Ever wonder why southern leaders are often loathe to remove symbols of the Confederacy? I have. Via Kevin Drum and Vox comes this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the history of Confederacy symbols, and I found this bit quite interesting:
4. There were two major periods in which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked — the first two decades of the 20th century and during the civil rights movement.
Southerners began honoring the Confederacy with statues and other symbols almost immediately after the Civil War. The first Confederate Memorial Day, for example, was dreamed up by the wife of a Confederate soldier in 1866. That same year, Jefferson Davis laid the cornerstone of the Confederate Memorial Monument in a prominent spot on the state Capitol grounds in Montgomery, Alabama. There has been a steady stream of dedications in the 150 years since that time.
But two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols.
The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.
The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.
And so, as Kevin Drum observes, these symbols of the Confederacy are not memorials, but rather visible symbols of an institution which had, at one time, enslaved Americans based on their color – and threatened to continue to exert its “superiority” through violence. It’s all about intimidation, and the flag plays a part in it.
I, like most everyone I assume, was not aware that the monuments didn’t really start going up until the South felt the need to enforce its privilege. Pride? Stubbornness? Something totally foreign to me? I dunno.
