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A Virginia judge has blocked efforts to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was at the center of the deadly violence that erupted in Charlottesville in 2017.

In a ruling issued this week, Judge Richard E. Moore said that any effort to remove the Lee statue would violate a state historic preservation statute and issued a permanent injunction preventing its removal. His decision extended to a separate monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that city leaders and local activists had hoped to get rid of.

In 2017 Charlottesville's city council voted to remove the two statues, saying they were examples of racism.

Local residents filed a lawsuit in response, saying the council vote violated a state law barring the removal of war memorials. That August, white nationalists rallied in the city to protest the removal of the Lee statue. The rally would lead to the death of 32-year-old counter-protester Heather Heyer, and two state troopers who were killed in a helicopter crash while patrolling the rally.

In the aftermath of the violence, black shrouds were placed over the two statues, but in February 2018, Moore ordered them removed.

In his latest ruling, Moore cited the intent of the preservation law, saying, "I don't think I can infer that a historical preservation statute was intended to be racist," he said. "Certainly, [racism] was on their minds, but we should not judge the current law by that intent."

Moore determined damages could not be awarded, but that attorneys' fees would be given to the plaintiffs' counsel.

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Judge Blocks Removal Of Confederate Statue That Sparked Charlottesville Protest

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A Virginia judge has blocked efforts to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that was at the center of the deadly violence that erupted in Charlottesville in 2017. In a ruling issued this week, Judge Richard E.

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It cost a total of $2.1 million - half of it public money - to take down four Jim Crow-era monuments in New Orleans, according to records the city released Friday.

About half of the money was spent on the removals themselves and the rest on security and support services that included paying a private security contractor more than $710,000 to monitor and infiltrate various protest groups.

The records also indicate the contractor who took down three of the four statues found itself out by about $217,000 after the city refused to increase the $600,000 contract to account for additional time spent on the jobs, each of which stretched on several hours.

The city cut the $90,000 cost of removing the Battle of Liberty Place monument - the first to be taken down - by more than 25 percent during negotiations with another contractor after the obelisk had been removed.

The city announced the cost of the monument removals, which played out from late April through May amid protests, threats and national media attention, on Friday in response to public records requests from media including The New Orleans Advocate.

The public costs of the removal will largely be absorbed by the budgets of the various city departments involved and should not have a major impact, Deputy Mayor Ryan Berni said.

The costs for the private security contractor will be covered by reducing various consulting contracts the city has, including those for analyzing the pension systems for firefighters and jail employees, the city budget and general economic analysis.

Actually removing the statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard and the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place cost a total of $665,000 plus an additional $400,000 for backup equipment and labor. Those costs were paid by private donors whose identities are being kept anonymous; their donations are being routed through the Foundation for Louisiana.

In addition, however, the city spent about $1.04 million of public money on other related costs, including the bills for New Orleans police, firefighters and Emergency Medical Services personnel to be present at the removals and at a massive protest at the Lee statue at Lee Circle.

The security costs also included $710,000 to Trident Response Group, a Dallas-based private security firm that provided "threat assessments," public safety plans and analysis that included undercover work infiltrating groups on both sides of the issue as well as intelligence gathering through social media monitoring and other methods.

"That's the cost of the extremists and some of the racist extremists that gravitated to this project over the last two years," Berni said.

"This went from a standard capital project - removing some monuments with some equipment - to a full-bore homeland security event. Through intelligence gathering from NOPD, State Police and FBI and through our private contractors, it became very clear that there were fringe groups, extremist groups that were looking to make this their cause célèbre and incite violence," he said.

There were threats against contractors and city employees before the removals began and continuing protests during the removals themselves. A protest at Lee Circle also brought right-wing and white-supremacist groups from around the country, some preparing for brawls with anti-monument protesters.

Trident bills itself as "an intelligence-based consulting firm" made up of "private sector business leaders, attorneys and veterans of military Special Operations, federal law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence community."

The security contractors and advisers were paid between $175 and $275 an hour, while the senior Trident employees who drafted the security plan were paid between $275 and $425 an hour.

City officials did not provide details Friday on the extent of Trident's operations or exactly which groups were being spied on, but they confirmed the firm's personnel were on the ground in an undercover capacity during the protests and provided a "safehouse" for workers involved in the project, at a cost of $3,000.

The security firm also received another $400,000 in privately donated money to procure backup cranes and laborers, which were used at times after city officials and contractors ran into problems acquiring construction equipment in light of the threats.

The security services came on top of hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for city workers to provide security.

New Orleans police officers were paid almost $113,400 in overtime and $106,500 in regular time, in addition to other compensation such as time off, for a total of more than 10,515 hours of work on the removals.

Earlier this week, The New Orleans Advocate and WWL-TV reported preliminary figures on NOPD pay during the removals that did not include taking down of the Battle of Liberty Place monument on Iberville Street.

