Nearly 100 Confederate Monuments Were Toppled Last Year. What Happened to Them?

It’s been a long time since I sat in an American history class, but what I remember of my education in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1980s and ’90s is how much of it was not fact, but myth.

I was taught that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights—a concept that seemed plausibly defensible to a kid—and that “our side” had its own heroes and its own stories worth remembering. Several of my relatives who live in north Florida still fly the Confederate flag on their boats and paste Stars and Bars stickers on their trucks. Some of them wear it on T-shirts, claiming, of course, “heritage not hate.” But to me, what the Confederate flag celebrates is Southerners’ long tradition of lying to ourselves about the past.

Some of the most obvious, in-your-face lies are in the huge physical reminders—the monuments, markers, and signs venerating the Confederate dead. Most of these monuments didn’t go up immediately following the Civil War. They first appeared in the 1890s as part of the backlash to Reconstruction. A second wave took place in the 1950s and ’60s during the civil rights movement. These weren’t coincidences; as Clint Smith writes in his book How the Word Is Passed, monuments to the Confederacy were part of “an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded.”