No Common Ground

Karen L. Cox's short volume offers a clear-eyed and thoughtful guide to a significant element in the polarized and potent history of Confederate memory. The book traces the changing meaning of Confederate monuments across the South between the Civil War and today, utilizing multiple perspectives and drawing on pertinent case studies. In her reading, the monuments are definitively characterized as “weapons in the larger arsenal of white supremacy, artifacts of Jim Crow not unlike the ‘whites only’ signs that declared black southerners to be second-class citizens” (p. 3). As Cox points out, the elite women's organizations operating earlier in the postwar South seldom if ever identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War: their language was cloaked in states' rights and the mythology of the Lost Cause that they helped transmit. From the 1890s forward, southern white men built monuments in greater numbers, moving their sites from cemeteries to prominent public locations where their larger-than-life presence helped enforce Jim Crow–era white supremacy. After W. E. B. Du Bois visited the South in 1931, he observed that the monuments should be more truthfully inscribed, “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery” (p. 67). Ordinary African Americans also recognized Confederate memorialization as part of southern whites' efforts to subvert and disfranchise them. Cox quotes Mamie Garvin Fields, who observed of the John C. Calhoun memorial erected in 1887 in Charleston, South Carolina, “I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through that statue” (p. 61). Local African Americans did all they could to deface the Calhoun statue, forcing its supporters to install a replacement in 1896, placing it on an eighty-foot-high pedestal far out of reach. It was finally removed in June 2020 by unanimous vote of the Charleston City Council

Archaeology · Collective memory · Economic Justice · Elite · Genealogy · Historiography · Meaning (existential · Memorialization · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Racism · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation · White supremacy · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Classics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Psychology

• From obscurity to national icon

  Christopher Lynch, Christopher S Lynch•American Nineteenth Century History•2023

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• Confederate Monuments and Anti-Black Stereotypes in the U.S. South

  Open Access•Heather A O’connell•Sociology of Race and Ethnicity•2024

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