In 2016, the $outhern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) released the “Whose
Heritage?” report on the Confederate symbols in the United States. This
report had one thesis: The Confederate monuments, memorials, and
namesakes were erected ruing the “Jim Crow” era to vindicate white
supremacy without consideration of other factors.
[1] The
report was based on no documented sources, but the charting of monuments
and namesakes was used to make a claim the rise of Confederate
monuments were attributed to “Jim Crow” racism. Thus, the fallacy was
born, an fallacy that is easily refuted by even a cursory examination of
readily available source material.
First,
many Northern states had Jim Crow laws with New York considered the Northern
capital of Jim Crow.
[2]
In fact, one can make a case—and many did—that Northern attitudes in regard
to blacks were harsher than Southerners who had nearly a three-hundred-year history
of race relations.
Jim Crow and racism
were not isolated to a single region.
