NC: Commemorating Faithful Slaves, Mammies, and Black Confederates Part I

 

Hawfields Presbyterian Church Slave Monument

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white Southerners engaged in a frenzy of commemoration and monument building. In addition to honoring Confederate soldiers and the Lost Cause, they also sought to commemorate African American "mammies" and "faithful slaves." Anxious to refute any suggestion that slavery had required the dehumanization of African Americans, white Southerners recalled their enslaved caretakers as willing "servants" who had been content, even grateful, for their lot in life. 

These commemorative gestures, which only hinted at the complex relationship that existed between slaveholders and slaves, served to legitimize white privilege and inform blacks of their "proper" place during the Jim Crow era. Simultaneously, some African Americans exploited the image of the "faithful slave" by pointedly reminding whites who railed against black criminality and fecklessness that blacks had been trustworthy in the past and, in fact, remained so. Even today, recent efforts to commemorate so-called "Black Confederates," or slaves who allegedly fought on behalf of the Confederacy, demonstrate the continuing contests over acknowledging the historical complexities of American slavery.

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