No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox

Reviewed by: Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments by Roger C. Hartley Melissa Ooten Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments. By Roger C. Hartley. ( Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 257. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-169-7; cloth, $89.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-168-0.) In Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments, legal scholar Roger C. Hartley has produced a much-welcomed addition to our understanding of the work and harm inflicted on us all by the landscape of Confederate monuments. Hartley's premise frames Confederate monuments as built for twin purposes: to valorize the Confederate soldier and to promote white supremacy. Unfortunately, valor is clearly rendered, while the workings of white supremacy are sometimes obscured, allowing supporters to portray these monuments benignly. Hartley's research builds particularly on the studies of monument and memory by Kirk Savage and W. Fitzhugh Brundage and on Grace Elizabeth Hale's study of twentieth-century whiteness. He relies heavily on secondary sources, and not surprisingly, as a lawyer, he cites dozens of applicable court cases. Hartley divides his book into three parts. In the first and most robust section, he interrogates three common rationales used to argue against Confederate statues: they do not tell a "complete history," they establish a "warping of history," and they center a "racial reckoning" (pp. 4, 5, 6). He notes that no monument tells a complete history, as that is not its intention. Instead, monuments engage memory; in this case, Confederate monuments sought to establish a collective white memory to suppress basic rights for African Americans while also erasing them from public landscapes infused with power. Although the monuments also warp history, that argument hinges on the intent of those who erected the monuments and allows Confederate supporters to dismiss the argument as no longer relevant. The racial-reckoning approach concentrates on the contemporary impact of the monuments. Hartley details examples of ongoing institutionalized racism to show why the argument that these monuments continue to harm African Americans is the most salient in generating successful action to remove them. Part 2 evaluates the options available to decenter the monuments. He firmly dismisses destruction, despite noting how it has been a common practice throughout history. Contextualization, he notes, is politically extremely difficult, as anyone who followed the attempts to add contextualization to the monuments that once lined Richmond's Monument Avenue will know. He favors relocation. The book's third section is a vital legal explication of legal barriers to communities' removal of monuments. While stellar in its stated purpose, the work would benefit from better centering Black resistance to white supremacy throughout. While Hartley includes [End Page 209] African American communities in a few distinct sections, too often he frames them as being acted upon, although they often resisted the further installation of white supremacist practices and policies at every turn. For example, he notes that on segregated railways white people "received a powerful message of superiority" by riding in their exclusive cars (p. 71). But what of Black resistance? When a Richmond streetcar company imposed segregation in 1904, African Americans boycotted en masse, bankrupting the company within months. White supremacy repeatedly met Black resistance, and it surely helped produce anxious whites who erected monuments as one means of many to entrench their power even as it was frequently challenged. Hartley's conclusion thoughtfully suggests how readers might use this text as a handbook for action. He notes that any community looking to address the harm of its Confederate memorials will confront the southern heritage argument, perhaps better known as "heritage, not hate" (p. 188). Knowing how and why to confront and subvert these common arguments in ways that move conversations and actions toward racial justice is invaluable as communities across the South and beyond navigate these racial reckonings. [End Page 210] Melissa Ooten University of Richmond Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The is virtually inconceivable without sustained attention to race, yet most scholarly examinations of southern identity have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of white southerners, ignoring the experiences of other racial groups in the region, most particularly black southerners. A similar phenomenon occurs in everyday conversations about the evidenced by the well-worn habit of talking about when actually referring to white southerners. For example, most of us, at one time or another, have heard, or perhaps even said, that are racist or owned slaves. Such statements implicitly connect being southern with being white. (1) The lay and academic tendency to equate southernness and whiteness is troubling when one considers that, in today's black southerners living in the region are slightly more likely to claim a southern identity than whites are. According to polls conducted throughout the 1990s, about 78 percent of African Americans living in the region claimed to be southern, compared to 75 percent of whites. Many scholars of the South have asserted that African Americans are now starting to reclaim their southern identity after the demise of Jim Crow. Noting that African Americans are returning to the South in large numbers, historian Edward Ayers argues that for some black Americans the South may be seen as a homeland. Even so, Ayers argues that there is a different moral geography for blacks and whites in the South. Writing in 1996, he noted that black southerners did not have flags or monuments to connect them with the official South, but they were connected to the region by their own sweat and sacrifice and by places of personal meaning--certain farms, houses, and streets. (2) Today, the region's African Americans still have few monuments dedicated to the memory of their cultural contributions and sacrifices, yet black southerners' labor, and often their blood, played an important and essential role in the development of the region. In an environment characterized by brutal racial oppression, white supremacy, slavery, segregation, and violence, black southerners raised crops, built roads, labored in coal mines, raised white children, and were vital in creating an infrastructure and a way of life that supported and enabled the prosperity of many whites. The recent work by journalist Douglas A. Blackmon on the convict leasing system reminds us that the forced and exploited labor of black southerners allowed for the growth of many corporations that still enjoy great prosperity today. (3) Looking at the recent history of the it appears that the demise of Jim Crow has created both the opportunity and the increasing desire of black southerners to assert their own identity as southerners. We began to see a contested view of southern identity in the 1990s, as black southerners sought to remove Confederate flags from state capitals, to change state flags that incorporated the Confederate battle flag into their designs, to stop the playing of Dixie at college football and basketball games, and to challenge the use of public money for the upkeep of Confederate memorials. At the same time, cultural conflicts over the meaning of southern identity between blacks and whites have led to increasing efforts by white southerners to hold onto symbols of the Confederate past. James C. Cobb argues that identity-challenged white southerners--middle and upper-class southern whites who have become increasingly assimilated into mainstream America, but still long for and wish to hold onto their southern identity--now feel that their heritage is under siege. (4) This activism suggests that at least some black southerners are reclaiming their identity as southerners, but what do we really know about how black southerners perceive their regional identity? Do these discussions concerning black southern identity, which often take place within the realm of academia, really reflect the experiences and concerns of black southerners, or is this a case where academic analysis does not really connect with the lives and concerns of everyday folks? …

