page_title: List of Confederate monuments and memorials
section_title: Jim Crow
hierarchical_section_title: List of Confederate monuments and memorials / History / Jim Crow
caption_attribution_description: English: In a park just north of Union. Includes quote for Robert E. Lee
context_page_description: This is a list of Confederate monuments and memorials that were established as public displays and symbols of the Confederate States of America, Confederate leaders, or Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. Part of the commemoration of the American Civil War, these symbols include monuments and statues, flags, holidays and other observances, and the names of schools, roads, parks, bridges, counties, cities, lakes, dams, military bases, and other public works. In a December 2018 special report, Smithsonian Magazine stated, "over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments—statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries—and to Confederate heritage organizations."
  This list does not include figures connected with the origins of the Civil War or white supremacy, but not with the Confederacy, including statues of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney in Annapolis, Baltimore, and Frederick, Maryland; the county and city named for pro-slavery congressman Preston Brooks; a controversial portrait of North Carolina Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin; and numerous memorials to Southern politician John C.
context_section_description: Confederate monument-building has often been part of widespread campaigns to promote and justify Jim Crow laws in the South.  According to the American Historical Association (AHA), the erection of Confederate monuments during the early twentieth century was "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South." According to the AHA, 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." According to Smithsonian Magazine, "far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans."
  According to historian Jane Dailey from the University of Chicago, in many cases, the purpose of the monuments was not to celebrate the past but rather to promote a "white supremacist future". Another historian, Karen L. Cox, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has written that the monuments are "a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era", and that "the whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy". Another historian from UNC, James Leloudis, stated that "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." They 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. According to Civil War historian Judith Giesberg, professor of history at Villanova University, "White supremacy is really what these statues represent." Some monuments were also meant to beautify cities as part of the City Beautiful movement, although this was secondary.
  In a June 2018 speech, Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. of Virginia Tech University said the monuments were not a "Jim Crow signal of defiance" and referred to the current trend to dismantle or destroy them as an "age of idiocy" motivated by "elements hell-bent on tearing apart unity that generations of Americans have painfully constructed." Katrina Dunn Johnson, Curator of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, states that "thousands of families throughout the country were unable to reclaim their soldier's remains--many never learned their loved ones' exact fate on the battlefield or within the prison camps. The psychological impact of such a devastating loss cannot be underestimated when attempting to understand the primary motivations behind Southern memorialization."
  Many Confederate monuments were dedicated in the former Confederate states and border states in the decades following the Civil War, in many instances by Ladies Memorial Associations, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), United Confederate Veterans (UCV), Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Heritage Preservation Association, and other memorial organizations. Other Confederate monuments are located on Civil War battlefields. Many Confederate monuments are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, either separately or as contributing objects within listings of courthouses or historic districts. Art historians Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson argued, in Monuments to the Lost Cause, that the majority of Confederate monuments, of the type they define, were "commissioned by white women, in hope of preserving a positive vision of antebellum life."
  In the late nineteenth century, technological innovations in the granite and bronze industries helped reduce costs and mad
caption: Statue in Monroe County, West Virginia, 2016
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