“This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood,” reads a sign erected this summer alongside a Confederate statue in Georgia.
“This monument … fostered a culture of segregation by implying that public spaces and public memory belonged to whites,” reads another.
Declares a third: “This ignores the segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans.”
“It’s happening in all sorts of places,” said Adam Domby, a history professor at the College of Charleston who is writing a book about Confederate monuments. “Still, it’s clearly in many cases being used as a stopgap because the laws prohibit removing them.”
Atlanta installed markers next to four of the city’s most prominent Confederate monuments in August. Officials in Decatur, Ga., placed a sign near a Confederate monument this month. Come October, three such markers will go up in downtown Franklin, Tenn. Cities including Savannah, Ga., and Richmond are weighing proposals to contextualize their monuments in a similar manner, according to the Atlanta History Center, which maintains an online database tracking the fate of Confederate monuments.
At least seven states passed legislation in recent years to protect their Confederate monuments, a wave that began around the 2000s and includes a law passed as recently as 2017. Such statutes, which vary in language but generally prohibit removal of the monuments, are in effect in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
There are roughly 1,700 Confederate monuments still standing across the United States as of 2019, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most were erected between the 1890s and the 1920s — during the rise of Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of African Americans — and more appeared in the late 1940s in response to the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces and the Supreme Court’s decision to integrate schools, according to James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.
“These statues are there because groups of white Southerners wanted to have a certain view of history legitimized: a view that bolstered white supremacy,” Grossman said.
Though many African Americans have disliked and protested against the monuments since their installation, Grossman said, opposition to Confederate symbols exploded into the mainstream following deadly racial violence in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and in Charlottesville in 2017. Towns and cities across the country have been struggling to decide how to handle their statues ever since.