ABSTRACTThe conceptual linkages among Confederate monuments, slavery, and race suggest that Confederate monuments are relevant for explaining contemporary black–white inequality, yet we have little evidence on these relationships. I aim to further develop these possible connections. My analysis relies on a unique data set of Confederate monuments located in public spaces in the US South. I find that counties with Confederate monuments – specifically monuments inscribed with rhetoric glorifying either the soldiers as “heroes” or the cause as “pure” – have higher than expected levels of black–white poverty inequality. However, this relationship is stronger where the legacy of slavery is weaker, namely in counties with smaller historical concentrations of slaves. Confederate monuments are intertwined with a complex history, one that may continue to be reflected in the contemporary landscape of black–white inequality. The presented results are only suggestive, but they provide guidance for important avenues of future research.

Iexamine why Confederate monuments were built in public spaces in counties throughout the US South with particular attention to connections to race. I use event history analysis to examine the overall likelihood of erecting the first monument in a county while accounting for dimensions of time. The data include a comprehensive accounting of public Confederate monuments, covariates spanning 150 years, and several unique historical variables. This is the first study to assess competing explanations for the construction of Confederate monuments in a generalizable analysis. Results provide support for understanding Confederate monuments as part of a larger “memory movement.” Moreover, this movement was strongly related to the relationship between race and power within a county. However, my analyses offer limited support for viewing Confederate monuments as part of a countermovement in response to local racial tensions. Incorporating the nuances of how race relates to Confederate monuments will be valuable to future research as scholars develop an understanding of their links to contemporary society.

Commemorations of the Confederacy remain pervasive throughout the Southern U.S. Historians have long established that many of these symbols were erected during the Jim Crow era to reinforce white political dominance in public spaces. Yet, little is known about how these enduring symbols shape perceptions among people of different racial identities today. This study examines Confederate monuments where they are most prominently placed: courthouse grounds. Using an original survey experiment of Black, white, and Latino Southerners, it investigates whether the presence of a Confederate monument in front of a courthouse influences feelings of personal safety and welcomeness, as well as perceptions of the fairness of the court system. Findings reveal that a Confederate monument made Black and Latino Southerners feel less safe and welcome at the courthouse and led Black Southerners to perceive the court system as less fair toward people like them. In contrast, Confederate monuments had no overall effect on white Southerners’ perceptions of courthouses or the judicial system. These results underscore the role of contentious symbols in reinforcing inequalities in public spaces.