Another $26,330 was spent on firefighters and Emergency Medical Services personnel, and almost $16,720 was spent to pay other city workers and for other costs, including providing meals to city employees during the daylong removal of the Lee statue.

The city also spent almost $64,500 building and providing security for a shed at the Alvar Street storage yard where some of the monuments are being kept.

The cost and funding sources for the monuments' removal has been a contested issue since early in the process. When speaking to the City Council before its 6-1 vote to take down the statues in December 2015, Mayor Mitch Landrieu pledged that the money to remove the monuments would come from private donations.
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At the time, the city estimated the removals would be a relatively quick process that would cost $175,000, which it said had already been secured from a private donor. That target jumped to $600,000 earlier this year, the amount that the only firm to bid on the project, Cuzan Services, said it would need to remove the statues of Lee, Davis and Beauregard.

At the end of May, Cuzan requested an additional $216,000 for unexpected time spent by workers on the removals. That request was denied by the city because the removals occurred in the timeframe included in the original bid documents.

The cost of removing the Liberty Place monument came in at $65,000, about $25,000 less than the invoice the company handling that project requested. That company's name was not listed in the records provided by the city.

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Removing New Orleans' Confederate monuments cost $2M-plus in public, private money

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It cost a total of $2.1 million - half of it public money - to take down four Jim Crow-era monuments in New Orleans, according to records the city released Friday. About half of the money was spent on the removals themselves and the rest on security and support services that included paying a private security contractor more than $710,000 to monitor and infiltrate various protest groups.

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Since white nationalists marched Friday in Charlottesville, Va., the quiet college town has seen a nighttime brawl lit up by torches and smartphones, and worse violence that left one person dead and dozens injured.

At the center of the chaos is a statue memorializing Robert E. Lee. It depicts the Confederacy's top general, larger than life, astride a horse, both green with oxidation.

The white nationalists were in Charlottesville to protest the city's plan to remove that statue, and counterdemonstrators were there to oppose them. The statue - begun by Henry Merwin Shrady, a New York sculptor, and finished after his death by an Italian, Leo Lentelli - had stood in the city since 1924. But over the past couple of years some residents and city officials, along with organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., had called for it to come down.

One local official made a similar suggestion as early as 2012 and quickly discovered that emotions surrounding the issue run deep.

'Ugly stuff bubbled up'

It was during the Virginia Festival of the Book, a series of readings and events held every year in Albemarle County, which includes Charlottesville.

At a talk given by the author and historian Edward Ayers, a Charlottesville city councilor, Kristin Szakos, asked about the city's Confederate monuments. She wondered whether the city should discuss removing them.

People around her gasped. "You would have thought I had asked if it was O.K. to torture puppies," she recalled during a 2013 conversation on BackStory, a podcast supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

The response to her comment was heated, and swift. Ms. Szakos said she received threats via phone and email. "I felt like I had put a stick in the ground, and kind of ugly stuff bubbled up from it," she said.

It was a local turning point, helped along by national events. Ms. Szakos's comment came about a month after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Florida. The trial and eventual acquittal of the man who shot him, George Zimmerman, helped fan the flames of the Black Lives Matter protests, which erupted into full force in 2014 following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

By 2015, debates about Confederate flags and monuments were heating up in Southern states including South Carolina, Texas and Louisiana. Those who favored removal saw the symbols as monuments to white supremacy, but their opponents accused them of trying to erase history.

In Charlottesville that year, someone spray-painted "Black Lives Matter" on the foundation of the Lee statue. City workers cleaned it quickly, leaving only a faint outline.

Buildup to a vote

By 2016, Wes Bellamy, another Charlottesville city councilor and the city's vice mayor, had become a champion of efforts to remove Confederate monuments. At a news conference in front of the Lee statue in March of that year, he said the City Council would appoint a commission to discuss the issue.

"When I see the multitude of people here who are so passionate about correcting something that they feel should have been done a long time ago, I am encouraged," he said to the crowd of residents in front of him. Some clapped. Others shouted, accusing Mr. Bellamy of sowing division.

That same month, Zyahna Bryant, a high school student, petitioned the City Council asking for the Lee statue to be removed. "My peers and I feel strongly about the removal of the statue because it makes us feel uncomfortable and it is very offensive," she wrote in the petition, which collected hundreds of signatures.

The City Council established its special commission in May 2016. Later that year, it issued a report suggesting that the city could either relocate the Lee statue or transform it with the "inclusion of new accurate historical information."

The addition of historical context might have been welcomed by some defenders of the statues. One group, Friends of C'Ville Monuments, said on its website that statues could be improved "by adding more informative, better detailed explanations of the history of the statues and what they can teach us."

