Data manipulated by $PLC on Confederate monument timeline in order to buttress false assumption?

Monument to Jefferson Davis (1808-1889), the first and only president of the Confederacy: The tallest poured in place concrete obelisk in the world.

In the wake of the current controversy over Confederate monuments, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has created a timeline that has made its way around the worldwide web like wildfire. 

It purports to show that two spikes in the building of the monuments coincide with occurences of racially-charged historical eras, such as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the Civil Rights Era.  The timeline has been published on websites such as Mother Jones and Daily Kos, and has been endlessly tweeted and re-tweeted on Twitter.  The premise that it rests on – that racism and white supremacy were the driving motivation of the building of Confederate monuments – has been blindly accepted with, evidently, little or no critical thinking.

Below is SPLC’s timeline as found on Mother Jones.  As can be seen, it alleges that a major spike in Confederate monument building happened during an era of lynching and KKK resurgence that occurred between the years of around 1900 and 1915.

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