Monument Protests

Introduction

Protesters try to topple a statue of President Andrew Jackson on June 22 in Lafayette Square across from the White House. Jackson's policies and actions forced many Native Americans off their lands. While some local officials have removed monuments honoring controversial historic figures, protesters have defaced and pulled down others and called for the removal of many more. (Getty Images/Drew Angerer)

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Overview

On July 1, a friend texted to tell Sandy and Emerson Shelton, a retired Black couple in Richmond, Va., that they had to turn on their television. Following days of protest, the city's mayor had made a decision: The first of five Confederate statues on the city's famed Monument Avenue was coming down.1

Sandy, who had grown up in Richmond, badly wanted to be there in person when the monuments to men who fought to preserve slavery were removed. She drove to the First Baptist Church, which the Sheltons attend, on one end of Monument Avenue next to the towering statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, where about 1,000 people had gathered.

“It was a warm afternoon. It was crowded. It was sunny,” Sandy remembers. “The atmosphere was so loving and cordial. It was just great being there.”

A statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson is removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., on July 1. While some view Confederate statues as honoring the proud heritage of Southern Civil War leaders, others argue they celebrate men with pro-slavery views and were erected during segregation to remind African Americans of who was in control. (AFP/Getty Images/Ryan M. Kelly)

Standing on the lawn with a friend from church, Sandy says she told her friend she thought the church bells should be ringing when the monument comes down. Her friend slipped away and spoke to someone at the church. When the statue was finally hoisted in the air for removal, the church bells rang out, loud and clear.

“The monument was coming down as the church bell was ringing,” Sandy says. “It was a dream come true.”

Monuments to Confederate leaders and other historic figures who owned slaves or held racist views have been coming down across the United States in 2020, part of a mass protest movement calling for racial justice that swept through the nation after the deaths at the hands of police of African Americans George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., among others.2 The call to remove Confederate statues, flags and other symbols from public spaces is not new, but it reached a new level of intensity this summer and even spread to other countries. It also has ignited a fierce debate about the value and meaning of public monuments, how history is remembered and what America stands for today. (See Short Feature.)

For many Black, Native American and other activists who support removal, it is long overdue. The monuments celebrate men involved in the darkest chapters of American history, they say, including slavery and the brutal subjugation of Native Americans, and many were erected in the post-slavery Jim Crow era in which African Americans were denied equal rights through legal restrictions and vigilante acts of terror.

Some analysts and historians say the monuments debate underscores the United States' failure to confront its history of slavery and racism. They point out that most Confederate memorials were erected in the post-Reconstruction period after the Civil War, roughly from 1880 through the 1920s, when the system of racial subjugation was being brutally enforced throughout the South.

“The message was really clear: Even through the Confederacy lost the Civil War, we're still in control. That's what those monuments were about,” says Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans, who was an early leader in the movement to take down statues, removing four in his city in 2017.

But for other Americans, the monuments represent values and history that deserve continued recognition. For the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, groups made up of the descendants of Confederate military veterans, the statues are testaments to the courage and heroism of their ancestors. Defenders of monuments to other public figures who either owned slaves or subjugated Native Americans say removing their monuments ignores important accomplishments central to their legacies.

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President Trump has loudly defended the monuments, demanding that anyone who damages a monument or statue in the United States be prosecuted under federal law and vowing to block any efforts to rename the 10 U.S. military bases named for Confederate military leaders.3

“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Trump said on July 4 at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota — a historic site that itself has been criticized for defacing sacred Native American land. The president called such efforts part of a “left-wing cultural revolution” that is “determined to tear down every statue, symbol and memory of our national heritage.”4

A 2020 poll shows that a slim majority of Americans favor removing Confederate statues, a jump in support from earlier polls. But the nation remains divided and feelings are heated on both sides. Violent confrontations broke out this summer around monuments in Texas, New Mexico and Georgia. The deadliest monument-related encounter occurred earlier, in 2017, at a rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., organized, in part, to protest plans to take down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. One woman was killed and 19 people were injured when an avowed white supremacist rammed a car into a crowd.5

Supporters of removing the statues say their intention is to embrace the American ideal that everyone, regardless of race, should be treated equally and with respect. “We're not changing history,” Landrieu says. “We're going to go back and commit ourselves to the original ideas America was built on.”

Despite Trump's depiction of events, many Confederate monuments and other statues have not been torn down by mobs but removed by local elected officials who determined the statues offended their citizens. Since 2015, 123 Confederate monuments have been removed or relocated from public spaces, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a human rights group based in Montgomery, Ala. These local acts accelerated after Floyd's death in May, the center found, with 70 statues taken out of city squares, parks and other public property between May and Sept. 15.6

Schools, college buildings, parks, streets and a lake in Virginia named for Confederate leaders also have been renamed. And Princeton University has removed President Woodrow Wilson's name from its public policy school and a college, citing his “racist thinking and policies.” A Berkeley, Calif., school district is renaming its Jefferson and Washington elementary schools because these former presidents held slaves.7

But at least 698 Confederate monuments remain across the United States, according to the center, plus more than 1,000 parks, schools, streets, buildings and other places named after Confederates. In addition, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy are preserving torn-down monuments by moving them onto private property and erecting new memorials to the Confederacy. At least 20 have been put in place in recent years, including statues, plaques and even Confederate battle flags placed next to interstate highways, according to Larry McCluney Jr., commander in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.8

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Dozens of monuments and memorials also remain that lionize Founders of the nation who owned people as slaves, presidents who considered other races inferior, Spanish colonizers and missionaries and other prominent figures whose views have come under scrutiny.

In contrast to statues of Confederate leaders who took up arms against the United States, many historians and community leaders say the question of how to treat monuments to figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington or early American colonizers is more complicated. Many of these historic figures played critical roles in establishing the United States, they note, and helped to shape the nation in ways that still matter.

Monticello, Jefferson's estate in Virginia that is open to the public, is an example of a memorial to a slaveholding Founder that has tried to put his full legacy and the lives of everyone at the estate, including enslaved persons, into context. (See Short Feature.)

Still, some activists believe even monuments to Jefferson and Washington should come down as part of an overdue reconsideration of U.S. history that recognizes the damage done by slavery and racial oppression.9

Other countries, more than 40 by one count, have established “truth and reconciliation commissions” to publicly acknowledge past injustice, often the mistreatment of one racial or ethnic group by another.10 The United States has never held such a public examination of its treatment of African Americans or Native Americans. (See Short Feature.)

As the nation engages in heated discussions of America's past and current treatment of minorities and what to do about monuments to Confederate military leaders and others, here are some questions being debated:

Should monuments to people who fought for or supported the Confederacy be removed?

A year before his death, Gen. Lee turned down an invitation to participate in preservation efforts at the site in Gettysburg, Pa., where a crucial Civil War battle was fought. In a letter to the battlefield's memorial association president in 1869, he wrote that he preferred “not to keep open the sores of war, but to … commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”11

Nevertheless, starting in the late 1800s, hundreds of monuments to the Confederacy, ranging from statues of celebrated generals on horseback to anonymous foot soldiers, have been erected in city squares and other public spaces across the South. The largest — a massive, nearly eight-story-tall relief of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and generals Lee and Jackson, carved into the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia — is believed to be the biggest bas-relief sculpture in the world.12

To some Southerners, these monuments celebrate a proud heritage, one they say is not defined by racism or a defense of slavery, but personal bravery and resolve. Many of the statues were erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which says it is dedicated to “honoring the memory of its Confederate ancestors [and] protecting, preserving and marking the places made historic by Confederate valor.”13

But Julian Hayter, a history professor at the University of Richmond, says the actions of Confederate soldiers cannot be separated from the cause they fought for: to preserve slavery and white supremacy. “I'm not saying that people who fought on behalf of the Confederacy didn't fight and die bravely,” says Hayter, “but they fought and died bravely for an ignoble cause.”

James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, the leading professional organization for historians, says the argument that the monuments are about military accomplishments is undermined by those Southern military leaders who are not represented by statues.

Barriers separate activists for and against the removal of Confederate monuments in a park near Stone Mountain, Ga., which contains a gigantic rock carving of Confederate leaders. A slim majority of registered voters favor removing Confederate statues from public spaces, according to a recent poll. (Getty Images/Lynsey Weatherspoon)

“The big example is General [James] Longstreet. Try to find a statue of General Longstreet, who was one of the more successful Confederate generals,” says Grossman. “You're not going to find a statue of Longstreet because he was in favor of African American suffrage” after the Civil War. He calls the lack of a Longstreet memorial a “crucial piece of evidence [that] it's not about Civil War heroism. It's about a commitment to a cause.”

Many Confederate leaders had been U.S. Army officers who ended up fighting against the country they had sworn to defend, which meant they were traitors, according to Michael McAfee, former curator of history of the West Point Museum at the U.S. Military Academy.

“They turned their backs on their nation [and] their oaths,” McAfee said, while fighting to preserve slavery. “That is why monuments glorifying them and their cause should be removed.”14

Some defenders of the monuments, however, say the Civil War was about more than slavery; Southerners were claiming their right of self-determination under the Constitution. “It was fought over an overbearing and overreaching [federal] government at the time,” says McCluney of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “Yes, I would have to say the issue of slavery was one of the underlying causes, but there were many factors involved. You have an industrial part of the country [Northern states] versus an agrarian part [the South]; you have an unfair tax [a tariff on imported goods that hurt the South]. There were many different facets to it.”

