“I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry.” This is a sentence that can be read in the handwritten jailhouse diary of Dylann Roof, the alleged white supremacist who went to a church in Charleston, SC and shot and killed nine African-American worshippers in 2015. Roof had stated that his intention was to ignite a “race war”. This controversy over Confederate monuments, and the resulting tragic events, recently sparked attention across the U.S. This controversy is important because it is dividing us as a nation and making the American lifestyle uncomfortable for many people, no matter which side they may be on. The division falls into two sides: One side believes that Confederate monuments are integral to our heritage, while the other sees them as representative of an oppressive past.
Confederate monuments celebrate Southern heroes and leaders and originate from the American Civil War that was fought between the North and South from 1861-1865. The war was a result of a major socio-economic division between the North and the South, particularly over the right to pursue a way of life that endorsed slavery and states’ rights. The Southern people were known as Confederates, and this resulted in the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments. During the turn of the 20th century, the North had won the war and was focused on moving on, while the South was stuck in poverty that would persist for years to come. Erecting
statues and naming streets and other public places after southern heroes was a way to look back on an “idealized past”.
Although built because of the Civil War, most of the monuments are a lot newer than one might think. There are roughly 700 Confederate monuments in the U.S. and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these monuments are spread over 31 states plus Washington, D.C.. This list clearly exceeds the 11 Confederate states that seceded. Mark Elliott, a history professor at UNC Greensboro, said that most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s ending. Rather, the monuments that were erected during that time were to mourn soldiers who had died. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation”, Elliott says. These new monuments were not to mourn dead soldiers. They were used to glorify Confederate leaders, including General Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Many earlier monuments were placed in cemeteries, while these new ones were situated prominently in public places, such as in front of state buildings. The Civil Rights Movement provoked the start of spreading Confederate symbols in other ways. “In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag; and in 1962, South Carolina placed the flag atop its capitol building.” (Little, 2017).
The main players in this issue are all Americans across the country. On one side, many Americans, particularly those in the South, believe the history behind these monuments is very important to their heritage and “Southern pride”. Many people have argued that these monuments are historical and that history cannot be rewritten. On the other side, many
Americans see these monuments as being built on the vestiges of the Civil War, which included the hatred of the North, and the embrace of racism and white supremacy. Due to a history that involved a war fought over maintaining a southern way of life that included slavery, many African-Americans and other minorities feel uncomfortable about these historical monuments because they feel these monuments celebrate a formerly oppressive way of life.
The controversy surrounding this debate was particularly enhanced in 2015 when a white man named Dylann Roof went to a church in Charleston, South Carolina and murdered nine African-American worshippers, including the church’s pastor. After the murders, multiple pictures of Roof were exposed where he is standing with the Confederate flag. Roof later confessed that he intended to incite a race war. This crime reignited a long-running debate within the U.S. and caused the removal of many Confederate monuments from public property, along with the Confederate flag. Six months after the event, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of six Confederate monuments: statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and an obelisk known as the “Liberty Place Monument” which honors a violent uprising against the Reconstruction Government of the South. City officials have also taken down monuments in Baltimore and Durham, NC, and many cities are calling on elected officials to do the same.
Recently, a tragic event occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia after the state decided to remove a Confederate monument of Gen. Robert E. Lee. There was a rally of white nationalists who were holding a “Unite the Right” march protesting the removal of the monument, along with a group of counter protestors which consisted of groups such as Black Lives Matter and
Antifa. During the protest, an alleged white supremacist supporter named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of counter protestors and hit another car, which consequently killed Heather D. Heyer. Heyer is said to have been “a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised and was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices.” (Astor, Caron & Victor, 2017) This was deemed a hate crime and has stirred up further controversy across the country. When Reuters took a poll in August 2017, they found that 54% of adults said Confederate monuments “should remain in all public spaces”, 27% said they “should be removed from all public spaces”, and 19% said they “don’t know”. The responses were split along racial and party lines, with whites and Republicans strongly supportive of preservation and Democrats and minorities more likely to support removal.
There are two primary sides to this controversy. On one side, many people feel that Confederate monuments should be removed while other people feel these monuments should be preserved. Those who want these monuments removed argue that these monuments support an ideology of hate and racism that was used in the 1800s. Stonewall Jackson’s great-great-grandsons recently wrote a letter to the mayor of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. “We are writing today to ask for the removal of his statue, as well as the removal of all Confederate statues from Monument Avenue,” they wrote in an open letter published in Slate. “They are overt symbols of racism and white supremacy, and the time is long overdue for them to depart from public display.” Also, Robert E. Lee V, the great-great-grandson of the
Confederate general, made a similar statement. When speaking to The Washington Post, he said, “if it can avoid any days like this past Saturday in Charlottesville, then take them down today.”
Many people on this side of the controversy do not have a problem with the monuments themselves, but where the monuments are placed. Gordon Reed, an American historian and law professor, argues that removing a statue does not mean we are erasing history. “We’re always going to know who Robert E. Lee is,” she said. “The question is where these monuments are. The public sphere should be comfortable for everybody.” It is also important that these monuments tell the true history of what the Confederacy stood for. Lee and Gaske consider how existing Civil War monuments can still play an important role in promoting public awareness of Civil War heritage. They conclude that monuments should be accompanied by a broader interpretation through markers, museums, and heritage sites that “provide the public the information they need to better understand the historical contexts of these monuments” including “controversial or unpleasant facts” (Rush, 1004).
