, North Carolina: A Lamar Bailey was arrested for drawing obscene images on a Confederate monument.
That was March 1898.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the statue of John C. Calhoun, a once vice president and rabid slavery supporter, was shot at, pelted with rocks and so vandalized that it had to be replaced with a taller memorial. The substitute was installed in 1896.
Portsmouth’s monument to the Confederate dead was removed in August after being beheaded and splattered with paint. But it had long been a target of disdain. An unknown assailant tried to bring it down by
placing bags of TNT at its base in 1974. Since late May, after the death of an African American man by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Virginia has removed more Confederate symbols than any other state.
This year’s uproar to rid the public landscape of Confederate and racist icons might feel like a new movement. It isn’t.
Last Monday, the statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was taken down at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, but it had been the ire of critics for years.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed a defense authorization bill that includes orders to rename 10 military bases named after Confederates. Three of the bases are in Virginia. Christening the installations after men who’d fought against the United States, a few of whom were notoriously inept, never sat well with some folks.
African Americans in particular have been frustrated with the memorials ever since they started popping up after the Civil War’s end in 1865. They knew the monuments were an attempt — a pretty successful one at that — to reshape what the war had been about and to keep African Americans subjugated although they were free.
“They absolutely knew what they were,” said Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of “No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice,” which is due out in April.
“In some ways, African Americans, I believe, understand the history of the monuments better than the white people who are defending them.”
Cox and other historians laugh at the idea that moving the monuments somehow strips away well-documented history. Slabs of stone and names alone have never taught anything, and the relics themselves were propaganda.
“They are telling a fabricated version of the Confederacy and what they were fighting for,” said Hilary Green, the 2020-21 Vann Professor of Ethics at Davidson College in North Carolina. “They are presuming that is the only interpretation of the Civil War that matters.”
Green has written extensively about the Civil War and African American memory and history, including her 2016 book, “Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890.” Nearly 200,000 African American men served in the Union Army and Navy and many veterans, African American and white, settled in Hampton Roads after the war. Southern heritage groups, however, liked glorifying those who fought for the Confederacy.
“They are even erasing white Union veterans,” Green said.
Virginia remains one of the nation’s top three states when it comes to having more monuments, roads, schools and neighborhoods named after Confederates. Some of the South’s most prominent statues were reserved for Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, and formed the picturesque Monument Avenue. Hordes of worshipers filled the city whenever a statue was unveiled, such as for Robert E. Lee’s in 1890.
African American newspapers covered the ceremonies with tons of skepticism. African American Union veterans, widows and children raised money for their own memorials. African American schools taught Black history and praised their own veterans for service. Their ceremonies, however, were conveniently ignored by white newspapers, Green said.
“There’s a long history of African American commemoration of the Civil War, as well as the rejection of the landscape that gets forced upon them,” Green said, “but they
find creative ways to challenge it.”
Notions of reconciliation and amnesia
were welcoming after the war, especially in states like Virginia, which was still burying its dead. Virginia journalist Edward A. Pollard wrote “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates” in 1866, a year after the South’s surrender at Appomattox. The “Lost Cause” rested on several pillars, including that the war wasn’t about slavery but rather the right for states to decide to keep it going. Another was that African Americans had better lives while enslaved.
“It was really easy for the narrative of the ‘Lost Cause’ to take hold because they had to have some sort of narrative to deal with the defeat,” Cox said. “This revisionist history morphs into this whole mythology and the monuments become part of that.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, which has its headquarters in Richmond, was founded in 1894. Its women were responsible for a good number of the memorials. Cox said the memorials became symbols of white supremacy as more of them were built when African Americans were more vocal about civil rights, such as in the 1950s and ’60s.
Cox, who also authored the 2003 “Dixie’s Daughters: The United
Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture,” said the UDC was probably most effective in how they used children to propel the Lost Cause. At a Confederate celebration in Richmond in 1907, for example, children were dressed in red, white and blue and formed a human Confederate flag. The women also organized textbook committees, well into the mid-20th century, to dictate what was taught in southern classrooms.
The storyline was also carried in the mainstream press. Confederate veterans launched newspapers, including the Norfolk Virginian, a predecessor to The Virginian-Pilot. The editors wrote poetically about the war and carried fundraising campaigns for monuments as front-page news.
But the African American press chronicled the war’s aftermath differently.
In late May 1890, Confederate flag-waving revelers filled Richmond for the unveiling of Lee’s monument. Meanwhile, The Richmond Planet, the city’s Black newspaper, ran an ongoing tally of the number of African American men who had been lynched throughout the South. Its editor, John Mitchell Jr., also wrote about the foolishness he saw in the Lee celebrations. Mitchell included the opinions of other African American journalists from around the country in a June issue.
“Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest generals of modern times. We grant that. But he was a traitor and gave his magnificent abilities to the infamous task of disrupting the Union and to perpetuating the system of slavery,” read the “New York Age.” “Where then is the wisdom or propriety of wasting any sentiment on Robert E. Lee?”
The Indianapolis World called the rebel flag a “rag, emblematic of rebellion and crime.”