But most historians sharply reject this characterization, noting that Confederate leaders clearly stated in their secession documents that preserving slavery, which had been outlawed in the North in the years following the American Revolution, was the major reason for leaving the Union.15

“Slavery was and remains the fundamental cause of the Civil War,” says Adam Domby, a historian at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. “Without slavery there was no Civil War.”

In addition, he says, most of the statues were erected a decade or more after the war ended, when white Southerners were reasserting their control by enacting so-called Jim Crow laws, which segregated society and were perpetuated by organized terror administered by the Ku Klux Klan. Statues honoring Confederate leaders, put up in front of courthouses and in other prominent places, were part of reasserting white authority, Domby says. “Monuments are always expressions of power. They tell you who's on top.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor at Harvard University, says that “statues and monuments to people who fought to destroy the United States and to maintain slavery should not be displayed in town squares and the like.” But memorials in battlefields and cemeteries are different, she says, because they more clearly commemorate the dead.

William Cooper, a professor emeritus of history at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and a past president of the Southern Historical Association, rejects the notion that Confederate statues were erected to reinforce white supremacy, which he points out was backed up by more powerful forces than mere marble or stone. “The last thing whites needed when they put up those monuments was to put Blacks in their place,” he says. “Blacks were down, that's true, and whites kept them down, that's true. But they didn't need monuments to do that.”

Cooper believes the monuments are important reminders of a significant chapter in U.S. history that should be preserved. “When you take them down, you erase history,” he says.

However, Sarah Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who has studied the removal of statues through the ages, says eliminating them does not erase history: “People … remain part of the historical record and part of historical memory, even if many of their monuments are expunged.”

The strongest argument for removing them comes from what they continue to mean to many Black Americans.

“Imagine being Jewish and having to go to the courthouse to do your business, and out in front of the courthouse is a statue of Hitler or an unknown Nazi soldier,” says Isaac Bailey, an author and professor of public policy at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. “For us, that is how it feels. We've had to essentially cope with that daily reality…. And that is, frankly, what folks like me are sick and tired of living with.”

Has the movement to remove statues of anyone associated with slavery gone too far?

After white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 to prevent the removal of a statue of Gen. Lee, President Trump tweeted: “So, this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”16

Trump's question foreshadowed those being asked by many Americans this summer, as protesters demanding equal justice toppled or defaced statues not only of noted Confederates but also of Founders and early American leaders who either owned slaves or held racist views.

In June, a statue in Baltimore of Washington, who owned 123 enslaved people upon his death, was vandalized with red paint and had the words “Destroy Racists” written on its base. Another statue of America's first president was toppled in Portland, Ore., along with one of Jefferson in front of a high school that bears his name. In 2017 and 2018, Jefferson statues were vandalized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where Jefferson was a student, and at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, which Jefferson founded.17

Monuments to Francis Scott Key, lyricist of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union armies in the Civil War, were also torn down by demonstrators in San Francisco this summer on “Juneteenth” (June 19), a holiday celebrating the day the last enslaved persons in the United States were freed.18

Washington, Jefferson, Key and Grant all owned slaves, although Grant only relatively briefly when he was given an enslaved person as a gift by his father-in-law. For some activists, these men do not deserve to be honored with monuments or statues that exalt their role in American history. In 2017, Angela Rye, a political strategist and commentator on CNN and National Public Radio, argued that their accomplishments cannot outweigh the wrong of holding other people as property.

“George Washington was a slave owner. And we need to call slave owners out for what they are,” she said. “Whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not, he wasn't protecting my freedom. My ancestors weren't deemed human beings to him. To me, I don't care if it's a George Washington statue or Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue, they all need to come down.”19

But Gordon-Reed, the Harvard historian, said, “there is an important difference between helping to create the United States and trying to destroy it. Both Washington and Jefferson were critical to the formation of the country and to the shaping of its early years.”20

Moreover, she continued, “The Confederate statues were put up … to send a message about white supremacy, and to sentimentalize people who had actively fought to preserve the system of slavery. No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery. The monuments go up because without Washington, there likely would not have been an American nation. They put up monuments to [Thomas Jefferson] because of the Declaration of Independence, which every group has used to make their place in American society. Or they go up because of [Jefferson's] views on separation of church and state and other values that we hold dear.”21

Lucian Truscott IV, an author and direct descendent of Jefferson, supports the treatment of Jefferson at his Monticello estate, which includes a look at the lives of enslaved people he owned. However, Truscott argues that the iconic domed Jefferson Memorial overlooking the Tidal Basin in Washington should be taken down.

“He should not be honored with a bronze statue 19 feet tall surrounded by a colonnade of white marble,” Truscott wrote. “The time to honor the slave-owning founders of our imperfect union is past. The ground, which should have moved long ago, has at last shifted beneath us.”22

However, Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, said attacks on statues of prominent historic figures have entered the “theater of the absurd.” Such attacks display “an ignorance of history,” he said, because they overlook the roles many of these men played in moving the United States toward a more racially just and democratic system.23

He singled out the June 19 attack on Grant's statue in San Francisco as an example of how toppling statues has become divorced from any rational consideration of the beliefs or overall accomplishments of the men they honor. “More than any man, save Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant destroyed the Confederacy with his magisterial generalship,” Olsen wrote, noting that Grant also worked to protect and extend the rights of newly freed Blacks during his presidency. Toppling Grant's statue because of a slave he was given as a gift and freed within a year, before the war began, is “ludicrous,” Olsen added.24

Still, historians and others note that many of America's Founders had more complicated lives than has generally been portrayed, particularly regarding slavery.

For instance, Washington's private papers show that he used legal loopholes to avoid having to free his slaves who accompanied him from Virginia to the free state of Pennsylvania, where the 1787 constitutional convention was held in Philadelphia.25

A more complete picture of the Founders is long overdue, says Davidson College's Bailey. “We shouldn't necessarily have to tear down all these monuments to Jefferson and Washington, etc., but we need to definitely tear down the myths about these men. We actually have to start going about telling the full truth.

“For such a long time, we have only seen them as these heroes who did these great and wonderful things,” he continues. “We have always downplayed the sort of real evil they also did. We need to deal with both things.”

Do statues of early European colonizers have a place in contemporary American society?

Many Italian Americans take tremendous pride in Christopher Columbus' role in the European exploration and colonization of the Americas. Some Hispanic Americans feel the same about the role Spanish explorers and missionaries played in the history of the Southwest. Pope Francis' decision in 2015 to confer sainthood on Junípero Serra, a missionary who spread the Catholic faith across California in the 18th century, is also a source of pride to many Catholics.

But to Native Americans and others, statues of these early colonizers are reminders of the subjugation and mistreatment Native peoples suffered at the hands of invaders. Such people do not deserve places of honor, they say.

“It is an act of violence to even have the statues in our homelands,” said Elena Ortiz, chair of the Santa Fe Freedom Council of The Red Nation, a social justice organization. “It's not just the statue, but it's what it represents: the celebration of our genocide.”26

This summer, protesters toppled statues of Serra in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Statues in Florida of Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León, who led the first European expedition to that state, were covered in spray paint and rotten eggs, while a statue of another conquistador, Juan de Oñate, was placed in storage in Albuquerque, N.M., after it was vandalized. A statue of Diego de Vargas, a Spanish governor of the New Mexico territory, was removed hours before a massive protest.27

Columbus has come in for particular attention from protesters, who have toppled, set on fire or beheaded his statues in places as far-ranging as St. Paul, Minn., Boston and Baltimore, where the explorer's statue was torn down from its perch near the city's Little Italy neighborhood and tossed into Baltimore harbor.28

The claims against each man differ in the particulars, but all involve cruel treatment of Indigenous people, including enslavement and slaughter, claims largely supported by the historical record. Columbus, for example, is blamed for the near annihilation of the Arawak Indians in the Caribbean, whom he enslaved and brutally exploited. Critics of Serra say Native Americans who were brought into his missions to be converted were enslaved, beaten and imprisoned if they resisted.29

The statues represent history from the point of view of the conquerors and ignore the conquered, a perspective that cannot be justified in a diverse, multiethnic democracy, activists say.

For example, says the College of Charleston's Domby, the statues of Serra and other missionaries “they're not celebrating the Native Americans who became Christians. They're celebrating the men who converted them. If we're going to listen to Native Americans, then [Serra] shouldn't be celebrated…. I think, in many of these cases, it's up to Native Americans to decide.”

The statues' defenders say such portrayals ignore the positive things done by those being memorialized. For example, Serra repeatedly intervened for mercy on behalf of Indigenous people who rebelled against Spanish authorities and disciplined Spanish soldiers who abused Native Americans, according to Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, archbishop of San Francisco.30

Italian Americans passionately defend Columbus, citing his skills as an explorer and navigator and contesting claims that he committed genocide. “Christopher Columbus accomplished extraordinary things during his life,” said Robert Ferrito, a senior official of the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy in America, the largest Italian American organization.31

Statue supporters say those attacking early European colonizers are unfairly judging them by present-day standards, not those of their own time. Louisiana State University's Cooper refers to this as “presentism,” which he says allows critics to dismiss figures from the past without trying to understand their lives. “What does condemnation prove? It simply proves that you feel morally superior to someone with different values from a different time,” he says. “They did live in a different time. You don't applaud them, but you try to understand what they did and how they felt.”

