Amid outcry over Confederate markers, new ones are going up
ATLANTA - While Confederate statues and monuments around the nation get removed, defaced, covered up or toppled, some new memorials are being erected, by people who insist their only purpose is to honor Civil War soldiers who died for the South.
Supporters of these new monuments describe a determination to hold onto their understanding of history.
“What I want to get across is how much the South suffered, not only through the war but after the war, during the Reconstruction years,” said David Coggins, who owns the Confederate Veterans Memorial Park in Brantley, Alabama, which dedicated a memorial to “Unknown Alabama Confederate Soldiers” in September.
Others say race has nothing to do with these new monuments, unlike those erected in the years after the war.
“The problem was with some of the other statues that were put up, that were basically intended to intimidate people,” said Danny Francis, commander of a Sons of Confederate Veterans unit in South Carolina. “We’re not trying to oppress anyone — we’re just historians. We welcome everybody.”
Francis’ group dedicated a granite memorial Saturday on private land where Civil War enthusiasts from North and South re-enact the Battle of Aiken each year. The marker says: “Dedicated to the immortal spirit of the Confederate Cause, and to those men and women who gave so much to save what they considered so dear.”
There’s no way around the discriminatory meaning of such messages, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People says.
“We’re trying to heal a nation, and with more and more of these going up, it’s a continuous slap in the face,” said Benard Simelton, president of the NAACP’s Alabama conference. “... The Confederacy fought to maintain the status quo of slavery and white supremacy.”
In New Orleans, Baltimore, Richmond and other Southern cities, some political leaders now openly challenge the idea that these markers are about “heritage.” They’ve described how many were erected in the early 1900s, when white mobs were terrorizing black communities, and states were imposing discriminatory Jim Crow laws.