jefferson let them stand undisturbed as monuments

SPLC notes that 27 of these 109 schools named for prominent Confederates are majority black.Ĭonfederate lionization manifests itself in other ways. Several years ago, a school board in Jacksonville, Florida, removed his name from a high school-which hadn’t been integrated until 1971, and then only after a federal court order. A cavalry general and probable war criminal, Forrest was the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest is a particularly appalling choice. Beauregard and Nathan Bedford Forrest (seven each). Other common namesakes include Jackson (15 schools), Jefferson Davis (13), and P.G.T.

Lee, the great beneficiary of the late-20th century “Lost Cause” myth, is the most common honoree, with 52 schools named for him. Those schools are perhaps some of the most egregious examples-unlike monuments to the local war dead, for example, they go out of their way to celebrate the rebellion in a venue otherwise unconnected to the war. David addresses readers defending the monuments.(Illinois, the land of Lincoln, has none.) A handful of symbols bear Confederate dedications in Northern States, including New York, which furnished more soldiers to the Union war effort and saw more of them die than any other state, and California, where schools in San Diego and Long Beach are named for Robert E. Texas, with 178, comes next, followed by Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi.īut a surprising number of sites are not in the South. That makes some sense, since Richmond served as the Confederate capital for most of the war the commonwealth hosted more battles than any other and the Confederacy’s two most famous generals, Lee and Jackson, were both Virginians. The greatest collection is in Virginia, with 223. In fact, the upper South is dotted with rebel symbols. Nor is this a case of the Deep South being somehow behind the times, as opposed to their more forward-thinking neighbors. It will come as little surprise that the greatest number of these sites are in the states of the Confederacy, and to a lesser extent in border states. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it.Įstablishing monuments to Confederate war heroes, in turn, celebrates men who committed treason and sought to break the nation apart in the name of slavery. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this act-it endorses it. An entire people are poorer for his action. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree-the heritage of white supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. The day after Dylann Roof committed the massacre in Charleston, my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out the moral case for removing the flag and, with it, other Confederate sites: Lee and Stonewall Jackson that looms hundreds of feet at Stone Mountain, Georgia. They range from East Wenatchee, Washington, to Miami, Florida, and take in everything from a workaday obelisk in Anniston, Alabama, that commemorates Major John Pelham, to the bas-relief of President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Relying on federal, state, and local databases, the often-controversial liberal group took a tally of Confederate-related sites around the country and found more than 1,500 in 31 states. For all the high-profile removals, there remains a stunning number of Confederate Civil War monuments, memorials, and namesakes in public spaces around the country, as a new inventory taken by the Southern Poverty Law Center makes clear. Stop Training Police Like They’re Joining the Military Rosa Brooksīut as Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army discovered, there’s a long road between reversing momentum and actually winning the war.

Jefferson let them stand undisturbed as monuments