Two protesters demonstrate in front of a Christopher Columbus statue in New York City on Columbus Day in 2017. Controversy has arisen over the explorer's legacy, with his defenders saying he should be recognized for his skills as a navigator but opponents saying he was responsible for the genocide of Indigenous people. (AFP/Getty Images/Jewel Samad)

Cooper says such statues still have a place in today's society, both for their accomplishments and because the monuments help us to consider and understand the past.

But the American Historical Association's Grossman, who teaches at the University of Chicago, says it's natural that perspectives on the past change. “Our values change; we find new documents, we find out new things about people,” he says. Historians have “adjusted to changing facts on the ground for decades. That's what we do.”

Changing public sentiment about historical figures should be taken into account regarding monuments, he says. “It's important to always ask how the presence of a memorial affects public culture,” he says. “What does it mean when visitors come and see someone that we are honoring with a memorial? What is it like to raise children in a community where your children have to walk past a [particular statue?] I think that's a valid consideration.”

Estevan Rael-Galvez, former state historian of New Mexico, believes monuments need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Some, he said, provide an opportunity for a fuller exploration of the history surrounding the events they commemorate.

But many of these statues, he says, were erected by certain cultural or political groups to impose a “single, static notion of history” that does not take the experience of others into account. “I think those are indefensible, and we should remove them,” he says. “I believe that statues for Oñate, de Vargas and Columbus should come down.”

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Background

“Damnation of Memory”

People have been toppling or defacing monuments of leaders who fell out of favor since the earliest days of recorded history. More than 3,500 years ago, Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III had the likeness of his stepmother, Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled before him, scrubbed from monuments, statues and reliefs in order to establish his own primacy as ruler.32

Much like today, says the University of Iowa's Bond, statues have been taken down by political leaders and toppled by angry citizens. During the Roman Empire the practice of tearing down monuments to previous emperors, or scraping their faces and names off statues, was institutionalized. The Senate would decide whether a deceased emperor deserved “damnatio memoriae” (damnation of memory). If his reign was deemed unworthy, all of his likenesses were destroyed.33

The Romans, Bond says, recognized the power that monuments and statues have within a society and the message sent by taking them down.

No statue honors Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, although he was one of the South's most successful commanders. Critics of Confederate monuments say that is because after the Civil War Longstreet favored voting rights for African Americans, proving that such monuments were not erected merely to honor military prowess or bravery. (Getty Images/Brady National Photographic Art Gallery/Buyenlarge)

“Removing the statues from places like the Roman Forum [at the center of ancient Rome] or Monument Avenue in Richmond — it's about reclaiming a place of honor,” she says.

It can also provide a cathartic moment for a frustrated populace, she adds. After the assassination of Emperor Caligula in A.D. 41, “the people themselves removed statues” of the ruler in Rome, she said, even though his successor Claudius blocked a decree of formal damnation.

The practice continued in the 1600s in England, where Parliament ordered a statue of King Charles I beheaded in 1650, a year after the king himself had been beheaded. A few decades later, as England went through further turmoil, Protestant soldiers in Newcastle tore down a statue of King James II, a Catholic, and tossed it into the river.34

In the United States, the tradition began with the birth of the nation. On July 9, 1776, after hearing a reading of the just-approved Declaration of Independence, an enthusiastic crowd in New York City toppled a two-ton statue of Britain's King George III from its high marble pedestal on Broadway Street. The statue's lead was reportedly melted down to make bullets for Washington's Continental Army.35

In more recent times, statues, monuments and other reminders of old regimes were torn down after popular rebellions felled communism across the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1991, for example, citizens in Moscow pulled down a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, from a square in front of KGB headquarters and eventually replaced it with a memorial to victims of repression. In 2003, Iraqi citizens toppled and trampled a statue of overthrown dictator Saddam Hussein. And during the Arab Spring uprisings in the 2010s, monuments and reminders of various Middle Eastern regimes were destroyed.36

Bond sees parallels with the movement in the United States this summer to take down statues of Confederates and other historic figures. “The state did not listen and react to the needs of the most repressed populations in [our] democracy,” she says. “Oftentimes, we see people [act] because they haven't been given an opportunity to be heard.”

Erecting Confederate Monuments

The defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War in 1865 was followed by a decade in the South known as Reconstruction, during which the rights of newly emancipated African Americans were guaranteed by the Constitution and protected by the U.S. Army, garrisoned across the region.

During this period, which lasted from 1867 to 1877, Congress passed three major amendments to the Constitution — the 13th, abolishing slavery, and the 14th and 15th amendments, aimed at establishing that all Americans are protected equally by the nation's laws and guaranteeing the voting rights of all males, regardless of race.

As a result, Black American men could vote and hold office, winning election to Southern state legislatures and to the U.S. Congress.37

But Reconstruction was abandoned after the disputed presidential election of 1876. In the so-called Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South if key Southern Democrats in Congress would vote to allow Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to take the White House.38

White Southerners rapidly reasserted their authority. “As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the ‘Redeemers,’ took control of state governments in the South, and the era of black men's enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end,” wrote historian Jill Lepore.39

The Redeemers movement reasserted white supremacy through laws that forced Blacks into second-class status through a rigid system of racial segregation that effectively deprived them of their rights to participate in the political system by imposing onerous literacy tests and poll taxes. In Louisiana, for example, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 730 in 1910.40

In addition, an extralegal reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups resulted in more than 4,400 African American men, women and children being murdered by white lynch mobs from 1877 to 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. The Montgomery, Ala.-based organization, which works to halt mass incarceration, notes that while many of the victims were hung, others were beaten to death, burned alive and sometimes dismembered, often at large public gatherings. The majority of these lynchings occurred in the South, but not all: The 1930 lynching of two Black teenagers in Marion, Ind., was preserved in an iconic photo by Lawrence Beitler, showing members of the white mob proudly posing in the front of the teens' hanging bodies.41

The greatest period of Confederate statue-building occurred during the Jim Crow era, when white supremacy was being re-established in the South. The majority of monuments were installed roughly between 1900 and 1920, according to data from the Southern Poverty Law Center.42

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A second flurry of monument-building followed World War II, when Black soldiers, returning from fighting for their country, began asserting their rights. A further uptick coincided with the beginning of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early '60s, which analysts say indicates that the monuments were not about preserving history.

“The statues were a civic demonstration of who's in charge, and what the proper hierarchy is,” says Grossman.

Domby, the College of Charleston historian and author of the 2020 book The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory, says the narrative of a noble and just Southern “Lost Cause” is “premised on lies and fabrications” and “fundamentally functions to this day to justify and uphold white supremacist policies and world views.”

The persistence of the narrative, he says, has played a role in racial attitudes and the treatment of African Americans that led to the current protests and attacks on Confederate statues. “To understand current problems,” Domby says, “you have to understand their roots.”

Charleston and Charlottesville

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, walked into a Bible study group at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and shot to death nine Black worshippers. Roof, who was hoping to start a race war, had posted photos of himself online posing with a Confederate flag and visiting a Confederate museum and cemetery.43

The massacre spurred a reconsideration of Confederate iconography across the South, and monuments and symbols of the Confederacy began coming down, including removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state Capitol within weeks after the murders.44

But the movement also spurred a backlash. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee enacted or strengthened laws protecting Confederate monuments.45

In 2017, after Trump's election, white nationalist and supremacist groups, energized by his victory, held a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., centered on defending a Confederate monument. After years of debate, the City Council earlier that year had voted to remove a statue of Lee from a central city square. Although the decision was halted by a lawsuit, it still served as a rallying point for the groups that gathered in the city in August.46

Several hundred people carry torches and chant “white lives matter,” among other slogans, during a march through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Violence erupted the next day between marchers and counterdemonstrators, and a woman was killed during a rally protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. (Getty Images/The Washington Post/Evelyn Hockstein)

For two days, far-right white nationalists, chanting phrases that included the Nazi slogan “blood and soil,” and “Jews will not replace us,” clashed with counterprotesters, including students from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and members of the decentralized nationwide racial justice movement known as Black Lives Matter (BLM). An early clash occurred around a statue of Jefferson on the university's campus, but on the second day the violence escalated when marchers headed downtown toward the Lee statue.47

Before it ended, Heather Heyer, a paralegal from Charlottesville, had been killed after a driver rammed his car into a crowd in which she was standing. The driver, James Fields Jr., an avowed white supremacist, was later convicted of murder and pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.48

After the rally, Trump eventually denounced racism, but only after first saying there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protests. He defended the far-right marchers by citing the fact that they were there to defend the Lee monument. “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said.49

A fresh round of protests and attacks on Confederate monuments followed Charlottesville, as communities around the country wrestled with whether to remove monuments honoring the South's rebellion.50 But those protests were only a prelude to much larger demonstrations that would erupt three years later.

George Floyd Protests

On May 25, in Minneapolis, George Floyd, a 46-year-old unemployed bouncer, died in police custody after an officer pressed a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd begged him to stop, saying at least 25 times that he could not breathe. Floyd had been arrested for allegedly buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.51

Bystanders recorded his death, later ruled a homicide, and the video went viral, sparking massive nationwide protests against police violence directed at Black Americans.