But in February, the City Council voted to remove the statue from the park. Opponents of the move sued in March, arguing that the city did not have the authority to do so under state law.

That court case is continuing, and the statue has remained in place. It was the focal point for a gathering held in May by the white nationalist Richard Spencer, who was among the demonstrators in Charlottesville this weekend. In June, the City Council gave Lee Park a new name - Emancipation Park.

'Unite the Right'

The rally that descended into violence Saturday was organized by Jason Kessler, a relative newcomer to the white nationalist scene who is well known in Charlottesville, where he has fought against the city's status as a sanctuary city for immigrants.

A self-described " journalist, activist and author," Mr. Kessler also waged a monthslong online media campaign against Mr. Bellamy, whom he depicted as anti-white.

More recently, Mr. Kessler became involved in the fight against renaming Lee Park - one reason for the "Unite the Right" rally this weekend. The rally was by far Mr. Kessler's largest undertaking yet. Last week, he won an injunction in federal court against the city, which had voted to revoke a permit for the rally.

"This is my First Amendment right," Mr. Kessler said of the rally during a news conference on Thursday. "This is the right of every American to be able to peaceably assemble and speak their mind free of intimidation. That's why I decided to do it."

With the lawsuit over the Lee statue still unresolved, it remains unclear what will become of it. The violence this weekend was one of the bloodiest fights over the campaigns across the South to remove Confederate monuments, and the statue remains a lightning rod in Charlottesville. Mr. Spencer, for his part, has promised to return.

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The Statue at the Center of Charlottesville's Storm

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Since white nationalists marched Friday in Charlottesville, Va., the quiet college town has seen a nighttime brawl lit up by torches and smartphones, and worse violence that left one person dead and dozens injured. At the center of the chaos is a statue memorializing Robert E. Lee.

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"History is what the present chooses to remember about the past." ~ Carl Becker (AHA President, 1931)
You may have found this webpage thanks to National Geographic Channel's documentary series, "AMERICA INSIDE OUT WITH KATIE COURIC." The premiere episode, "Re-Righting History," discusses various perspectives and controversies in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last August. Historical context is essential for understanding the legacy of Confederate monuments and the contemporary debates over their place in public spaces. The American Historical Association is proud to provide a resource for our communities to engage in these conversations, and we will gladly provide any community with a list of historians qualified to contribute the relevant expertise. We hope you will read through this collection of resources to expand your knowledge of the issues raised in "Re-Righting History."

The American Historical Association is the nation's largest organization advocating for history education, the professional work of historians, and the critical role of historical thinking in public life. We welcome history advocates in all fields of work to join us. You can to learn more about the AHA.

AHA Statement on Confederate Monuments (August 2017)

In the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy, the AHA released a statement about the role of history and historians in these public conversations. Rather than seeking to provide definitive answers to the questions posed by individual monuments, the AHA emphasizes the imperative of understanding historical context in any consideration of removing or recontextualizing monuments, or renaming public spaces.

Resources on Confederate Monuments and History

On this page, you will find links to interviews, op-eds, and other writings that our members, fellow historical societies, AHA Council members, and staff have made about the importance of historical thinking and knowledge within the current debate. If you would like to find a historian who can speak to your community, please contact Jane Green for a referral.

AHA Teaching Resources

The Future of the African American Past Video Resources (August 2017)

AHA Council, Letter of Support for National Monument to Reconsruction (November 16, 2016)

James Grossman, " Whose Memory? Whose Monuments? History, Commemoration, and the Struggle for an Ethical Past," Perspectives on History (February 1, 2016)

Carol Anderson, " K-12 Educators Workshop: The Long Civil Rights Movement," AHA Annual Meeting (January 9, 2016)

Sarah Fenton, " AHA Plenary: "The Confederacy, Its Symbols, and the Politics of Public Culture," AHA Today (January 9, 2016)

Stephanie Kingsley, " Plotting Freedom: Data Mapping Leads to New Visions of Reconstruction," Perspectives on History (October 1, 2015)

Seth Denbo, " All History Is Local: Debating the Fate of a Confederate Soldier Statue in Maryland," AHA Today (July 27, 2015)

Ernie Price, " Footsteps to Freedom: Rethinking the Legacy of Appomattox," AHA Today (May 26, 2015)

James Grossman, " Historical Malpractice and the Writing of Textbooks," Perspectives on History (December 1, 2010)

AHA Council Op-Eds and Interviews

David Bell, " Is It Still Okay to Venerate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?" Washington Post (August 17, 2017)

Kevin Boyle, " Charlottesville Violence Was the Result of Political Pressure Cooker, Experts Say," Boston Globe (August 13, 2017)

Kevin Boyle, " Donald Trump's response to Charlottesville - too little too late?," CBC (August 15, 2017)

