Yesterday
The Times published an article titled:
“What Should Happen to Confederate Statues?” Among its remarks were the following:
Many
Confederate statues being debated today did not originate during the
Civil War era, when Southerners built obelisks in cemeteries and other
tributes with themes of mourning. The towering figures of individual
soldiers and monuments in public squares generally came later,
historians say, during the rise of Jim Crow laws and subsequently during
a backlash against desegregation.
“That
is when you are simultaneously seeing the dedication of these
monuments,” said Christy Coleman, the chief executive of the American
Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va. “They are not separate things. They
are a reassertion of the ideal.”
The
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) originated that bogus narrative when
they released the chart below. While it documents that the vast
majority of the “towering figures of individual soldiers and monuments
in public squares” were erected between 1900 and 1920, the SPLC falsely
attributes the surge to white supremacy and Jim Crow. Only someone
mentally imprisoned by political correctness could reach such a
conclusion for four reasons.
First,
and foremost, the period coincided with the war’s semi-centennial when
veterans were dying off. A twenty-one year old who went to war in 1861
was sixty years old in 1900 and eighty in 1920.
Second, the same factor
caused the number of Union soldier statues erected to swell during the
same era. Presumably, Jim Crow and white supremacy cannot explain the
Union statue-building. Third, the South was too impoverished for decades
after the war to financially afford memorials like those that
Northerners had been building for years in honor of their Civil War
heroes. Notwithstanding its population growth, the South did not recover
to its of pre-war economic activity level until 1900.
Fourth, Jim Crow
was not isolated to 1900 – 1920. It extended for years on either side of
the interval.
When
The Times attributes
the second minor surge of Confederate monument building during the
1960s to “a backlash against segregation” it overlooks the fact that the
early 1960s coincided with the Civil War Centennial. Although the
United States Post Office issued five Civil War commemorative stamps
between 1961 and 1965, only an imprisoned mind could believe that the
Office was motivated by “a backlash against segregation.”