The protests grew after public awareness grew of the circumstances of the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician in Louisville. Taylor was shot in her home in March by police executing a no-knock warrant who thought Taylor might be connected to a drug ring involving her former boyfriend. Taylor's death did not immediately gather widespread attention. But as it did, it fed protests, both in Louisville and nationally, which lasted for months.52

Protests spread to cities across the country, largely led by BLM groups. By early July, according to The New York Times, 15 million to 26 million people had participated in hundreds of events, making the demonstrations possibly the largest social movement in U.S. history.53

The movement to take down Confederate statues, already underway, accelerated in concert with the BLM protests, which sought systemic changes in how police treat minorities. By mid-September, at least 70 statues had come down since Floyd's death. In addition to statues, other Confederate symbols have been coming down. In June, officials at NASCAR banned Confederate flags from the auto racing association's events.54

Bond, the University of Iowa historian, says that taking down physical symbols such as statues is one of the easiest things to do when trying to make fundamental changes in society, but it is only part of the larger effort. “This shouldn't be understood as separate from everything else that is happening,” she says.

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Current Situation

Administration Efforts

Trump continues to make defending Confederate statues and monuments to the Founders a centerpiece of his campaign speeches as he approaches the November election. On Sept. 18, speaking in Bemidji, Minn., the president extolled Lee's virtues, saying he had “won many, many battles” and was “a great general.”55

Although Trump was speaking in a state where 2,500 Union soldiers died fighting against Lee's cause, Trump vowed to continue protecting Lee's statues. “They want to rip his statues down all over the place,” he said. “But Robert E. Lee, whether you like him or not, whether you like statues or not, they don't rip statues down anymore. I signed a law. Ten years in jail if they rip them down.”56

However, Trump signed no such law. An executive order he signed in June, which is not the same as a law, links efforts to topple monuments to rioters and violent extremists he portrayed as intent on destroying America.

“Key targets in the violent extremists' campaign against our country are public monuments, memorials and statues,” Trump's order states. “Their selection of targets reveals a deep ignorance of our history and is indicative of a desire to indiscriminately destroy anything that honors our past.” The order states that U.S. policy will be to “prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under federal law” anyone who destroys, damages, vandalizes or desecrates a monument, memorial or statue within the United States.57

Two days before the order was issued, U.S. marshals were told to prepare to protect federal monuments around the country in an email that indicated the order had originated with Attorney General William Barr. Within a week, the Justice Department had arrested five men for alleged vandalism of a statue of President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Park near the White House.58

A six-story-high statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee remains standing on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., despite having been defaced by protesters. Efforts to remove the statue from public land have been temporarily blocked by the courts. (AP Photo/ImageSPACE/MediaPunch/Chris Tuite)

Jackson, whose actions forced many Native Americans off their lands, is not the only historic figure who has been attacked for policies that harmed Indigenous peoples. The day before Columbus Day this year, as part of a so-called Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage, protesters in Portland toppled statues of former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt held openly expressed racist views toward Native Americans and supported federal policies that removed them from their native lands and forced them to assimilate. Lincoln has been condemned for approving the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux following the Dakota uprising of 1862, in which hundreds of settlers in Minnesota were killed. Lincoln approved the hangings, despite his concerns that the men's three- to five-minute-long military tribunals were conducted without defense attorneys or translators. However, against the wishes of military leaders, he commuted the death sentences of another 265 Dakota men who also had been sentenced to hang.59

In a tweet, Trump called the Portland protesters “animals” and called for the FBI to help contain them. Tawna D. Sanchez, a Native American state legislator from Portland, also condemned the actions, saying if activists want to change the city's statues they should go through proper procedures. “We don't have to do it by tearing things down, because it's not helping,” she said.60

Trump is also calling for establishment of a National Garden of American Heroes, which would include statues of various famous Americans. The day before Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore to give a Fourth of July speech, he signed an executive order creating a task force to provide a preliminary report on plans for the statuary garden within 60 days. The order included an eclectic list of people Trump said shall be memorialized in the park. In addition to some Founders, he listed frontier pioneer Davy Crockett, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., aviator Amelia Earhart, astronaut Christa McAuliffe and a roster of conservative heroes, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, President Ronald Reagan and evangelist Billy Graham. It does not include any similarly acclaimed Democrats.61

Kevin K. Gaines, a professor of social justice and civil rights at the University of Virginia, said that while presidents do have a role in shaping the national conversation about history, “this comes off as a desperate act of political grandstanding to his base.”62

However, the task force solicited recommendations for the heroes' garden from thousands of state and local officials around the country. Most governors reportedly ignored the request, but the suggestions, which the task force made public in its initial report on Aug. 31, include figures far outside Trump's apparent vision, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and several Native American leaders and historic figures.63

Former vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has said Confederate statues “belong in museums, they don't belong in public places.” But he drew a distinction between monuments to men who were “in rebellion committing treason” and slave-holding former presidents Jefferson and Washington, whose monuments, he said, should be protected.64

Congressional Actions

The question of whether Confederate leaders should be honored with statues in places of prominence is more immediate for members of Congress than might be expected. The U.S. Capitol includes 11 statues of prominent Confederates that lawmakers frequently walk past.65 The statues are part of the National Statuary Hall Collection, which honors two people from each state, chosen by the states for their accomplishments. It includes Mississippi's Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederacy; Georgia's Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy; and several Confederate generals.66

In July, the House voted, 305-113, to remove the Confederate statues, with 72 Republicans joining Democrats in a rare example of bipartisanship.67

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is not expected to bring the bill up for a vote. He has called it “clearly a bridge too far” and said such decisions should be left up to the states.68

Earlier, in June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ordered four portraits of Confederate leaders removed from the speaker's lobby, a corridor outside the House chambers. “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy,” Pelosi wrote.69

Lawmakers from both parties have introduced bills that deal with removing monuments and the larger questions of racial justice that motivate the protests, but none of the measures is considered likely to pass before the election.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has introduced a bill that would require a one-year mandatory prison sentence for anyone found guilty of vandalizing a memorial to an American veteran. In contrast, Rep. Ihlan Omar, D-Minn., is sponsoring a bill that would make it more difficult for police to use force against peaceful protesters.70

However, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation this July that would require renaming military bases named after Confederate military leaders and removing Confederate flags and other symbols from installations. The requirement is in both the House and Senate versions of the $740.5 billion defense authorization bill, which includes money for military pay raises, equipment purchases and other Defense Department priorities.71

Although Trump has threatened to veto the bill if it requires dropping Confederate names from bases, the legislation passed with enough votes in both chambers to override a veto. Still, congressional leaders have put off final action until after the election, while they seek to reach an agreement with the White House.72

State and Local Action

Many cities and towns trying to take down monuments in response to public demands are being blocked by state laws that restrict the ability of local communities to remove Confederate monuments. Six states — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee — have laws that afford different protections to monuments.73

South Carolina, for example, requires a two-thirds vote by the state Legislature before a monument can be taken down or moved. Citizens in Tennessee must petition the state Historical Commission for a waiver from state law before moving or altering any monument on public property. Alabama prohibits local governments from removing, altering or renaming monuments more than 40 years old, which includes 48 Confederate monuments, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.74

Several of the laws were enacted in recent years in reaction to earlier calls to remove Confederate monuments. The most recent was signed in 2019 by Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, in a ceremony held next door to a plantation built by slave labor.75

The laws have put the legislatures at odds with local officials. In Lowndes County, Ala., which is nearly three-quarters African American, the county commission unanimously voted in July to remove a column outside the county courthouse honoring Confederate veterans. But by doing so, the county could face a $25,000 fine for violating the state law, which was upheld last year by Alabama's Supreme Court after the state sued Birmingham officials for covering Confederate inscriptions on another monument.76

Virginia law also prevented local governments from removing Confederate monuments until Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, signed legislation in April giving cities the right to decide. Northam had vowed the law would be changed after the violent rally to protect Lee's statue in Charlottesville.

“These monuments tell a particular version of history that doesn't include everyone,” Northam said. “In Virginia, that version of history has been given prominence and authority for far too long.”77

Despite the new law, efforts to remove the six-story high Lee statue on Richmond's Monument Avenue and the one in Charlottesville have been blocked by lawsuits filed by local residents. Charlottesville was able to take down a different Confederate statue, but the suit over the contested Lee monument in that city has not yet been resolved. The trial in the lawsuit challenging the removal of the Richmond statue is due to start on Oct. 19. Three other Confederate statues that were on Monument Avenue, including the one of Gen. Jackson that Sandy Shelton watched being removed, have been taken down.78

In the District of Columbia, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser faced a political backlash after a monuments committee she appointed recommended not only renaming dozens of schools, parks and city government buildings honoring historic figures connected to slavery, but also adding plaques or other material to provide context to the Jefferson Memorial, Washington Monument and other prominent sites that are on federal land in the city.79

Following attacks from the White House and members of Congress, the suggestions regarding federal monuments were removed from the report.80

History Lessons

After this summer's mass protests for racial justice, punctuated by efforts to topple controversial monuments, educators are emphasizing the nation's rich cultural diversity and looking more closely at the country's history of slavery and its troubled record on race relations. The effort is being driven in part by student demands.81

One vehicle for change are school lesson plans offered for all grades based on The 1619 Project, an initiative by The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the start of slavery in America. The project reframes U.S. history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the nation's story.82

Some historians and conservative analysts have criticized the project as factually inaccurate at some points and one-dimensional by focusing so heavily on slavery in its depiction of America's founding.83

But the project also has been applauded, in some cases by the same historians who have pointed out errors, for recognizing the significance of slavery in the nation's history and its continuing effect on society.84 The 1619 Project “was hugely controversial, but it also had a huge impact on the way middle schools, high schools and all of us taught history,” says the University of Iowa's Bond.

She links the movement to take down monuments to those connected to slavery. “It's a replacement of a different kind,” she says. “It's just not as visible as the replacement of statues.”

