States have statues’ back
Opposition to Confederate symbols runs into laws that protect them
At least 54 Confederate monuments have been removed. More than 700 still stand.
The Confederate soldier presides over Piedmont Park, a lonely but still heroic figure. The Civil War has ended; now an angel is guiding him to lay down his rifle. ❚ Atlanta’s Peace Monument, erected in 1911, honors the Peace Mission led by Southerners to reconcile with the North after America’s deadliest conflict. ❚ What’s missing is the reason that Confederate leaders seceded from the United States and attacked it in the first place: to preserve and extend the enslavement of African-Americans. The reconciliation it depicts is between the whites of the South and the whites of the North – it has nothing to say about black Americans, their experience with slavery, or their struggle for equality and justice.
For that reason, the Peace Monument in recent years has been the target of protests and vandalism.
And it’s why civil rights leaders and public officials in this majority-black city now want it removed.
“We’ve allowed the ones who lost the war to write the narrative,” said the Rev. Tim McDonald, pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church.
But there’s one obstacle to taking the statue down: state law.
As public opposition to symbols of the Confederacy has grown, Georgia is one of several states that has moved to protect them. Laws throughout the South are blocking local governments from removing statues, monuments and markers from public view.
Now leaders in Atlanta are considering an alternative: adding signs to the Peace Monument to explain that the Peace Mission excluded AfricanAmericans – 200,000 of whom fought in the war. Three other cityowned memorials would also be “contextualized.”
“Don’t leave them uncontested,” says Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center. “If you want to leave them, you’d better tell the truth about them.”
Some say new signs aren’t enough. “A plaque standing next to something that massive and already offensive can’t really undo the harm to citizens who are being exposed to it,” says Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It’s the next phase in the national debate over monuments to the Confederacy: What can local officials do when the state says they can’t take them down?
Communities across the South have tried a range of approaches.
❚ The City of Birmingham, Alabama, covered its Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument with plastic in 2017 and built a plywood enclosure around it. The state’s attorney general sued, citing the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, approved that year. But a state judge threw the law out, saying it infringed on Birmingham’s “right to speak for itself.”
❚ Memphis officials wanted to remove statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and Capt. J. Harvey Mathes from two public parks. Under the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, they were required to get a waiver from the state historical commission. When the panel rejected their request, they sold the parks to a nonprofit, which took the statues down.
❚ Protesters at the University of North Carolina last August toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier that had stood on campus for more than a century. State law prohibits the university from moving “Silent Sam” to another jurisdiction; some officials say the law requires the school to restore the statue to its pedestal. The university’s board of trustees is due to report its options next month.
Officials in New Orleans, Baltimore and other cities, unrestrained by state laws, have taken down Confederate monuments.
Each state gets to memorialize two figures in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. In recent years, some states have replaced Confederate figures with civil rights leaders or other notable figures.
In some places, those moves have drawn opposition. The Sons of Confederate Veterans has filed lawsuits over the removal of memorials.
Walter D. Kennedy, the organization’s chief of heritage operations, says the soldiers and sailors whom the monuments memorialize made honorable contributions to the Confederacy. The public, he says, should look beyond slavery and white supremacy.
“Heroes are not people that are flawless,” Kennedy says. “We look at our history and we point to the positive things in their life.”
NAACP leaders in Atlanta and Georgia launched a campaign in January to remove all Confederate symbols across the state.
They called on lawmakers to give individual communities discretion to take down statues. They say they would prefer to see them in graveyards or museums with their historical context.
“We are issuing a directive to our elected officials,” said Gerald Griggs of the Georgia State Conference NAACP. “It’s time to bring the country together by removing these vestiges of the past.”