Confederate monuments are about more than just the Confederacy (AL)

Last edited Fri May 6, 2016, 12:20 PM - Edit history (1)

May 05, 2016 at 6:00 PM
By Jackson Prather

... Like the Confederate battle flag, monuments have a dynamic meaning that is not fixed or absolute. Many Confederate monuments, such as Birmingham's controversial Linn Park monument (1906), were constructed decades after the Civil War during a period of intense political and racial tension. These monuments say as much about the Confederacy as they do about Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South ...

Governor George S. Houston and the Redeemers won on a campaign of white supremacy and home rule. Over time, Redeemers instituted systematic disenfranchisement and discrimination of black Alabamians through Jim Crow and codified it with the Alabama Constitution of 1901, the same outdated document that we vote to amend every time we go to the ballot box.

At the same time the Redeemers were excluding blacks and some poor whites from public life, Confederate monuments were being constructed in front of county courthouses, in parks, and in other public places around the state. Ladies Memorial Associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were a driving force in constructing monuments, working with the state legislature to raise money and build monuments like the Confederate Memorial Monument (1898) at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.

The commemoration movement was about more than honoring their fallen sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers. These groups helped forge the Lost Cause ideology that proclaims the righteousness of the Confederacy, the valiance of its soldiers, the greatness of its leaders, and the denial of slavery as a cause of the Civil War. It took hold after the war amid a context of utter destruction, gripping poverty, and racial violence. According to historian Thavolia Glymph, the Lost Cause became so endemic that it passed "off legend as history so successfully that the legend came to be remembered as the history." The South produced the Lost Cause and the North accepted it, allowing the two sections to reunite at the expense of race relations ...


http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/05/confederate_monuments_are_abou.html
(On edit, added link)