Trump also ties removing monuments to education, but he sees it as a sign that America's youth are being indoctrinated by educators and the media with a left-wing ideology that teaches them to hate America. In a speech at the National Archives on Sept. 17, Trump referred to The 1619 Project as the principal example of this indoctrination.85 He has since threatened to cut education funding to states that teach The 1619 Project.

Trump also has said he would sign an executive order establishing a national commission, to be called the 1776 Commission, to promote what he calls a patriotic education.

But U.S. school curriculums are established at the local level, and education experts say federal law prohibits officials from mandating what is taught.86

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Outlook

Confronting the Past

The question of which historic monuments and statues will still be standing five or 10 years from now cannot be separated from the larger questions of whether and how the United States comes to terms with its troubled racial history.

President Trump has vowed to block further efforts to remove statues and predicts the attacks this summer will create a permanent backlash.87

But some who support protecting the monuments are not so sure there will be a backlash. Cooper, the retired Louisiana State professor, who feels Confederate monuments and statues are a part of American history worth preserving, believes the tide has shifted too strongly against them.

“I don't think most of them will still be around, even the small ones in small towns that are pretty inoffensive to most anybody,” he says. “Given the current political mood, especially with a lot of young people, five years from now, I think you'll have a hard time finding one.”

Davidson College's Bailey says the monuments' futures are closely tied to the question of whether the country can confront its racial history.

“I am happy we are actually trying to grapple more seriously with this,” he says, “although I am not convinced we are yet ready to really, really fully grapple with what it means to tell hard truths about ourselves and actually try to figure out a way to undo the damage that is decades deep.”

Still, he sees hope in public opinion polls showing that Trump's attacks on the protesters and his attempt to tap into a law-and-order message, which has been effective in the past, “have not worked well for many white people so far. That sort of gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe this time it can be different.” In a mid-September poll by Reuters/Ipsos, only 11 percent of white voters said being “tough on crime” was the most important factor influencing their vote.88

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest supporter of the arts and humanities in the United States, announced in October that it will spend $250 million over five years to help the country reimagine both future monuments and how it treats existing monuments dedicated to historic figures. The foundation said its project will support the creation of new monuments that better reflect the nation's diversity as well as the relocation or contextualizing of existing ones.89

Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, hopes the monument debate “will re-energize American engagement with public spaces,” leading us to consider how we want to use our parks, squares and other gathering places. “That doesn't have to mean what monuments do we put up to replace the ones we've taken down,” he adds. “Lots of times, the best thing to do is probably not replace the ones we've taken down.”

Rael-Galvez, the former New Mexico historian, sees the ongoing debate about history and the shape of the American future as a positive sign. “I'm optimistic about the future because young voices and diverse voices are having this conversation in their communities,” he says.

But like Landrieu, he believes it might be best if monuments are not replaced with new ones honoring a fresh set of heroes. The debate over the meaning of today's statues, he says, indicates they are a poor way to remember the past.

“This reckoning we're in gives us an opportunity to ask why we need monuments at all. Are we representing history in a way that generates civic discourse and an understanding of the past?” Rael-Galvez asks. “In my opinion, with very few exceptions, I don't think monuments do that. A statue of a man on a horse doesn't help us understand the past.”

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Pro/Con

Should monuments honoring the Confederacy be taken down?

Pro Mitch Landrieu Former Mayor, New Orleans, and Founder, E Pluribus Unum. Written for CQ Researcher, October 2020 As mayor of New Orleans, I removed four Confederate statues from public land during a multiyear process that helped reintroduce historical facts and a more proper telling of the history of how and why many of these statues or monuments were erected. As part of E Pluribus Unum's “Divided by Design” study of racial attitudes in the South, I saw firsthand the impact Confederate monuments have had in telling a one-sided, untruthful history that contributes to the institutional effects of racism. The historical record is clear: Most statues of Confederate leaders were erected not just to honor these men but as part of the movement that became known as the Lost Cause. The movement had one goal: to rewrite history to hide the truth about the Confederacy and to use the statues to continue to oppress Black Americans. According to the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center, some 1,700 Confederate memorial monuments, statues and other symbols were erected well after the Civil War during a post-Reconstruction period and in the early 20th century. The era coincided with the rise of Jim Crow segregation laws and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a backlash against the civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s. Essentially, the South lost the war and a group of people got together and decided that they were going to adorn the country with monuments to make the cause for which they fought seem noble, rather than treasonous. It was a propaganda campaign of epic proportions. These monuments purposefully celebrate and perpetuate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, enslavement and terror that it stood for. Slavery was one of our nation's original sins, and racism remains our Achilles' heel. While that history cannot be changed by removing a statue, we can change how we honor that history. These Confederate generals fought to destroy the United States of America in order to preserve slavery. To put the Confederacy on a pedestal is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, an affront to our present and a bad prescription for our future. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of a fictionalized version of it. Once they are removed, we can better confront the racist systems that have divided us by design for generations and get us closer to that more perfect union we all aspire to.

Con Larry Mccluney Jr. Educator, Historian and Commander-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Written for CQ Researcher, October 2020 Confederate memorials do not symbolize traitors who fought to preserve slavery. Such ideas spark emotions for those who believe they memorialize the dead. Most were built decades after the war, as the Civil War generation began to die off. Confederate graves were not cared for as those in federal military cemeteries, so erecting a Confederate monument was a way to grieve and remember the hundreds of thousands who died in that war. Many of these men are buried in unmarked graves far from home and family. Is it any wonder why, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation? Thus, the true purpose of these memorials is to remember and respect the Confederate soldiers who mostly fought and died, not to preserve slavery, but responded to a sense of honor and duty to defend their homes and families. At a Memorial Day event in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran, talked about transmitting the emotional weight of the war to future generations and the role of monuments: “I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be.” Holmes also said, “the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire … we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after.” These monuments were erected as powerful lessons in American history, a testament to our turbulent past that would be diminished if they were hidden in sanitized museums. Not every statue or piece of public art must comfort and console us but should oblige us to grapple with our nation's history. Let them stand as memorials to our ancestors to tell the story of a generation who fought and died for their country; and show that a nation can overcome its differences; and although slavery is part of America's past, those on both sides of this debate can offer respect and forgiveness to all.

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Short Features

Monticello Honors Jefferson, but With Context

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, owned a magnificent home and plantation known as Monticello, outside of Charlottesville, Va.

The man who penned the Declaration's famous lines, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” words that have inspired people around the world to seek their freedom, also owned more than 600 men, women and children he kept as property over the course of his life.1

Genetic records and other evidence indicate a high likelihood he fathered six children with one of them, Sally Hemings, with whom he apparently maintained an intimate relationship for many years, probably beginning when she was 15 or 16. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello as a museum and historic site, has been struggling for decades to capture the contradictions in Jefferson's life — balancing the man who proclaimed all men equal and referred to slavery as a “moral and political depravity” with the man who kept enslaved people and fathered children with one of them.2

Nearly three decades ago, the foundation embarked on a mission to incorporate the story of African Americans at Monticello into the larger story of Jefferson's plantation, an effort some historians say is an example of how a memorial to a historic figure can be placed in a context that captures the good and the bad.

“What Monticello has done has been commendable,” says Julian Hayter, a historian at the University of Richmond in Virginia. “They are, in effect, diving headlong into the complexity that defines the American experience.” Monticello's research and the exhibits it has added, he explains, expose visitors to contradictions in Jefferson's life that mirror the contradictions that have existed historically between the country's ideals and its actions when it comes to race.

Gary Sandling, Monticello's vice president of visitor programs and services, says Monticello does not try to resolve those contradictions. “The bottom line is we hold these things in tension,” he says. “We don't try to reconcile them, and that's not always satisfactory [to guests]. But what we think is important is these are the realities of the beginnings of our nation…. Here's a place where you can understand that duality.”

Visitors to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's estate near Charlottesville, Va., participate in a tour that examines the role of slavery at the home. This house was likely the dwelling of an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, and her children, whom Jefferson fathered. (Getty Images/The Washington Post/Norm Shafer)

The work began in 1993, the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth. The first step was “Getting Word,” an oral history project in which descendants of African Americans families at Monticello shared their stories.3 Since then, exhibits have expanded to include a significant restoration of Mulberry Row, the adjacent community where people held as slaves lived and worked, providing a clearer picture of their day-to-day lives. Interpretive efforts also examine Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery and how he managed the people he held as property, priding himself on being a benevolent slaveholder while also selling some he considered troublemakers and renting others out to improve his finances, a common practice at the time.4

Based on DNA evidence and research by Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian at Harvard University, which found a compelling case for Jefferson having fathered Heming's children, Monticello tour guides began talking about the relationship in 2001.

But a couple of years ago, the foundation went further and opened an exhibit that tells Hemings' story. Although she left no written record of her life, the exhibit draws on the recollections of one of her sons, Madison, that he shared with a newspaper in 1873.5

In recent years, Monticello also has hosted symposiums that examine the larger history of slavery. “Over time, what we've realized is we want visitors to understand the historical roots of a still very modern phenomenon, which is race and racism,” Sandling explains. “The institution of slavery is the reality in which American ideas about race and racism were forged, and those are still here…. This is a place to understand the beginnings of that.”

Sandling says a backlash to Monticello's portrayal of slavery and Jefferson's role in it happens “surprisingly less often than might be imagined, given how contentious these issues are. But it certainly happens.” Monticello's guides do not try to force a perspective on guests, he notes. “We attempt to hear what our visitors say when they are unhappy, but also to affirm that we ground what we do in research and scholarship.”

