Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

There are more than 160 Confederate monuments and memorials to the Confederate States of America (CSA; the Confederacy) and associated figures that have been removed from public spaces in the United States, all but five of which have been since 2015. Some have been removed by state and local governments; others have been torn down by protestors.
More than seven hundred monuments and memorials have been created on public land, the vast majority in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws from 1877 to 1964. Efforts to remove them increased after the Charleston church shooting, the Unite the Right rally, and the murder of George Floyd.
Proponents of their removal cite historical analysis that the monuments were not built as memorials, but to intimidate African Americans and reaffirm white supremacy after the Civil War; and that they memorialize an unrecognized, treasonous government, the Confederacy, whose founding principle was the perpetuation and expansion of slavery. They also argue that the presence of these memorials more than a hundred years after the defeat of the Confederacy continues to disenfranchise and alienate African Americans. However, opponents view that removing the monuments as erasing history or a sign of disrespect for their Southern heritage. Some Southern states passed state laws restricting or prohibiting the removal or alteration of public monuments.
According to The Washington Post, five Confederate monuments were removed after the Civil War, eight in the two years after the Charleston shooting, 48 in the three years after the Unite the Right rally, and 110 in the two years after George Floyd's murder. In 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he would order the renaming of U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals, as well as other Defense Department property that honored Confederates.
The campaign to remove monuments extended beyond the United States; many statues and other public works of art related to the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism around the world have been removed or destroyed.
Most of the Confederate monuments on public land were built in periods of racial conflict, such as when Jim Crow laws were being introduced in the late 19th century and at the start of the 20th century or during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. These two periods also coincided with the 50th and 100th year after the end of the Civil War, including the American Civil War Centennial. The peak in construction of Civil War monuments occurred between the late 1890s up to 1920, with a second smaller peak in the late-1950s to mid-1960s.
In an August 2017 statement on the monuments controversy, the American Historical Association (AHA) said that to remove a monument "is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history." The AHA said that most monuments were erected "without anything resembling a democratic process," and recommended that it was "time to reconsider these decisions." Most Confederate monuments were erected during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and this undertaking was "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South." Memorials to the Confederacy erected during this period "were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life." A later wave of monument building coincided with the civil rights movement, and according to the AHA, "these symbols of white supremacy are still being invoked for similar purposes."
Michael J. McAfee, curator of history at the West Point Museum, said, "There are no monuments that mention the name Benedict Arnold. What does this have to do with the Southern monuments honoring the political and military leaders of the Confederacy? They, like Arnold, were traitors. They turned their backs on their nation, their oaths, and the sacrifices of their ancestors in the War for Independence.... They attempted to destroy their nation to defend chattel slavery and from a sense that as white men they were innately superior to all other races. They fought for white racial supremacy. That is why monuments glorifying them and their cause should be removed. Leave monuments marking their participation on the battlefields of the war, but tear down those that only commemorate the intolerance, violence, and hate that inspired their attempt to destroy the American nation."
University of Chicago historian Jane Dailey wrote that in many cases the purpose of the monuments was not to celebrate the past but rather to promote a "white supremacist future." Civil War historian Judith Giesberg, professor of history at Villanova University agrees: "White supremacy is really what these statues represent."
Historian Karyn Cox of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has written that the monuments are "a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era." University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian James Leloudis wrote, "The funders and backers of these monuments are very explicit that they are requiring a political education and a legitimacy for the Jim Crow era and the right of white men to rule."
Adam Goodheart, Civil War author and director of the Starr Center at Washington College, told National Geographic, "They're 20th-century artifacts in the sense that a lot of it had to do with a vision of national unity that embraced Southerners as well as Northerners, but importantly still excluded black people." Goodheart said that the statues were meant to be symbols of white supremacy and the rallying around them by white supremacists will likely hasten their demise. Eleanor Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a scholar of Civil War history, said, "If white nationalists and neo-Nazis are now claiming this as part of their heritage, they have essentially co-opted those images and those statues beyond any capacity to neutralize them again".
Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale University, said the statues' continued existence "really impacts the psyche of black people." Harold Holzer, the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, argued that this was intentional: the statues were designed to belittle African Americans. Dell Upton, chair of the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote that "the monuments were not intended as public art," but rather were installed "as affirmations that the American polity was a white polity," and that because of their explicitly white supremacist intent, their removal from civic spaces was a matter "of justice, equity, and civic values."
Historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts asked:
In a 1993 book on the issue in Georgia, author Frank McKenney argued otherwise: "These monuments were communal efforts, public art, and social history," he wrote. Ex-soldiers and politicians had difficult time raising funds to erect monuments so the task mostly fell to the women, the "mothers widows, and orphans, the bereaved fiancees and sisters" of the soldiers who had died. Many ladies' memorial associations were formed in the decades following the end of the Civil War, most of them joining the United Daughters of the Confederacy following its inception in 1894. The women were advised to "remember that they were buying art, not metal and stone."
Cheryl Benard, president of the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage, argued against the removal of Confederate war monuments in an op-ed written for The National Interest: "From my vantage point, the idea that the way to deal with history is to destroy any relics that remind you of something you don't like, is highly alarming."
Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. said that the monuments were not a "Jim Crow signal of defiance." He called the current climate to dismantle or destroy Confederate monuments as an "age of idiocy," motivated by "elements hell-bent on tearing apart unity that generations of Americans have painfully constructed."
But Dell Upton argues that the monuments celebrated only one side of the story, one that was "openly pro-Confederate." The monuments were erected without the consent or even input of Southern African-Americans, who remembered the Civil War far differently, and who had no interest in honoring those who fought to keep them enslaved. Robert Seigler, who documented more than 170 Confederate monuments in South Carolina, found only five dedicated to the African Americans who had been used by the Confederacy to build fortifications or "had served as musicians, teamsters, cooks, servants, and in other capacities." Four of those were to slaves and one to a musician, Henry Brown.
Alfred Brophy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, argued the removal of the Confederate statues "facilitates forgetting," although these statues were "re-inscribed images of white supremacy." Brophy said that the Lee statue in Charlottesville should be removed.
Julian Hayter, a historian at the University of Richmond, supports a different approach for the statues: re-contextualization. He supports adding a "footnote of epic proportions" such as a prominent historical sign or marker that explains the context in which they were built to help people see old monuments in a new light. "I'm suggesting we use the scale and grandeur of those monuments against themselves. I think we lack imagination when we talk about memorials. It's all or nothin'.... As if there's nothin' in between that we could do to tell a more enriching story about American history."
Just five Confederate memorials were removed in the century-and-a-half after the Civil War. The modern effort to remove them was sparked by the Charleston church shooting of 2015. In the two years that followed, eight memorials were removed. In the city of New Orleans, a crane had to be brought in from an unidentified out-of-state company as no local company wanted the business.
The removal movement was further galvanized by the August 2017 Unite the Right rally, which gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the proposed removal of its Robert Edward Lee statue. The rally saw deadly violence and the public display of white supremacist symbols. Within days, other cities moved to remove similar memorials. In Baltimore, for example, the city's Confederate statues were removed on the night of August 15–16, 2017. Mayor Catherine Pugh said that she ordered the overnight removals to preserve public safety. Similarly, in Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Jim Gray asked the city council on August 16, 2017, to approve the removal of two statues from a courthouse.
Within three years of the Charleston shooting, at least 114 Confederate monuments were removed from public spaces, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which published an extensive report in 2016 of Confederate memorials in public spaces and keeps an up-to-date list online. Texas removed 31, more than any other state.
A 2017 Reuters poll found that 54% of American adults stated that the monuments should remain in all public spaces, and 27% said they should be removed, while 19% said they were unsure. According to Reuters, "responses to the poll were sharply split along racial and party lines, however, with whites and Republicans largely supportive of preservation. Democrats and minorities were more likely to support removal." Another 2017 poll, by HuffPost/YouGov, found that 48% of respondents favored the "remain" option, 33% favored removal, and 18% were unsure. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll released in 2017 found that most Americans, including 44% of African Americans, believe that statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should remain in place.
