Not pure history

Chris Herrington’s commentary regarding monuments and parks that were established to honor Confederate leaders and their cause was one of the best explanations I have read recently of why the neo-Confederate attempts to defend the indefensible are completely wrong from a historical perspective (July 1 article, “Confederate statues, parks obscure war-era history”). Those edifices were indeed attempts to honor white supremacy and reflect, not the actual history of the Civil War and its aftermath, but the cultural attitudes of the Jim Crow times in which they were established.

While the South lost the military conflict of the war, the white South actually won the subsequent cultural war and didn’t even begin to recede in that realm until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, 100 years after the supposed defeat. But if the monuments were about history, where are the monuments erected to those Memphians and Mid-Southerners who, by the tens of thousands, enlisted right here in Memphis to fight for the Union with the U.S. Colored Troops? Why were black people not allowed to erect a park and monument in their honor in 1905? Were they not also Southerners?

For the record, I am a native Memphian and the descendant of several Confederate soldiers. While intensely interested in the history of these men, I feel no obligation to defend their cause, which is, most pointedly, indefensible.