While some visitors only want to hear the positives in Jefferson's legacy, “for the most part, they're receptive to the idea [that] this is complicated,” Sandling says. Younger visitors, in particular, he adds, “don't want to feel you're airbrushing over the complexity of the history.”

The contextualization offered at Monticello is not possible at many monuments to historic figures now under question, says Gordon-Reed. For some, the location of the monument itself is the issue. For others, there is little opportunity to paint a fuller portrait.

“People go through Monticello with a guide. There are opportunities for questions and dialogue,” she says. “Places that have that component have an advantage.” In other places where it makes sense, Gordon-Reed says, contextualization can be a way to maintain monuments to important historic figures while also providing a fuller, more relevant account of their lives and times.

Hayter says that means the public will have to accept more nuanced portraits of celebrated Americans. “People don't like the grey area,” he says, “but they're going to be forced to wade in it.”

— Reed Karaim

[1] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives, https://tinyurl.com/y6czvv7g; “Jefferson & Slavery,” Monticello, https://tinyurl.com/yyprzzdf.

[2] “Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 10 September 1814,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://tinyurl.com/y4dbpjww.

[3] “Getting Word, African-American Oral History Project,” Monticello, https://tinyurl.com/y6gor2ef.

[4] “The Business of Slavery at Monticello,” Monticello, https://tinyurl.com/y683m3o6.

[5] Farah Stockman, “Monticello Is Done Avoiding Jefferson's Relationship with Sally Hemings,” The New York Times, June 6, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/yab57sf7; “The Life of Sally Hemings,” Monticello, https://tinyurl.com/y7azb36s.

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Many Nations Are Addressing Racial Injustices

In the weeks after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis at the hands of police, the mass protests against racial injustice that erupted in the United States spread across the globe.6

Tens of thousands marched in cities on every continent, from London, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin to Melbourne, Australia, Nairobi, Kenya, and Cape Town, South Africa. Protesters, often carrying Black Lives Matter placards signaling their solidarity with the U.S. anti-racism group, defaced or tore down monuments to once-revered figures connected to slavery, imperialism or racial oppression. They targeted statues of Winston Churchill, the prime minister who led Great Britain in World War II; King Leopold of Belgium; British imperialist Cecil Rhodes and several wealthy slave traders.7

But within a few days, counterdemonstrations arose in Paris and London, with right-wing protesters, mostly young white men, clashing with Black Lives Matter supporters and police in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square. In an echo of U.S. confrontations over monuments, the counterdemonstrators who gathered at Parliament Square said they were rallying to protect the symbols of their heritage and culture, particularly Churchill's statue, which had been spray-painted with the word “racist” on its base. Churchill was a strong proponent of Britain's empire, which subjugated native populations around the world.8

This summer's wave of demonstrations and counterprotests indicate the United States is hardly alone in its struggle to come to terms with issues of racial inequality and justice.

But dozens of other nations have taken steps in recent decades to heal racial and historical wounds that the United States has not, says Bonny Ibhawoh, a professor of history and global human rights at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He believes the United States could benefit from establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission,” such as those created by more than 40 countries to face historical wrongs committed by one group against another in their societies.9

A specialist in global racial reconciliation efforts, Ibhawoh says such a commission could help the United States sort out its long, complex history of racial issues. “They're not issues that can be solved simply politically. They're not issues that can be solved simply legally,” he says. “Truth commissions come into play when society recognizes that politics and law are not enough … and there is a need to have a true accounting of what happened, and it seems to me that's [the case in] the United States.”

Participants at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in East London, South Africa, in 1996 discuss human rights abuses that occurred during the nation's apartheid era. More than 40 countries have addressed racial injustice and facilitated community healing using such commissions. (AFP/Getty Images/Philip Littleton)

The way such commissions operate can vary, and not all have been successful, he says. But they commonly have three mandates: First, find the truth of what happened; then, bring justice to the victims, which can come in the form or reparations, memorials or some other form of recognition; and, finally, use the knowledge gained to help different groups in society reconcile.

Ibhawoh cites South Africa, where the white minority imposed a rigid system of racial segregation known as apartheid from 1948 to 1991, as an example of a nation that needed to face the truth of its past. “The public hearings of the South African truth commission laid bare the depths and horrors and atrocities of apartheid,” he says, “and that is the first step for a society, reckoning and coming to terms with what happened and how it impacted people.”

Canada also addressed historical injustices inflicted on its First Nation peoples through forced assimilation and other mistreatment with a commission that operated from 2008 to 2015, he points out. Following the commission's investigations, Canada formally recognized its past abuses and established goals to redress First Nation grievances.

The work is ongoing, but Ibhawoh says it has been successful enough that Norway and Denmark are now exploring similar commissions to deal with the legacy of how the Sami, an Indigenous minority in their countries, have been treated.

“You're starting to see Western democracies use truth commissions in very creative ways,” he says.

Dr. Bonny Ibhawoh, director of the Center for Human Rights and Restorative Justice at McMaster University in Canada, says a truth and reconciliation committee could help the United States address its complicated racial history. (Kevin Patrick Robbins)

During this summer's protests in the United States, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., introduced a bill to create a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission to “acknowledge, memorialize, and be a catalyst for progress toward jettisoning the belief in a hierarchy of human value based on race … and permanently eliminating persistent racial inequities.”10

With Congress and U.S. society sharply divided on issues of race, Lee's legislation is unlikely to pass anytime soon. Ibhawoh says some of his African American colleagues in the United States have told him there is not enough public support there for a commission, but he believes one is inevitable.

“At some point,” he says, “a society has to decide: ‘When do we have a full reckoning?’”

— Reed Karaim

[6] “How George Floyd's death sparked protests around the world,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y4w99yuj.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Iliana Magra, Elian Peltier and Constant Méheut, “Far-Right Groups Push Back as Protestors Rally in Europe,” The New York Times, June 13, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y9amh2oc.

[9] For background, see Jina Moore, “Truth Commissions,” CQ Researcher, Jan. 1, 2010, http://library.cqpress.com.

[10] “In the Wake of COVID-19 and Murder of George Floyd, Congresswoman Barbara Lee Calls for Formation of Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission,” Office of Congresswoman Barbara Lee, U.S. House of Representatives, June 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y8jqfsn9.

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Bibliography

Books

Clinton, Catherine , et al., Confederate Statues and Memorialization (History in the Headlines Series) , University of Georgia Press, 2019. In a roundtable discussion and a series of essays, prominent historians examine the role of Confederate statues in U.S. history and culture.

Domby, Adam , The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory , University of Virginia Press, 2020. A historian examines the falsehoods behind the “Lost Cause” ideology that emerged after the Civil War, an effort to recast the struggle as a heroic defense of the South.

Landrieu, Mitch , In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History , Viking, 2018. The former New Orleans mayor explains why he removed Confederate statues from his city after a race-based mass murder in Charleston, S.C., and examines the history of racism and Confederate mythology in the United States.

Robbins, James , Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past , Regnery Publishing, 2018. A fellow at the conservative American Foreign Policy Council says removing Confederate statues is part of a broader effort by the political left to enforce its view of history.

Articles

Fisher, Marc , “As Confederate monuments tumble, die-hards are erecting replacements,” The Washington Post, July 25, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3b24z4u. Even as other monuments are removed, members of groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans are erecting new ones to the Confederate cause, which they say commemorate the courage of the men who fought for the South.

Fortin, Jacey , “Toppling Monuments, a Visual History,” The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ydc24h7o. People have been tearing down monuments to former leaders almost since the beginning of recorded history, including — in modern times — statues commemorating the old Soviet Union and repressive Middle Eastern regimes.

Gowan, Annie , “As statues of Founding Fathers topple, debate rages over where protestors should draw the line,” The Washington Post, July 7, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y38w5obl. Angry protesters have toppled or defaced statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, leading to calls for a more thoughtful and measured approach to monument removal.

Hirsch, Michael , “If Americans Grappled Honestly With Their History, Would Any Monuments Be Left Standing?” Foreign Policy, June 24, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yx9ftpz8. A reappraisal of the lives of slaveholders Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, among others, raises difficult questions about how America's Founders should be memorialized.

Reports and Studies

“Divided By Design, Findings from the American South,” E Pluribus Unum, October 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y48vk28v. Research by an initiative founded by former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to promote racial understanding and reconciliation finds that “many white people lack an understanding of the scale of racism in America.”

“Voters' Attitudes About Race and Gender Are Even More Divided Than in 2016,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yy9fb3fz. As it debates how to remember its racist past, the United States is sharply divided along partisan and generational lines about the degree of racism that still exists in U.S. society, with Democratic voters and younger people far more likely to say white people still enjoy significant advantages.

“Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Feb. 1, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y55ztqvj. Despite a movement to take down Confederate statues after a 2015 racially based mass killing in Charleston, S.C., a study by the civil rights group found 1,747 Confederate monuments, place names and other symbols still in public places across the nation.

Comey, Laura , et al., “Confederate Symbols Relation to Federal Lands and Programs,” Congressional Research Service, July 28, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3lc3l75. An inventory of Confederate monuments and other symbols on public lands finds that they exist in various national parks and cemeteries, including Arlington National Cemetery. Ten U.S. Army bases also are named after Confederate military leaders.

