![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s why I often speak to community groups, and also why I decided to write No Common Ground. Even when a cross-section of Southerners petition for removal, they’re prevented from doing so because these state legislatures have usurped local control through so-called heritage protection acts.Īs a historian of the American South, I feel a deep responsibility to share the long history of these statues alongside the stories of racial injustice with which they are associated. Much of it is based on propagating myths that the South fought the Civil War to protect states’ rights (it was to preserve the institution of slavery) and that removing a monument is an erasure of history (it isn’t). GOP-dominated state assemblies have passed draconian legislation as part of Republicans’ culture war against Black Lives Matter and racial progress more generally. That has changed significantly in the past 25 years, and especially since 2015, as states across the region, including my home state, have passed laws to protect Confederate monuments as part of an alleged dedication to “Southern heritage.” Now, after a lifetime of studying Southern history, this makes more sense to me, because in the 1990s, Lost Cause sympathies were far more entrenched the deeper into the South one traveled. I’d grown up in Greensboro, N.C., in the 1970s, and I don’t recall such attention to Confederate memory there as I found when I moved to Mississippi to attend graduate school. ![]()
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