In 2017, Jason Spencer, a white member of the Georgia legislature, told an African-American colleague that if she continued calling for removal of Confederate monuments, she wouldn't be "met with torches but something a lot more definitive," and that people who want the statues gone "will go missing in the Okefenokee....Don't say I didn't warn you."
Various groups of proponents met March 22–24, 2018, in New Orleans "to commemorate, celebrate and strategically align Take 'Em Down efforts." A second such conference was held March 22–24, 2019, in Jacksonville, Florida.
In April 2020, a study found that Confederate monuments were more likely to be removed in localities that had a large black and Democratic population, a chapter of the NAACP, and Southern state legislatures that have the power to decree removal. Public support for removal increased during the George Floyd protests, with 52% in favor of removal, and 44% opposed.
Most of the removals have been undertaken by state and local governments, while a relative few memorials were pulled down by protestors. For example, the bust of Robert E. Lee in Fort Myers, Florida, was toppled by unknown parties during the night of March 11–12, 2019. At least three were demolished by protestors in states that had passed laws to make it more difficult to legally remove them: Silent Sam, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; the Confederate Soldiers Monument in Durham, North Carolina; and the Screven County Confederate Dead Monument, in Sylvania, Georgia. The latter two were damaged beyond repair, while Silent Sam, which was not seriously damaged, was placed in storage, awaiting a political decision on its fate. The "Confederate Dead Monument" was replaced through funds raised by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Seven states have passed laws that impede or forbid the removal or alteration of public Confederate monuments. Laws in Georgia (early 20th century), North Carolina (2015), and Alabama (2017) prohibit removal or alteration. Laws in South Carolina (2000), Mississippi (2004), and Tennessee (2013, updated 2016) impede such actions.
A 1902 law in Virginia was repealed in 2020; other attempts to repeal state laws have not been successful.
In 2023 Florida Republican Dean Black filed legislation that would punish any lawmakers who vote to remove "historical monuments and memorials." Under this bill, if local lawmakers vote in favor of the removal of Confederate statues, they may be fined or removed from office by the governor.
In 2016, Tennessee passed its Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, which requires a two-thirds majority of the Tennessee Historical Commission to rename, remove, or move any public statue, monument, or memorial. A 2018 amendment passed in response to events in Memphis (see below) prohibits municipalities from selling or transferring ownership of memorials without a waiver, and "allows any entity, group or individual with an interest in a Confederate memorial to seek an injunction to preserve the memorial in question." The New York Times wrote in 2018 that the Tennessee act shows "an express intent to prevent municipalities in Tennessee from taking down Confederate memorials."
As of 2022, the Tennessee Historical Commission has considered seven petitions to remove a Confederate monument and approved just one: for the Forrest bust in the state capitol.
The removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol required a two-thirds vote of both houses of the legislature, as would the removal of any other Confederate monument in South Carolina.
A state law, the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act of 2015, prevents local governments from removing monuments on public property, and places limits on their movement within the property. In August 2017, Governor Roy Cooper asked the North Carolina Legislature to repeal the law, writing: "I don't pretend to know what it's like for a person of color to pass by one of these monuments and consider that those memorialized in stone and metal did not value my freedom or humanity. Unlike an African-American father, I'll never have to explain to my daughters why there exists an exalted monument for those who wished to keep her and her ancestors in chains...We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery. These monuments should come down." He also asked the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to "determine the cost and logistics of removing Confederate monuments from state property." Cooper later removed, on the grounds of public safety, three Confederate monuments at the North Carolina Capitol that the legislature had in effect made illegal to remove.
After the University of North Carolina renamed Saunders Hall in 2014 (see below), its Board of Trustees prohibited further renamings for 16 years.
In 2019, North Carolina's law prohibiting monument removal was challenged indirectly. The Confederate Soldiers Monument in Winston-Salem was removed as a public nuisance, and a similar monument in Pittsboro was removed after a court ruled that it had never become county property, so the statute did not apply.
On March 8, 2020, the Virginia legislature "passed measures that would undo an existing state law that protects the monuments and instead let local governments decide their fate." On April 11, 2020, Governor Ralph Northam signed the bill into law, which went into effect on July 1. Previously, the state law had prohibited local governments from taking the monuments down, moving them, or even adding placards explaining why they were erected.
