The Washington Post / Getty Images

       After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

      Perspective: The Confederate Monument Debate

      There has been a renewed debate recently about what, if anything, to do with Confederate monuments. There are more than 700 of them in 31 states across the United States, in public spaces ranging from city squares to state capitols and courthouse grounds. Most of the monuments were erected decades after the Civil War ended, during the height of the so-called Jim Crow era of racial segregation from the 1890s through the 1950s. Rather than honoring Confederate soldiers who died in the war, as most monuments did in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, these glorified leaders of the Confederacy.¹ Critics view them as symbols of white supremacy designed to defy civil rights. New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu agreed and ordered four such monuments to be removed in 2017.

      One of the four New Orleans monuments that were removed did not even directly commemorate the Civil War. Instead, the Liberty Place Monument, erected in 1891, commemorated an 1874 Reconstruction-era uprising led by white supremacists. An inscription added to the monument in 1932 hailed that uprising as an important step toward the results of the 1876 elections, which—as the inscription put it—“recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.”² The other three monuments that were removed in 2017 honored leaders of the Confederacy. One was a bronze statue of Jefferson Davis (the only president of the Confederacy), which had been dedicated in 1911 at a “whites only” ceremony on the 50th anniversary of Davis’s inauguration. Children wearing red, white, and blue formed a living Confederate battle flag and sang “Dixie” at the event. Another was a bronze statue of Confederate General G.T. Beauregard on horseback, unveiled in 1915 (the same year that the Hollywood film Birth of a Nation glorified the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan). A time capsule in the giant marble base of the statue, put in place in 1913, contained Confederate flags, currency, medals, and a photo of Jefferson Davis.³ The final monument (and the oldest) was a bronze statue, dedicated in 1884, of Confederate General Robert E. Lee standing high atop a 60-foot column, facing north with his arms crossed. Debate about whether to remove similar monuments in Virginia drew national attention and led to violence soon thereafter.

      The 1932 inscription on a Confederate memorial in New Orleans hailed the end of Reconstruction as recognition of white supremacy in the South.

      Although many aspects of the Civil War, the slavery issue, and race relations are distinctly American, many nations around the world have confronted similar questions about how to deal with monuments to former regimes. Understanding how they have dealt with the issue may offer guidance as we continue to struggle with how to resolve this contentious debate. In the aftermath of World War II, for example, the newly created Federal Republic of Germany (what we came to think of as “West Germany”) banned the swastika, the Nazi party, and even publication of Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, and systematically removed Nazi-era memorials. In the years to come, it enacted laws against hate speech (Volksverhetzung—literally “incitement of the people”) and Holocaust denial, which remained in place after the reunification of East and West Germany. Thus, neo-Nazi marches are legal in the U.S., but not in Germany. No memorials to World War II generals grace the public squares of Germany nor is it legal to display the Nazi flag (though it is in the U.S.). Even Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, where he killed himself in 1945, has been paved over for fear that it would be treated as a shrine for neo-Nazis. On the other hand, memorials to the victims of the Nazi regime have been erected—from the massive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (mere steps away from the Hitler bunker) to tiny brass cobblestones called stolpersteine (“stumbling blocks”) on streets throughout Germany, providing brief biographical details of the men, women, and children deported from those locations to concentration camps during the war.⁴

      Brass markers called stolpersteine across Germany mark the last official address of thousands of victims of the Holocaust and are engraved with biographical details.

      ODD ANDERSEN

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