Reviewed by: Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments by Roger C. Hartley Jordan Brasher Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments. Roger C. Hartley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. x and 255 pp., figs., bibliog., notes, and index. $29.99 hardcover (ISBN 9781643361697). The question of what to do with Confederate monuments and why they matter socially, politically, and geographically to diverse publics and interest groups has received much attention in local, state, national, and international news media, by community organizers and activists, lay citizens, teachers, students, scholars, practitioners of law, and many others. The tragic events in Charleston in 2015, Charlottesville in 2017, and Minneapolis in 2020 have reignited decades-old public debate and controversy around Confederate landscape iconography and more recently, wider issues of commemorating enslavers and colonizers in spaces and places around the world. Understanding and challenging the "monumental harm" these memorials inflict and perpetuate is of pressing public interest, and a book examining Jim Crow era Confederate monuments within the current moment of racial reckoning is timely, presenting an opportunity to contribute to public and academic discussions around Confederate monuments and the relationship between white supremacy and Confederate memory politics in the United States. Yet, to be frank, Hartley's Monumental Harm does not meet the moment. It is underwhelming in its critique at best and at worst, implicitly condemns antiracist advocates who seek to destroy and overthrow monuments to enslavers and colonizers, especially those associated with the Confederate States of America. Although the author states that the book is "directed to scholars, students, the general reader, and all others who seek clarity regarding the role of Confederate monuments in contemporary America," the book is as much written for a conservative white legal practitioner audience as for scholars and students, whose activism and research outside the narrow constitutional law realm stand to benefit little from the analysis presented in this book. The language, theory, and ideology underpinning the writing in the book would not prove acceptable to most critical social scientists, students, and activists researching and organizing against Confederate commemorative infrastructure. Linguistically and ideologically, the book's use of terms and concepts like "non-racist" would not meet the standards of critical race scholars and activists who recognize, as [End Page 79] Angela Davis once famously noted, that "in a racist society, it is not enough to be nonracist, we must be anti-racist." This is borne out by the author's admonition to understand white Southerners' "non-racist-based views associated with the need to preserve their understanding of Southern heritage" (xiii). Arguably though, white Southerners like myself cannot ever fully tease apart white supremacy from our cultural heritage, despite our most conscious intentions. Other linguistic-ideological concerns involve the author's capitalization of the "W" in white, the use of "slave" rather than "enslaved" in reference to people held in chattel bondage prior to the end of the Civil War, and the problematic use of the "n" word fully spelled out without quotations or censorship as a white author. Whether this was a choice forced on the author by the publishing press or by their own choice is unclear given that the book provides no discussion or rationale for these linguistic-ideological choices. From a critical race-informed perspective, the book is not nearly critical enough in terms of the kinds of language and ideology the author uses. Additionally, from a theoretical perspective, the distinctions that the author draws between history and memory are not widely accepted within scholarly communities in critical memory studies or geographies of memory. The author's contention that history "reflects what is objectively provable from the record of past events" and that memory by contrast "consists of subjective representations, constructions, of reality created by those with the power and cultural authority to do so in order to influence how we think about some historic event" (19) fails to acknowledge that the formal business of "doing history" by historians is not immune to or separate from the cultural authorities that produce collective memories and that all knowledge about the past, even that created by professional historians, is socially produced from particular social locations...

Those advocating the removal of US Confederate monuments have generally relied on the claim that because the ideas these monuments represent (i.e. White supremacy) have no legitimate place in political discourse, the monuments should be removed from public space. While we share this normative position, experiences while teaching our interdisciplinary undergraduate course on Memory, Place, and Power forced us to interrogate our reflexive desire to ‘take ’em down’. We learned that as scholars and practitioners, we must not only better explain and defend the nature of the ‘forgetting’ that happens when we remove Confederate monuments but also put our discussion of their fate into a broader international context, one that embraces a range of alternatives beyond the stark choice of removal versus retention.