Alabama's law, the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, was passed in May 2017. On January 14, 2019, a circuit judge ruled that the law is an un-Constitutional infringement on the City of Birmingham's right to free speech, and cannot be enforced. On November 27, 2019, the Alabama Supreme Court reversed that ruling by a vote of nine to zero. In their decision, the court stated that "a municipality has no individual, substantive constitutional rights and that the trial court erred by holding that the City has constitutional rights to free speech."
On July 22, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 305–113 to remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney from the old robing room next to the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol Building. The bill (H.R. 7573 (116th)) would also have removed statues honoring Confederate figures and create a "process to obtain a bust of [Justice Thurgood] Marshall...and place it there within a minimum of two years." The bill reached the Republican-led Senate on July 30, 2020 (S.4382 (116th)) and was referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration, which took no further action on it.
The empty pedestals or plinths left after monument removal have met various fates.
In Baltimore, one of the four empty plinths was used in 2017 for a statue of a pregnant black woman, naked from the waist up, holding a baby in a brightly-covered sling on her back, with a raised golden fist: Madre Luz (Mother Light). The statue was first placed in front of the monument before its removal, then raised to the pedestal. Artist Pablo Machioli said "his original idea was to construct a pregnant mother as a symbol of life. 'I feel like people would understand and respect that'". The statue was vandalized several times before it was removed by the city.
For the toppled Silent Sam monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, two scholars proposed leaving the "empty pedestal — shorn all original images and inscriptions — [which] eliminates the offending tribute while still preserving a record of what these communities did and where they did it.... The most effective way to commemorate the rise and fall of white supremacist monument-building is to preserve unoccupied pedestals as the ruins that they are — broken tributes to a morally bankrupt cause." Instead, the plinth and its plaques were removed on January 14, 2019, at the direction of university Chancellor Carol Folt.
The plinths of the statues in Richmond, Virginia, were removed in 2022. In some of Richmond's Monument Avenue intersections, the spotlights remain—pointed upward toward now-empty space.
In 2000, the U.S. Army renamed Forrest Road - named for Confederate general and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest - at Fort Bliss after receiving complaints. The road was renamed Cassidy Road after Lt. Gen. Richard T. Cassidy, a former post commander.
In February 2020, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General David H. Berger, ordered "the removal of all Confederate-related paraphernalia from Marine Corps installations", including Confederate flags, bumper stickers, and "similar items".
The U.S. Navy has similarly prohibited the display of the Confederate flag, including as bumper stickers on private cars on base; a wave of corporate product re-branding has also ensued.
In 2021, Congress ordered the Defense Department to establish a commission to consider whether to rename various bases, ships, buildings, streets, and other things named to honor Confederate figures. In 2022, this Naming Commission recommended changing the names of nine Army bases, two Navy ships, and other items. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to follow the commission's recommendations.
In May 2022, the first part of the Naming Commission's report recommended changing the names of nine Army bases:
The last of these changes were finalized in October 2023.
By December 2022, the Naming Commission had also directed the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, to rename buildings, roads, and other facilities. West Point also removed several displays related to former superintendent Robert E. Lee, including a portrait, bust, quotation, and bronze panels depicting him and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 2017, the Arkansas Legislature voted to stop honoring Robert E. Lee's birthday.
In 2019, the Arkansas Legislature voted to replace Arkansas's two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection. Uriah Milton Rose, an attorney and founder of the Rose Law Firm, advised against secession, but backed the Confederacy during the war; while not a soldier or elected officeholder, he served the Confederacy as chancellor of Pulaski County, later being appointed the Confederacy's state historian. A statue of white supremacist progressive era-Governor James Paul Clarke was also removed. They will be replaced with statues of Johnny Cash and journalist and state NAACP president Daisy L. Gatson Bates, who played a key role in the integration of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.
An August 2017 meeting of the Florida League of Mayors was devoted to the topic of what to do with Civil War monuments.
The 2016 Tennessee Heritage Protection Act puts "the brakes on cities' and counties' ability to remove monuments or change names of streets and parks."