Reply to Removing and Renaming Confederate Statues, Schools, Streets, etc: Why?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The Confederacy lasted 4 years, that’s hardly a deep routed history. It’s all about glorifying the old southern white lifestyle built on the backs of salves. Also according to the news this morning the streets in Alexandria that are named after confederate leaders were named in the 1950’s. What was the purpose of that? Go back to the previous names like Water Street etc.[/quote]

It was in direct response to the civil rights movement and Brown vs. Board. [/quote]
It had more to do with the advancement and spread of Lost Cause mythology which predates the civil rights movement by several decades. [/quote]

DP: Of course Civil Rights efforts didn’t just start in the ‘60s or with Brown.  [/quote]
The modern civil rights movement is generally thought to have begun in the late 40s with the return of Black GIs from WWII, among other things. Lost Cause dates back to the end of the Civil War and was spread by southern newspapers. It really began to take hold in earnest in the 1880s/90s with the establishment of neo-confederacy organizations and publication of academic scholarship. The outcome was that almost all of the confederate statues in Richmond were erected before 1930. So no, the erection of these statues was not a reaction to the civil rights movement. [/quote]

Actually, the early 1900’s included quite a bit of work and even progress in the area of civil rights — to the point where Woodrow Wilson deliberately intensified segregation throughout the Federal government and in DC.  At least some confederate statues were put up at this point — yes, before 1930, in response to earlier successful efforts to gain civil rights, some of which were related to the return of Black soldiers from WWI.

I can’t speak to the Lost Cause side of things, or your dating of the “modern” civil rights movement. I do think, though, that it’s fair to say that support for the statues was —and is — correlated with civil rights gains. Perhaps Richmond followed a different pattern?

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A majority of confederate monuments were put up between 1900 and 1920, [b]in connection with a big push to suppress blacks[/b].  They weren't about preserving history, they were about sending a message.  Many of the confederate monuments were cheaply mass-produced, and many were erected in towns that didn't even have much of a meaningful connection to the Confederacy.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/[/quote]
Sorry but while obviously they were racist and it was an era of lynching, the driving factor was Lost Cause mythology.
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/06/how-the-lost-cause-myth-led-to-confederate-monument-fever/
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