Authenticity, Memory, and Materiality: Disgraced Memorials and Issues of Permanence Erika Doss (bio) What role does authenticity play in the judgment, value, and preservation of visual and material culture? Recent years have seen an uptick in the vandalism and the removal of “disgraced” memorials in the United States, most notably statues and other kinds of public art that some Americans find offensive, oppressive, and inappropriate. These include memorials, murals, and fountains dedicated to the Confederate States of America, Christopher Columbus, Father Junipero Serra, and western frontiersmen. Arguments for retaining and preserving these and other memorials are typically based on claims about their authenticity. Authenticity in art, the philosopher Denis Dutton explained, rests on assumptions that the object or image under consideration is “real,” “genuine,” and “true,” that it is a sign of undisputed credibility and legitimacy, a paradigm of irreplaceability. Whenever we use the term, however, Dutton advised us to first ask: “Authentic as opposed to what?”1 Authenticity, in other words, is a dynamic concept dependent on multiple cultural, social, economic, and political factors. Authenticity is neither innate nor permanent. Images and objects express and embody the values, beliefs, and norms of their makers and their audiences—and all these ideals are acquired and subject to change. Notwithstanding the mutability of authenticity, many Americans claim that challenging or removing certain memorials amounts to violating or destroying their inherent legitimacy. In 2018, a year after the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville erupted in violence and murder, an NBC poll reported that over 61 percent of southerners “oppose removing Confederate monuments and statues from public spaces.” That number is “even higher in some Deep South states, with 65 percent of Alabamians and Mississippians opposing removal.”2 In fact, southern fiscal support for Confederate monuments and sites has steadily escalated: over the past decade, Alabama’s Confederate Memorial Park, in Chilton County, has been allocated more than $5.6 million [End Page 135] in state funding. Since 2010, Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library in Biloxi, Mississippi, has received more than $21 million in federal and state funding.3 No matter how shameful or disgraced, no matter the violence they solicit and produce in their local communities, those who want to retain and preserve Confederate memorials and sites insist on their authenticity, a concept of truthfulness and validity that they attach to their original location and installation. For their supporters, monuments to the Confederacy are viewed as the “real thing,” as authenticating spatial and experiential links to the past. They value them as “teaching tools,” as “great objects for teaching and learning about the South’s dark, complex and troubled past.” By removing them, they argue, “we would be denying ourselves a great opportunity to learn about the South’s past.”4 Framing them as funereal tributes to southern soldiers who died in the Civil War, supporters discount the fact that the vast majority of Confederate memorials originated during Jim Crow, that many more were built during the civil rights era, and that dozens of monuments to the Confederacy have been erected in the past twenty years in states from North Carolina to Arizona. Whether or not they pay tribute to the Confederacy’s dead, all of them were and are intended as intimidating symbols of white supremacy. Understandings of the presumptive authenticity of Confederate memorials rest on the idea that legitimate visual and material cultures have unique origins, and that they are only or mainly genuine in the places and spaces where they were originally dedicated and installed. Defenders of Confederate memorials, for example, view them as authenticating “heirlooms” of southern history. Their authenticity is deemed far more significant than how they were originally received by different American audiences, or how they are contested today. Their credibility, and irreplaceability, rests on assumptions of their historical validity in the past, their physical occupation in the present, and the overarching assumption that all Americans share, or should share, the same understandings of history. It further stems from assumptions that American history, and history in general, is fixed and permanent: an unchanged narrative of facts and truth. In their 2017 “American Values” survey, however, researchers with the Public...

Memorials romanticizing the short-lived Confederate States of America remain scattered across public spaces. Yet, little research examines whether memorials are consequential for residents that live proximate to them. This study relies on insights from social stress theory to examine associations between the local presence of public Confederate memorials and the mental health of African American and Afro-Caribbean adults. Data for this study are merged from the National Survey of American Life (n=4,740) and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s census of Confederate memorials. We examine associations between counts of local Confederate memorials and depressive symptomatology, self-rated mental health, and substance use disorder. Results from gender-stratified generalized models show that logged memorial counts are curvilinearly associated with mental health among Black women such that psychological adjustment is typically poorest in counties with an average number of memorials. In these spaces, African American women experience significantly greater depressive symptoms than Afro-Caribbean women. Moreover, social cohesion—familial support, membership with a pro-Black organization, frequent contact with neighbors, and ethnic closeness—modifies associations between memorials and mental health such that women with high levels of cohesion typically experience buffered mental health impacts when residing proximal to memorials. This study highlights the importance of critically investigating stressors extending from white supremacy across social statuses and theorizing resourcefulness against antiblack racism.