In another editorial, Mitchell wrote prophetically about the exultations: “It serves to retard its progress in the country and forges heavier chains with which to be bound.”
In the early 1920s, the UDC suggested a monument in Washington to honor the enslaved women who’d cared for their children. It would be called “Mammy” and a sculptor created a model with a woman gazing at a child in her arms while two others tugged at her skirt. In 1923, a North Carolina congressman proposed legislation on the group’s behalf and proclaimed that it would allow Black women to reminisce about their days of bondage “as the happy golden hours of their lives.”
Green said the white women of the UDC were banking on the moral and financial support of African Americans to get the monument built. They were mistaken. The reaction was swift, contemptuous and the monument proposal died.
“The condition of the slave woman was so pitiably, hopelessly helpless that it is difficult to see how any woman, whether white or black, could take any pleasure in a marble statue to perpetuate her memory,” wrote African American activist Mary Church Terrell in 1923. “If the Black Mammy statue is ever erected, which the dear Lord forbid, there are thousands of colored men and women who will fervently pray that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground.”
Historian and socialist W.E.B. Dubois constantly called out southern mythos in his magazine, “The Crisis.” In a 1928 issue, he blasted states like Virginia for treating Lee’s birthday like a holiday. Virginia started it in 1899. Only this year — 2020 — did the Democratic-controlled General Assembly vote to end it.
“Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery,” Dubois wrote. “People will argue that he fought for state rights. ... Nonsense. The South cared only for state rights as a weapon to defend slavery.”
African Americans countered the narrative
and it can be seen especially in Hampton Roads, Green said. The veterans joined the Grand Army of the Republic units. Hampton Roads has three monuments dedicated to African American soldiers, which is saying something, Green said, since she knows of fewer than 10 across the country.
James Fuller, a G.A.R. member, was the first African American to serve on Norfolk’s City Council. In 1885, he had a portion of West Point Cemetery set aside for African American vets and started fundraising for a memorial. The statue was completed in 1920 after Fuller’s death. It is topped with a bronze figure modeled after William Carney, who had been enslaved in Norfolk, fought in the Civil War and earned the Medal of Honor.
The Silas Fellows G.A.R unit erected a memorial obelisk in Portsmouth’s Lincoln Memorial Cemetery and, in 1910, the Colored Union Soldiers Monument was dedicated in Hertford County, near the county’s first school for Blacks. Green said it is telling that these monuments had to be placed in “allowable spaces” like cemeteries. They would not have been accepted in public squares like Confederate statues.
Still, the monuments were centers of pride. They were often the start of parade routes for Memorial Day celebrations.
The parade routes often coursed through or around a Confederate square. The Union veterans were showing, “‘We’re here, too.’ “Green said.
Those first “protests” against Confederate monuments were often subtle, Green said, especially if they happened during the day. With the Calhoun statue in Charleston, Green said, African American children carried rocks and left little scratches on the base every time they walked by.
“The acts of vandalism come in because they didn’t have a voice in the political system. If they spoke up, they’re going to get lynched,” Green said.
That’s no different from what has happened this year.
“When people feel that they no longer had a voice to bring about change in a democratic process, they went back to throwing paints on the statues. They embrace the earlier means in which African Americans used to show their displeasure.”
In October, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama counted nearly 1,757 Confederate symbols, including named government buildings, lakes and schools, on public land. Close to 700 are monuments. This does not include those in cemeteries or private property. More than 100 memorials have been removed, relocated or renamed since May 26, the day after George Floyd, an African American man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer.
“I think that really takes that long history of African Americans rejecting these spaces to now,” Green said. She appreciates that people of all races and ethnicities are now joining the chorus.
“You have a widespread community saying that it’s causing pain, trauma and hurt and some people are saying, is it worth it? They are deciding it’s not worth this.”
Richmond’s Lee statue is the last Confederate one remaining on Monument Avenue after others were removed this summer. A group of residents tried to stop it from being dismantled, but a judge in October ruled that Lee can go, too. Protesters against the memorial have claimed the monument and covered the 60-foothigh structure with multi-colored messages from the profane to the peaceful. People have picnicked on the grounds and exchanged wedding vows there.
It has become a memorial of a movement that began more than 100 years ago.
“That artwork is now the history of that monument. It is on the granite. It has to be preserved as-is,” she said. “You can’t clean it up because then you will erase the history of why this thing came down.”
Removal of monuments
In its latest October update, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama has documented 102 Confederacy symbols that were removed from public spaces or renamed since May 26, the day after the death of George Floyd.
Sixty-four of those symbols are Confederate monuments. Comparatively, 58 Confederate monuments were removed between 2015 and 2019.
Virginia has removed the highest number of Confederacy symbols (40) since Floyd’s killing, followed by North Carolina (18) and Texas (10).
June and July 2020 were tied at 38 removals for each month.
In 2015, a self-proclaimed white supremacist shot nine African American parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, which led to a call to remove Confederate symbols. A total of 171 have been removed or relocated from public spaces since the shooting.