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The Next Step

Confederate Monuments

Burnett, John, and Piper McDaniel , “Confederate Statues Come Down Around U.S., But Not Everywhere,” NPR, Oct. 6, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yy8sz2sj. Local officials have moved to protect at least 28 Confederate monuments after racial justice protesters, spurred by George Floyd's death in police custody, have called for such monuments to be torn down.

Ortiz, Erik , “These Confederate statues were removed. But where did they go?” NBC News, Sept. 20, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y6nzmemv. Once removed from public land, many Confederate monuments are transported to cemeteries or museums.

Schultz, Edan , “Group sues over plans to remove Confederate monument in Madison,” WCTV, Oct. 7, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y2j4o4a9. The Sons of Confederate Veterans are suing the mayor of Madison, Fla., over the city's decision to remove a monument to Confederate soldiers.

Founders

“Six Arrested for Vandalizing George Washington Statue in Grand Park,” NBC Los Angeles, Aug. 15, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y4ctu77f. Police arrested six suspects in connection with the toppling of a statue of George Washington in Los Angeles.

Ossolinksi, Mark , “Thomas Jefferson statue protestors announce list of demands at MU,” Columbia Missourian, Oct. 2, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y28e5mh4. Protesters at the University of Missouri pledged to hold “600 hours of disruption” — representing the number of enslaved persons Thomas Jefferson owned — until a statue of the former president is removed from campus.

Redden, Elizabeth , “UVA Approves Removal of Controversial Statue,” Inside Higher Education, Sept. 14, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y2gsfgtu. The University of Virginia pledged to “contextualize” a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the school's founder, to acknowledge his use of slave labor at the institution.

International Protests

“Extinction Rebellion protestor arrested for defacing Winston Churchill statue,” The Guardian, Sept. 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y4huaulw. A demonstrator at an environmental protest was arrested for spray-painting a London statue of Winston Churchill with the words “is a racist.”

Allen, Vanessa , “National Trust faces backlash for linking Winston Churchill's home to slavery and colonialism,” Daily Mail, Sept. 22, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3q3co4x. Some British politicians worry that a charity's decision to highlight Winston Churchill's ties to colonialism will encourage further attacks on a statue of the former prime minister.

Blei, Daniela , “The Museum Where Racist and Oppressive Statues Go to Die,” Atlas Obscura, Aug. 14, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yyw3ng5x. In Germany, a museum displays statues of controversial figures at eye level and allows visitors to touch them.

Missionaries and Columbus

“Boston's vandalized Columbus statue to get a new home,” The Associated Press, Oct. 6, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yy2sg5tn. Boston will replace a beheaded statue of Christopher Columbus with one honoring Italian immigrants.

Flynn, JD , “California Catholic university puts St. Junipero Serra statue in storage,” Catholic News Agency, July 14, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y4fsw2vo. The University of San Diego moved a statue of St. Junipero Serra, an 18th-century missionary, into storage to prevent its potential desecration.

Herbert, Geoff , “‘Killer’: Christopher Columbus statue vandalized in Utica twice in 8 days,” Syracuse.com, Oct. 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3k528oa. A statue of Christopher Columbus in Utica, N.Y., has been repeatedly vandalized in the lead-up to Columbus Day, as competing petitions call for its removal and its retention.

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Contacts

Black Lives Matter
blacklivesmatter.com
A decentralized movement with offices in many U.S. cities that seeks to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities.”

Daughters of the Confederacy
328 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd., Richmond, VA 23220
804-355-1626
hqudc.org
Female descendants of Confederate veterans who strive to honor the memory of those ancestors by protecting and preserving historic Confederate sites.

Equal Justice Initiative
122 Commerce St., Montgomery, AL 36104
334-269-1803
eji.org
A nonprofit group that tracks legal cases regarding Confederate monuments and works to end mass incarceration and racial injustice.

National Trust for Historic Preservation
2600 Virginia Ave., N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, DC 20037
202-588-6000
savingplaces.org
Congressionally chartered group that works to save America's historic sites says removing Confederate statues may be necessary to promote racial justice.

Sons of Confederate Veterans
740 Mooresville Pike, Columbia, TN 38401
800-380-1896
scv.org
Male descendants of Confederate veterans who work to preserve the legacy and history of those veterans.

Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, AL 36104
334-956-8200
splcenter.org
Legal advocacy group that monitors the activity of hate groups and other extremists; maintains a database of Confederate monuments across the United States.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation
Monticello, 931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway, Charlottesville, VA 22902
434-984-9800
monticello.org
The nonprofit that oversees the home of the author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States examines Thomas Jefferson's political legacy as well as his role as a slaveowner.

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Footnotes

[1] Brad Kutner, “Not Waiting for Vote, Virginia Mayor Orders Removal of Confederate Statues,” Courthouse News Service, July 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y6sr5fe9.

[2] “Protests break out around the US following deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,” USA Today, July 23, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yybdkfcw.

[3] Leo Shane III, “Trump vows bases named for Confederate leaders ‘will not be changing,’” Military Times, July 24, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y6so9l2e.

[4] “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota's 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration, Keystone, South Dakota,” The White House, July 4, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y7mrw7an.

[5] Jason Lemon, “Majority of Americans Now Support Removing Confederate Statues, Up 16 Points from 2018: Poll,” Newsweek, July 21, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxcvj9kd; Kaley Johnson, “Weatherford protest turns violent as hundreds show up to defend Confederate statue,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 27, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y6j7kmge; “Police Move in After Fights Break Out During Georgia Protest,” U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 15, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3w5h9dy; Simon Romero, “Man Is Shot at Protest Over Statue of New Mexico's Conquistador,” The New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ycp5zl2d; and Joe Heim, “Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death,” The Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ya3pc3m4.

[6] “SPLC Whose Heritage? Dataset Updates as of Sept. 15, 2020,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Sept. 15, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y297wf25.

[7] Ibid.; Matt Jones, “Newport News' Lake Maury, named for Confederate Officer, is now The Mariners' Lake,” The Daily Press, July 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxbs3mrd; “President Eisgruber's message to community on removal of Woodrow Wilson name from public policy school and Wilson College,” press release, Princeton University, June 27, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ycqmqurh; and Maddie Capron, “‘Unrepentant Slaveholder.’ Schools removing president names, California district says,” The Sacramento Bee, June 15, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y63vdrbd.

[8] “SPLC Whose Heritage?” op. cit.; Marc Fisher, “As Confederate monuments tumble, die-hards are erecting replacements,” The Washington Post, July 25, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3b24z4u.

[9] Charles Blow, “Yes, even George Washington,” The New York Times, June 28, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3nfuc4h.

[10] Bonny Ibhawoh, “Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations,” The Conversation, Jan. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ycz8etoo.

[11] David Emery, “Was Robert E. Lee Opposed to Confederate Monuments?” Snopes, Aug. 23, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yxlwpkqc.

[12] Mickey Mellen, “Just how big is the Stone Mountain sculpture?” Google Earth Blog, Aug. 19, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/yxshh3ep; Steve Hendrix, “Stone Mountain: The ugly past — and fraught future — of the biggest Confederate Monument,” The Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ybnyjbsz.

[13] “Reaffirmation of the Objectives of the United Daughters of the Confederacy,” United Daughters of the Confederacy, Dec. 1, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y5kqmwal.

[14] Catherine Clinton, Confederate Statues and Memorialization (History in the Headlines Series), 2019, Kindle edition, p. 118.

[15] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “What This Cruel War Was Over. The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the worlds of those who bore it,” The Atlantic, June 22, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/mkfubr2.

[16] Debbie Lord, “What happened at Charlottesville: Looking back on the rally that ended in death,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, Aug. 13, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yyrgltzy.

[17] “Ten Facts About Washington & Slavery,” Mount Vernon, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y5vocv3u; “George Washington statue in Baltimore defaced with red paint,” The Associated Press, June 21, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3o2qsun; Rebecca Ellis, “George Washington Statute Toppled in Portland,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, June 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y46o5umd; Amanda Williams, “Williams and Mary's Thomas Jefferson statue vandalized,” Virginia Gazette, Feb. 14, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yxs2g2g8; and Susan Svriuga, “‘Racist + Rapist’: On Founder's Day at U-Va., Jefferson's statue is defaced,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y47734gv.

[18] Marty Johnson, “Protestors tear down statues of Union general Ulysses S. Grant, national anthem lyricist Francis Scott Key,” The Hill, June 20, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ybaqt3a7.

[19] “Rye: White supremacist statues need to be removed,” CNN, Aug. 18, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y2ydzc5l.

[20] Colleen Walsh, “Must we allow symbols of racism on public land?” The Harvard Gazette, June 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y8zjv6jr.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Lucian K. Truscott IV, “I'm a Direct Descendent of Thomas Jefferson. Take Down His Memorial,” The New York Times, July 6, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y77bluos.

[23] Henry Olsen, “The anti-statue movement has taken a turn into absurdity,” The Washington Post, June 22, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3de3bee.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Erin Blakemore, “George Washington Used Legal Loopholes to Avoid Freeing His Slaves,” Smithsonian Magazine, Feb. 16, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y54b3puq.

[26] Wyatte Granthan-Philips, “Not just Confederate statutes: Indigenous activists want Spanish conquistadors, missionaries removed,” USA Today, June 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y8rjcp7u.

[27] Ibid.; Daniel Chacón, “De Vargas statue removed; overnight attempt to move Plaza obelisk fails,” Santa Fe New Mexican, June 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3bp99tz; and “Statue of Spanish governor removed from New Mexico park,” ABC News, June 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y89j6wg6.

