The Hard Truth About Confederate Monuments
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On Wednesday afternoon, a handful of onlookers cheered as the statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were unceremoniously covered in black shrouds in Charlottesville, Virginia — a week and a half after violent protests shook the city, and continue to reverberate around the country.
It’s forced communities from Austin, Texas, to Baltimore, Maryland, to consider the question of who and what is memorialized in their public spaces, and over 20 statutes have already been removed.
One statue under consideration for removal is on the campus of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where 800 people gathered this week to demand its removal. It’s also home to historian Fitz Brundage. The history department chair at UNC, and the author of “The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory,” Brundage has studied how these statues came to be, and their political and cultural intent. He says that there are four distinct periods of Confederate statue making, and remembrance.
There are more than 1,500 Confederate monuments in communities like Charlottesville. Check out the interactive map from the Southern Poverty Law Center below.
This segment is hosted by Indira Lakshmanan.