Reviewed by: The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory by Adam H. Domby Thomas J. Brown (bio) The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. By Adam H. Domby. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 258. Cloth, $29.95.) Adam H. Domby’s The False Cause is a welcome addition to a flurry of state-level studies of the Lost Cause, joining recent books on Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and South Carolina. It is no coincidence that the border states and Upper South are especially well represented in this set, joining geographically broader works on Civil War remembrance in Appalachia and the western guerrilla theater. If the books about South Carolina analyze the original core of the Confederacy, most of the scholarship has explored the development of the Lost Cause on the peripheries of secession. Domby is alert to the potential of North Carolina to demonstrate the postwar production of political unity in the white South. Although he begins and ends with the monument dedications, veterans’ reunions, and other commemorations that have been staples of the literature, the heart of his monograph is an investigation of Confederate pension processing in [End Page 442] North Carolina, focused particularly on Piedmont counties. Domby aims to combine his rhetorical and administrative histories in a meditation on the Lost Cause culture of dishonesty, a timely theme. Domby’s fundamental premise is that in North Carolina “white supremacist politicians ‘needed’ the Lost Cause perhaps more than in any other state” (4). He reports that North Carolina had more conscripts, more draft exemptions, and more deserters than any other Confederate state, and he highlights the relative strength of postwar biracial politics before the Wilmington massacre of 1898. He devotes less attention to labor unrest in a center of New South industrialization but organizes much of the first half of the book around tobacco and textile magnate Julian S. Carr. A conscript private who came to wear a Confederate general’s uniform because of his rank in the United Confederate Veterans, Carr offers a rewarding focus for Domby’s emphasis on Lost Cause fabrication. The book dissects Carr’s verifiable historical claims, especially his inflation of the number of University of North Carolina students who volunteered for and served in the Confederate army, and his ideological positions. Domby points out that Carr’s business and philanthropic interests gave him a reputation as a racial moderate. This proved to be a liability in campaigns for public office against more belligerent white supremacists, which Carr sought to repair on the hustings. His dispensation of patronage also led him to address Black audiences and attempt to impose his version of history upon them. As Domby writes in an account of a speech at Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University), “In telling an obvious lie that no one could publicly contradict, Carr expressed his power” (39–40). The second half of the book is a remarkable audit of Confederate pension records in North Carolina. Domby shows that many deserters received benefits because “no one really wanted to find fraud” and that the award of limited payments to African Americans supported the white ideal of the “faithful slave” (88). This research is an exemplary collation of pension, military, census, and genealogical sources. Domby combines his survey of broad patterns with a keen eye for dramatic individual stories. For example, his discussion of African Americans who were granted pensions for services to the Confederacy culminates with this revelation about the death record of the last recipient: his father was the soldier listed on his pension application as his master. The point draws on assiduous archival digging and clear understanding of the narratives promoted and hidden by the Lost Cause. In general, the scholarship on Civil War remembrance might better connect its cultural and social dimensions. Domby’s book is a good effort in this direction, but it never fully situates North Carolina benefits administration within the vein of scholarship initiated by Theda [End Page 443] Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992). The argument that the pension system fostered white supremacism and harmony at a...

The University of Texas's “Racial Geography Tour,” designed by Dr. Edmund Gordon

Essay The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History by Kevin Thornton For most of this century, public memory in the South has cherished the noble Lost Cause. The Confederate monument in Yazoo City, Mississippi, erected in 1909 by the local United Daughters of the Confederacy, tells the story in one sentence : "As at Thermopolyae, the greater glory was to the vanquished."1 To anyone conversant with ancient history, the Yazoo City monument proclaims that the men and women of the Confederacy fought for nothing less than the principle of liberty. Like the ancient Spartans who sacrificed themselves before Xerxes' army, these southerners courageously struggled against an overwhelming invasion to preserve a civilization. They did not falter once defeat was imminent . Indeed, their tenacity in the face of defeat ennobled them beyond victory; they won the greater triumph of embodying, to future generations, the causes of honor and home and patriotism. In 1909, the legacy remained that of the Confederacy in the South. And like the Confederate monument in Yazoo City, it was constructed entirely for whites. For many people today, the idea that white southerners fought for liberty in the Civil War seems perverse: The legacy of the Confederacy is not courage in the face of adversity but racism. "I have to tell you this vote is about race," said Democratic Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois in her widely quoted attack on the United Daughters of the Confederacy seal from the Senate floor. "It is about racial symbolism. It is about racial symbols, the racial past, and the single most painful episode in American history."2 As the idea of a noble Confederate past increasingly is challenged, in many people's minds it is being replaced with the idea that the Confederacy stood for racism. From this perspective, honoring the Confederacy is a racist act. The story represented by monuments and flags is wrong, both historically and morally, and deserves to be repudiated. Moreover, at some level, resistance to changing offensive public symbolism proves only that the same southern orthodoxy of 1909 exists still and that, in the end, African American opinion doesn't count. And yet a positive version of the Confederate past is deeply rooted in the public memory of the South and remains, especially for many white southerners, 234Southern Cultures a key element of southern identity. These people believe strongly that a southern heritage of bravery and idealism is real. They deeply resent the demand that Confederate symbolism be repudiated and construe the attack on the Confederate past as heavy-handed, politically correct moralizing that vilifies white southern identity. Most of all, they fear imposition of a new orthodoxy of southern apology , wherein anything southern is automatically assumed to be racist. They believe their opponents demand nothing less than a public culture that ritually denounces their ancestors as uniquely guilty—the Nazis of the American past. "A kind of inquisition is being waged against Southerners," asserts the literature of the Northeast Georgians for the Flag and Southern Heritage, "a psychological persecution that would have us renounce our forebears, our heritage, and our culture." The tract continues, "The battle of the Confederate flag is merely the opening wedge in a campaign to destroy all vestiges of respect for the traditional South, and our forebears."3 Two Views of Southern History In the increasingly shrill characterizations put forward by protesters and counterprotesters , there are two Souths, and behind these Souths, two versions of southern history. "Everybody knows what the Confederacy stands for," said Senator Moseley-Braun. But that is just the problem. While everybody knows what Confederate symbolism means, we know different, contradictory things. The heritage of nobility runs smack up against the legacy of racism. Arguments about Confederate symbolism have an interminable, circular quality because each side accuses the other, in essence, of being willfully ignorant of the most basic historical facts.4 But these arguments are not about facts. They are about meaning. Moreover , they are not only about the Confederate past, but about the continuing uses to which Confederate memory is put. These arguments offer conflicting versions , in other words, about what the Confederacy stood for and what the Confederacy stands for. In...