[28] Theresa Machemer, “Christopher Columbus statues beheaded, pulled down across America,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 12, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y82xaa4u; Colin Campbell and Emily Opilo, “Christopher Columbus statue near Little Italy brought down, tossed into Baltimore's Inner Harbor,” The Baltimore Sun, July 4, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yau8d92o.

[29] Edward T. Stone, “Columbus and Genocide,” American Heritage, October 1975, https://tinyurl.com/yxo4n8qj; Alejandra Molina, “Who is St. Junipero Serra and why are California protesters toppling his statues,” America: the Jesuit Review, June 22, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3tly4lp.

[30] Salvatore Joseph Cordileone, “Statues of Saint Junípero Serra deserve to stay,” The Washington Post, June 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxm3gnv9.

[31] Robert Ferrito, “Your view: Why criticisms of Christopher Columbus are unfair,” The Morning Call, Aug. 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y6lmgzto.

[32] Sarah E. Bond, “Erasing the Face of History,” The New York Times, May 14, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/yxb7hcpw.

[33] Eric Michael Rhodes, “Top Ten Origins: Monument Takedowns,” Origins, Nov. 27, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y3wfpxtw.

[34] Andrew Lawler, “Pulling down statues? It's a tradition that dates back to U.S. Independence,” National Geographic, July 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yaumb74c.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Jacey Fortin, “Toppling Monuments, a Visual History,” The New York Times, Aug. 17, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ydc24h7o; Deborah Seward, “Statue of Soviet Intelligence Chief Pulled down,” The Associated Press, Aug. 22, 1991, https://tinyurl.com/y4ta7985.

[37] “Reconstruction,” History, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yck7wgpj.

[38] “Compromise of 1877,” History, Nov. 27, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ycokg5h3.

[39] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, 2018, Kindle edition, p. 330.

[40] Ibid., p. 344.

[41] “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3rd Edition)” Equal Justice Initiative, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yxjp4kw4; “Strange Fruit: Anniversary Of A Lynching,” “Radio Diaries,” NPR, Aug. 6, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y5hw4rvh.

[42] Ryan Best, “Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History,” FiveThirtyEight, July 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ybrdfncr.

[43] Samuel Momodu, “The Charleston Church Massacre (2015),” BlackPast, Sept. 30, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y78vjuak; Neely Tucker and Peter Holley, “Dylann Roof's eerie tour of American slavery, at its beginning, middle and end,” The Washington Post, July 1, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y2nujw6o.

[44] Nathaniel Cary and Doug Stanglin, “South Carolina takes down Confederate flag,” USA Today, July 10, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/yy85cn4j.

[45] Brian Lyman and Natalie Allison, “As calls to remove Confederate monuments grew louder, states passed new laws to protect them,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y268ycjo.

[46] Lord, op. cit.; Chris Suarez, “Charlottesville City Council votes to remove statue from Lee Park,” The Daily Progress, Feb. 6, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yyamgere.

[47] Suarez, ibid.

[48] David K. Li, “Driver in deadly car attack at Charlottesville white nationalist rally pleads guilty to federal hate crimes,” NBC News, March 27, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y4ddd37s.

[49] Lord, op. cit.

[50] Ian Simpson, “Statue defaced as U.S. Confederate monument protests grow,” Reuters, Aug. 17, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y5j8rale.

[51] Matt Furber, Audra D.S. Burch and Frances Robles, “What happened in the Chaotic Moments Before George Floyd Died,” The New York Times, May 29, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yajo25hj.

[52] “Breonna Taylor: What happened on the night of her death?” BBC, Oct. 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y474s97d; Josh Wood and Tim Craig, “As Breonna Taylor protests stretch into 12th week, calls for officers' arrests intensify,” The Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxk5gnpn.

[53] Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” The New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y8qt9ftc.

[54] “SPLC Whose Heritage?” op. cit.; Steve Almasy, “NASCAR bans Confederate flags at all races, events,” CNN, June 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ycnozwd6.

[55] “Donald Trump Campaign Rally Speech Bemidji, Minnesota Transcript September 18,” Rev, Sept. 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y4o732xw.

[56] Ibid.

[57] “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence,” The White House, June 26, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ychd69sb.

[58] Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, “U.S. marshalls told to prepare to help protect monuments nationwide as Trump targets people who vandalize structures during protests,” The Washington Post, June 24, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yb675nwc; Alexander Mallin, “DOJ arrests man for alleged vandalism of Andrew Jackson statue,” ABC News, July 2, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ycgrxxpg.

[59] Alysa Landry, “Theodore Roosevelt: The Only Good Indians are the Dead Indians,” Indian Country Today, June 28, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y7rfouqv; Mike Baker, “Protesters in Portland Topple Statues of Lincoln and Roosevelt,” The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y6ofb3yc; Robert K. Elder, “Execution 150 Years Ago Spurs Calls for Pardon,” The New York Times, Dec. 13, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/y68lbzau; and “Petition asks Obama to pardon Dakota 38,” The Associated Press, March 23, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/y6nxp468.

[60] Baker, ibid.

[61] “Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes,” The White House, July 3, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y8mzjk63.

[62] Michael Crowley, “Trump Says He Will Create a Statuary Park Honoring ‘American Heroes,’” The New York Times, July 4, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y9tphr8d.

[63] Ellen Knickmeyer, Alan Suderman and Jim Anderson, “George Floyd? Donald Trump? Hero statue nominations are in,” The Detroit News, Aug. 31, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y56pbn8q.

[64] Annie Linskey, “On monuments, Biden draws distinction between those of slave owners and those who fought to preserve slavery,” The Washington Post, June 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y5vnhj9x.

[65] James Bikales, “Here are the Confederate statues in the Capitol,” The Hill, June 12, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yc3wcyzz.

[66] “National Statuary Hall Collection by Location,” Architect of the Capitol, https://tinyurl.com/yyqs3fo7.

[67] Catie Edmondson, “House Votes to Remove Confederate Statues from U.S. Capitol,” The New York Times, July 22, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y29qus7a.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Emily Cochrane, “Pelosi Orders Removal of Four Confederate Portraits From the House,” The New York Times, June 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y9bz3djn.

[70] “S.4105 — Washington-Grant Historic Preservation Act,” Congress.gov, June 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3t9ahgk; “H.R.7315 — Protecting Our Protesters Act of 2020,” Congress.gov, June 24, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yykyh79h.

[71] Connor O'Brien, “Senate clears bill removing Confederate names from military bases, setting up clash with Trump,” Politico, July 23, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y4fauqha.

[72] Joe Gould, “Defense authorization bill delayed until after election,” Defense News, Sept. 9, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y543whnk.

[73] “Confederate monuments are protected by law in several states,” WXII 12 News, July 10, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y2y8a42d.

[74] Ibid.

[75] “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Feb 1, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yysbpuho; “Confederate monuments are protected by law in several states,” op. cit.; and Tyler Jett, “Without once mentioning the Civil War, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signs bill protecting Confederate monuments, other memorials,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, April 26, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y2mf7fml.

[76] “QuickFacts, Lowndes County, Alabama,” U.S. Census Bureau, July 1, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxashlo4; Brian Lyman and Natalie Allison, “As calls to remove Confederate monuments grew, states passed laws protecting them,” The Daily Herald, Aug. 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y57qzhm9; and Kim Chandler, “Top Alabama court upholds Confederate monument protections,” ABC News, Nov. 27, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/sacwflw.

[77] Chandler, ibid.

[78] Gregory S. Schneider, “Judge sets trial date for lawsuit blocking removal of Richmond's Robert E. Lee statue,” The Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y272kcdg; Gregory S. Schneider, “Confederate statue taken down in Charlottesville near the site of violent 2017 rally,” The Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxjqs5z8.

[79] Julie Zauzmer and Michael Brice-Saddler, “D.C. committee recommends stripping the names of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Scott Key and others from city government buildings,” The Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxbgy4wg.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Deanna Pan, “How teachers are bringing lessons from the racial justice uprisings into the classroom,” The Boston Globe, Sept. 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yy8gjtm9; Hannah Natanson, “High school students are demanding schools teach more Black history, include more Black authors,” The Washington Post, Aug. 17, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y2o9as25.

[82] “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y6m2pten.

[83] Naomi Schaefer Riley, “‘The 1619 Project’ Enters American Classrooms,” Education Next, Fall 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxzz2gg2.

[84] Leslie M. Harris, “I Helped Fact-Check The 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me,” Politico, March 6, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/w9dbnlh.

[85] “Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History,” The White House, Sept. 17, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxp8jmo6.

[86] Sarah Schwartz, “Could President Trump Really Penalize Schools for Teaching the 1619 Project?” Education Week, Sept. 8, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3xrc4ec.

[87] “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota's 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration,” op. cit.

[88] Chris Kahn, “Biden leads Trump nationally by 9 points, with suburbs focused on coronavirus, not crime: Reuters/Ipsos Poll,” Reuters, Sept. 16, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yxq6khx3.

[89] Jennifer Schuessler, “Mellon Foundation to Spend $250 Million to Reimagine Monuments,” The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y3wepry2.

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About the Author

Reed Karaim, a freelance writer in Tucson, Ariz., has written for The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, Smithsonian, American Scholar and other publications. He is the winner of the Robin Goldstein Award for Outstanding Regional Reporting and other journalism honors. He is also the author of two novels, the most recent of which, The Winter in Anna, published by W. W. Norton & Co., is set at a small-town weekly newspaper. He is a graduate of North Dakota State University in Fargo.

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