Politics

Some Examples of Confederate Tributes Around the South

Published

10 years ago

June 24, 2015

The Mississippi flag hangs, with the other state flags, in the subway between the U.S. Capitol and Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, Tuesday, June 23, 2015. In the wake of a massacre at a black church in Charleston, S.C., a bipartisan mix of officials across the country is calling for the removal of Confederate flags and other symbols of the Confederacy. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

The Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — Tributes to the Confederacy and the Jim Crow era that have existed still abound in the Deep South and beyond more than a century after the end of the Civil War.

Here are some of the most high-profile displays, including several that are being criticized anew following the fatal shooting of nine parishioners at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina:

— ALABAMA: An 88 -foot-tall Confederate memorial sits at the Capitol entrance nearest the governor’s office. It features four different Confederate banners, including the battle flag. Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the Confederacy, is said to have laid the cornerstone at a ceremony in 1886. Two nearby public high schools, now with nearly all-black student bodies, are named for Davis and Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces.

— ARKANSAS: There are two Confederate monuments on the Capitol grounds, one honoring Confederate women, the other soldiers.

— FLORIDA: No confederate flag flies at the Florida Capitol, but the state flag, whose main design was adopted in 1900, features a St. Andrew’s Cross — an ‘X’ emblazoned across the banner. The imagery is similar to the Battle Flag, though it also reflects a flag of the Spanish empire when it ruled Florida from the early 16th century until 1763. Several county courthouses and local public squares or parks feature Confederate veterans monuments.

— GEORGIA: The Capitol and surrounding grounds feature multiple statues, busts and portraits of Confederate war heroes and segregationist politicians. In the Capitol rotunda is a portrait of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. A bust of Stephens sits just outside the rotunda. The Georgia state flag, a compromise version that replaced a design with the battle flag, is modeled after the “Stars and Bars,” the first national flag of the Confederacy. Twenty miles from the Capitol is Stone Mountain, which features a massive carving of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, all on horseback.

— KENTUCKY: Jefferson Davis is among the statues included in the Capitol rotunda. The Davis statue is situated behind the Abraham Lincoln statute that sits in the rotunda’s center, so that the president of the Confederacy appears to be looking over the shoulder of the 16th U.S. president who governed during the Civil War.

— LOUISIANA: A statue of Robert E. Lee sits at the center of Lee Circle, a major traffic circle connecting downtown New Orleans to the Garden District neighborhood. Another city thoroughfare is named for Jefferson Davis and includes a statue of the Confederate president.

— MISSISSIPPI: The state flag is the last U.S. state banner to include an explicit image of the Confederate battle flag. At one Capitol entrance sits a monument to the women of the Confederacy. The University of Mississippi’s athletics teams are knowns as the “Ole Miss Rebels,” and the school’s band often plays “Dixie” at sporting events.

— NORTH CAROLINA: An obelisk memorial to the state’s Confederate war dead and a monument to the “North Carolina Women of the Confederacy” are located on the old Capitol grounds in Raleigh. The Capitol square also includes statues of Civil War-era Gov. Zebulon Vance and Gov. Charles Aycock, known partly for his anti-black rhetoric at the end of the 19th century.

— SOUTH CAROLINA: The Confederate battle flag flies at the base of a Confederate monument in front of the Capitol. It flies between a Confederate monument and a statue of Benjamin Tillman, a noted white supremacist who spent three decades — from 1890 to 1918 — as governor and U.S. senator. Behind the Capitol is a statue of Strom Thurmond, a long-serving U.S. senator who ran for president in 1948 as a “Dixiecrat” to protest the national Democratic Party’s softening stance on segregation.

— TENNESSEE: A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is inside the Capitol.

— VIRGINIA: Arlington National Cemetery, formerly the plantation of Robert E. Lee, includes a Confederate section with almost 500 graves surrounding a memorial. Future President William Howard Taft authorized the memorial in 1906, when he served as secretary of war for President Theodore Roosevelt.

___

Compiled by Bill Barrow in Atlanta; Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama; Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas; Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi; and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

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: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

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Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

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CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.