Confederate monuments and memorials

Monument building and dedications Memorials have been erected on public spaces (including on courthouse grounds) either at public expense or funded by private organizations and donors. Numerous private memorials have also been erected. (SPLC), by year of establishment. Most of these were put up either during the Jim Crow era or during the Civil Rights Movement. These two periods also coincided with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War. According to Smithsonian Magazine, "Confederate monuments aren't just heirlooms, the artifacts of a bygone era. Instead, American taxpayers are still heavily investing in these tributes today." Nevertheless, monuments and memorials continued to be dedicated shortly after the American Civil War. Before 1890, most were erected in cemeteries as memorials to soldiers who died in the war. Many more monuments were dedicated in the years after 1890, when Congress established the first National Military Park at Chickamauga and Chattanooga, and by the turn of the 20th century, five battlefields from the Civil War had been preserved: Chickamauga-Chattanooga, Antietam, Gettysburg, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. At Vicksburg National Military Park, more than 95% of the park's monuments were erected in the first eighteen years after the park was established in 1899. But monuments began appearing in public places with the emergence of the Jim Crow South, coinciding with the nadir of American race relations. According to the American Historical Association (AHA), the erection of Confederate monuments during the early 20th century was "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South." According to the AHA, memorials to the Confederacy erected during this period "were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life." A later wave of monument building coincided with the civil rights movement, and according to the AHA "these symbols of white supremacy are still being invoked for similar purposes." According to Smithsonian Magazine, "far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans." Another historian, Karen L. Cox, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has written that the monuments are "a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era", and that "the whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy". They were erected without the consent or even input of Southern African Americans, who remembered the Civil War far differently, and who had no interest in honoring those who fought to keep them enslaved. According to Civil War historian Judith Giesberg, professor of history at Villanova University, "White supremacy is really what these statues represent." Some monuments were also meant to beautify cities as part of the City Beautiful movement, although this was secondary. In a June 2018 speech, Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. of Virginia Tech said the monuments were not a "Jim Crow signal of defiance" and referred to the current trend to dismantle or destroy them as an "age of idiocy" motivated by "elements hell-bent on tearing apart unity that generations of Americans have painfully constructed." Katrina Dunn Johnson, Curator of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, states that "thousands of families throughout the country were unable to reclaim their soldier's remains--many never learned their loved ones' exact fate on the battlefield or within the prison camps. The psychological impact of such a devastating loss cannot be underestimated when attempting to understand the primary motivations behind Southern memorialization." Many Confederate monuments were dedicated in the former Confederate states and border states in the decades following the Civil War, in many instances by Ladies Memorial Associations, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), United Confederate Veterans (UCV), Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Heritage Preservation Association, and other memorial organizations. Other Confederate monuments are located on Civil War battlefields. Many Confederate monuments are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, either separately or as contributing objects within listings of courthouses or historic districts. Art historians Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson argued, in Monuments to the Lost Cause, that the majority of Confederate monuments, of the type they define, were "commissioned by white women, in hope of preserving a positive vision of antebellum life." In the late nineteenth century, technological innovations in the granite and bronze industries helped reduce costs and made monuments more affordable for small towns. Companies looking to capitalize on this opportunity often sold nearly identical copies of monuments to both the North and South. Another wave of monument construction coincided with the Civil Rights Movement and the American Civil War Centennial. At least thirty-two Confederate monuments were dedicated between 2000 and 2017, including at least 7 re-dedications. Scholarly study Scholarly studies of the monuments began in the 1980s. In 1983 John J. Winberry published a study which was based on data from the work of R.W. Widener. ==The Monument Movement==