Historians have thoroughly documented the process of selective memory in recent years. “The centrality of slavery as a cause of the Civil War was written out of the collective memory of the war….it happened through a concerted effort to first forget the causes of the war, then to focus on the war as an effort to protect the homeland.” (Brophy, 126) Brophy explains that if the memory of the Civil War is that the cause was slavery, those who fought against the Union would seem immoral. However, if the war was thought of as fought over political
self-determination, home rule, and about honorable people fighting for their homeland, then we would have a different sense of the war. While certain people may want to remember their Confederate ancestors in cemeteries and at battle sites, many neo-Confederates’ efforts to commemorate their version of the Civil War era are drawn from, and justified in their arguments by, the Lost Cause version of history and similarly, the contemporary narrative of Southern Heritage (Winsboro, 225).
On the other side of the debate are those who do not want to see these monuments removed. Many people on this side argue that we cannot erase the history of this country; it is heritage not hate, they follow the Lost Cause ideology, and they feel that the removal of these monuments will affect their Southern pride. Those who protest for the preservation of these monuments assert that they are integral to Southern heritage and reflect a part of history – good or bad. They can also be used as educational tools for generations to come to help understand the complex history of our country.
Representatives from several southern states embrace this thinking. South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Tennessee all have Heritage Protection Acts that restrict the removal of any monument located on public property. Alabama and Arkansas are also considering proposed legislation on the topic. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has made several announcements regarding his opinion about the topic. Days after the attack in Charlottesville, President Trump Tweeted: “Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns
and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!” President Trump is not alone in his argument. Joseph McGill, the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, is in support of Confederate monuments staying on the landscape. He feels that Confederate soldiers were defending a way of life that was passed down to them and if we remove these monuments, then we would also have to remove the monuments of their fathers and their fathers before them. Within this process, we will eventually get to our Founding Fathers, some of whom were slave owners. “How would Washington, D.C., look without the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial?”, he argues.
The Lost Cause ideology is responsible for the creation of divided memories of the Civil War and emancipation. “One memory is of forgiveness and forgetting and another is of change and equality” (Burkhardt, 2011). The Lost Cause ideology is one that is used to defend supporters of the Confederacy. This ideology is a sense of southern defense of the war, where people on the side of the Confederacy believe that they were defending a southern way of life, and refuse to see slavery as a reason for the war. Commonly held beliefs were that the war was fought over states' rights and not slavery, that slavery was a humane institution that offered to teach Christianity to African "savages," and that the war was a just cause in the eyes of God. This ideology characterized the south as “a region victimized by Northern aggression” (Burkhardt, 2011). John H. Reagan, a former Confederate cabinet member, said that ex-Confederates were not primarily responsible for starting African slavery and were not responsible for the existence of the “Great War”. The Lost Cause ideology also projected the
belief that the Founding Fathers left the question of slavery unanswered and the South sacrificed itself to find the answer. These monuments played a major role in spreading this ideology.
While the South statistically is the most racially mixed region in the country, this fact does not mean that the relationship between whites and blacks is substantive. David Goldfield, the author of Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History, argues that the “prevailing race relations in the South today are actually none at all… the South is still fighting the Civil War”, in part because blacks and whites cannot productively talk about the Southern past. In Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, Tony Horwitz explains the problem this way: “Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and irreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.”
Other countries could provide examples in how to go about the situation. Confederate symbols are uniquely American, yet other countries have had the same problem dealing with these issues. Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance says it has removed every one of the 1,320 statues of Lenin throughout the country, The Times of London reports, and destroyed another 1,069 Soviet-era monuments. “The removal of the statues is part of a ban on Soviet-era symbols that was signed into law by President Poroshenko in 2015”, the newspaper explains. Additionally, a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes became the subject of student protests at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2015. After a month of demonstrations, the mainly white university council voted to take down the statue. "It marks a significant … shift where the country deals with its ugly past in a positive and constructive way," a spokesman told the wire service. Germany also has had similar issues. Most of the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, but Berlin preserved a section of the wall, creating “the longest-open air gallery in the world.” Elsewhere in Berlin, Adolf Hitler's underground bunker is marked only by a small sign outside a parking lot. "One reason for not preserving Hitler's bunker was that it was feared that the site might become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis; a place of violence and shameless celebration of a history that should be shameful," NPR's Maggie Penman reports.
Lloyd F. Bitzer’s (1968) summary of The Rhetorical Situation suggests there are three constituent elements in any rhetorical situation: an exigence, an audience, and constraints. (pg. 6-7) The exigence in this case is the controversy over Confederate monuments maintained in public places. Confederate monuments have been controversial in the U.S. for many years, a fact that has divided the country in two. The main issue is the following question: Are Confederate monuments integral to our heritage or built upon the foundation of an oppressive past? The audience for this issue is my fellow classmates. I believe they should care about this issue because the state of our country will not improve if we do not come together and see eye-to-eye. The constraints on this issue are the fact that we have different beliefs, attitudes, and motives as a nation, and this is what so bitterly divides us at this moment in time.
As we can see, the controversy over Confederates monuments has been a long-running debate and has reached a point where both sides are very angry at each other, which in turn has led to violent and dangerous confrontations. Every American is impacted by this controversy because it concerns our history as a country, and whether we believe the past is so important that we will allow it divide us now. The history of this controversy is important because it provides a foundation for one side of the argument to accuse the other. As we have seen in these recent events, there are great risks at this moment in time of not resolving this issue. The country is at odds with whether we should maintain these monuments as historical symbols and risk offending people who feel threatened by their symbolism or remove them entirely and risk losing a part of our history. The significance of this situation is the fact that our country has an underlying issue that has always been there – racism – and these recent events are forcing it back to the surface.