ABSTRACTBuilding on a growing body of literature about the historical and contemporary formation of Black Southern identity, this essay studies the rhetoric of a local activist group in Memphis, Tennessee which sought the removal of that city’s confederate monuments in 2017. I argue that the group, #TakeEmDown901, fashioned a Black Southern counterpublic through a significant and sophisticated intervention into pressing questions about the racial contours of Southern heritage. Drawing from the analysis of a broad range of texts produced during the controversy, I contend that attention to the rhetorical emergence of this counterpublic in practice can help to address a deficit that has hindered the study of Southern oratory for more than a century – its hegemonically White sense of Southern heritage.

Confederate monuments are a contested piece of the public landscape. Debates generally focus on the division between “heritage” and “hate,” but some scholars have argued that the meaning of monuments is more complex. There is little research examining variation among Confederate monuments, but this may be critical to understanding their social foundations and consequences. We provide insight into Confederate monuments and their complexity by examining their inscriptions and how the use of different inscriptions changed over time and varies between the Upper South and Deep South. We employ content analysis to organize the inscriptions associated with 856 Confederate monuments located in public spaces throughout the U.S. South into common themes. Our results suggest three distinct types of inscriptions: those connected to the lost cause ideology that glorifies the Confederacy and its cause; those that were comparatively plain in their description of people, places, and events; and others that focused exclusively on mourning the death of Confederate soldiers. The majority of monuments (59%) contain a Lost Cause inscription. Plain monuments comprise 35%, and only 6% of public Confederate monuments were dedicated purely to the dead. Our descriptive analysis also indicates substantial temporal and spatial variation in the use of these different types of inscriptions. Despite sharing a connection to the Confederacy, we assert that the specific messages associated with a monument are more varied and, in part, reflect the social conditions of the time and place in which they were built.

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South Susan V. Donaldson (bio) Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them. —J. W. C. Pennington Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history—and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history. . . . Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126). These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the [End Page 267] antebellum white South's systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history—in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). Toni Morrison, for one, has seen it as her specific charge to search out those silences "for the unspeakable things unspoken" and finally to retrieve them from the realm of the forgotten and give them voice ("Unspeakable" 210). But there are also issues that have generated furious arguments since the publication of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner: that is, what is it that stories and histories of slavery should say, what narrative forms should they take, who should write them—and for what audiences? These are questions that have provided much of the impetus for new categories of writing about slavery, the most notable of which are novels like Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Morrison's Beloved, often referred to as "neo-slave narratives." Two 2003 novels, Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Known World and Valerie Martin's Orange Prize-winning Property, suggest yet another category: that of post- or anti-plantation tradition novels drawing inspiration in part from the tradition of slave narratives, especially those by Solomon Northup, Henry Box Brown, and William and Ellen Craft, but also from the necessity of responding to and writing against the long shadow cast by Gone with the Wind on popular memories of slavery, the antebellum South, and the Civil War era. Indeed these two novels cast their sights farther afield by interrogating mastery itself, and by implication master narratives of history, by exposing the daily operations and limits of power and domination, excavating the counternarratives blocked by those operations, and ultimately revising both the content and the form of the historical record. The Known World and Property, then, are not just historical novels. They are postmodern novels written for a postmodern South and a postmodern age—with all the connotations of a loss of mastery that term "postmodern" carries. For if all of our current debates on slavery reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible...