Protests that echo the Klan
The mayor of Charlottesville, Va., was on the mark when he compared the people who marched with torches last week to protest the planned removal of a Confederate monument to Ku Klux Klansmen, who terrorized Southern nights with cross-burnings and violence. By embracing the symbols and rhetoric of racial terror, the demonstrators made clear that they valued the Confederate memorial not for civic or aesthetic reasons but as a testament to white supremacy.
Communities across the South have been removing Confederate flags from public spaces and removing or reappraising Confederate monuments since the white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. The Charlottesville City Council voted last month to sell a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was donated to the city by a wealthy segregationist almost a century ago. A court has barred the city from removing the statue while it weighs a lawsuit opposing the action.
A commission established by the City Council, in a report issued last year, dispensed with the notion that the sculpture was, as its supporters argue, simply a neutral expression of Southern pride. Rather, it said the sculpture had emerged from the Lost Cause movement, which developed in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It romanticized slavery, affirmed white supremacy and justified the segregation of black Virginians in virtually “all walks of life,” the report said.
The statue was given to the city in 1924, the year the Virginia Racial Integrity Act made it illegal for a white person to marry anyone other than another white person. Although the sculpture is in a public park, the commission noted, the land around it retained the aura of a “whites only” space for a long time. Given this legacy, the commission said, the Lee statue was unsuitable for placement in a public space unless the surroundings were remade to reflect its origins and serve as a historical reminder and critique of racial oppression and Jim Crow rule.
Many of those who argue for keeping the sculpture in place see it as an innocuous symbol of the South. The demonstrators discredited that idea when they massed around it brandishing burning torches and chanted white supremacist slogans.