Kevin Boyle, " Five books to shed light on America's problem with white supremacy," The Guardian (August 18, 2017)

Tyler Stovall, " Irena's Lamp," Perspectives on History (December 2017)

AHA Executive Director Interviews

Goldie Blumenstyk, " When White Supremacists Descend, What Can a College President Do?" Chronicle of Higher Education (August 12, 2017)

Jennifer Schuessler, " Historians Question Trump's Comments on Confederate Monuments," New York Times (August 15, 2017)

Michael Steele, " You Can't Erase History. What Has Happened Has Happened," Steele and Ungar Show (August 16, 2017)

Lucía Cohen, " La ignorante comparación que hace Trump de los generales sureños con Washington y Jefferson," Univision (August 16, 2017)

James Grossman, " Monuments Removed," CNN Newsroom (August 16, 2017)

Lindsey Bever, " Politicians Blamed 'Both Sides' during the Civil Rights Movement," Washington Post (August 16, 2017)

Kristine Phillips, " Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson Are Not the Same as Confederate Generals," Washington Post (August 16, 2017)

Judith Siers-Poisson, " Confederate Memorials Removed from Madison Cemetery," Wisconsin Public Radio (August 17, 2017)

Rhod Sharp, " Listen at 1:26:15," BBC Radio 5 Live (August 17, 2017)

Kellie Meyer, " Debate over Removing Confederate Statues on Capitol Hill," Gray TV (August 17, 2017)

James Grossman, " A Historian Explains Why Trump's Defense of Confederate Statues Doesn't Make Any Sense," ATTN: Video (August 17, 2017)

James Grossman, " Listen at 0:00:50," BBC World Service Radio Newsday (August 17, 2017)

Nova Safo, " Are Confederate Monuments Important Works of Art?" Agence France-Presse (August 18, 2017)

James Grossman, " The History of Confederate Statues," Radio National Breakfast - AuBC (August 18, 2017)

Jon Schuppe, " Toppling of Confederate Statues Fuels Opposition to Other Markers," NBC News (August 18, 2017)

Viviana Mazza, " E le statue sovietiche? Spostare I monumenti non cancella mai la Storia," Corriere della Sera (August 18, 2017)

"Interview with James Grossman," Medi1 Moroccan Radio (August 18, 2017)

Interview with Jim Grossman, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (August 18, 2017)

James Grossman, " Weekends with Alex Witt," Weekends with Alex Witt, MSNBC Live (August 19, 2017)

Kimberly Atkins, " James Grossman on Removal of Confederate Monuments," C-SPAN Washington Journal (August 20, 2017)

Miles Parks, " Confederate Statues Were Built to Further a 'White Supremacist Future'," NPR Politics (August 20, 2017)

AHA Member Op-Eds
* Indicates former Council member
Yoni Applebaum, " Take the Statues Down," The Atlantic (August 13, 2017)

Justin Behrend, " Steeped in Racism, Confederate Flag Evokes the Worst of Us," Livingston County News (August 17, 2017)

Günter Bischof, " Why Not a Confederate Theme Park?" New Orleans Advocate (August 20, 2015)

Adam Blackler, " White Supremacy on Campus: An Ahistorical Campaign of Racial Prejudice," The Society Pages (March 14, 2017)

*David Blight, "' The Civil War Lies on Us Like a Sleeping Dragon': America's Deadly Divide-and Why It Has Returned," The Guardian (August 20, 2017)

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, " I've Studied Confederate Memorials. Here's What to Do about Them," Vox.com (August 18, 2017)

Edward Carson, " Confederate Monuments and American Citizenship," Christian Century (March 22, 2016)

Jane Censer, " Historians: 'Defending History' is Complicated in the US," CNN Opinion (August 19, 2017)

Julian Chambliss, " Don't Call Them Memorials," Frieze.com (August 17, 2017)

Marcia Chatelain, " How Universities Embolden White Nationalists," Chronicle of Higher Education (August 17, 2017)

Christopher Church, " UNR History Professor's Letter to Students about Charlottesville," Reno Gazette-Journal (August 16, 2017)

Anthony Comegna, " Debasing Roger Taney," Libertarianism.org (August 21, 2017)

Nathan Connolly, " Charlottesville Showed That Liberalism Can't Defeat White Supremacy. Only Direct Action Can," Washington Post (August 15, 2017)

Jane Dailey, " Baltimore's Confederate Monument Was Never About 'History and Culture,'" Huffington Post (August 17, 2017)

Rebecca Davis, " Condemning Racism Is a Start, But We Have Work to Do in Delco," Delaware County Times (August 17, 2017)

Jerome de Groot, " Monuments to the Past," History Today (August 17, 2017)

Catherine Denial, " Wrestling with America's Past," Galesburg Register-Mail (August 20, 2017)

Chris Doyle, " So, Do We Pull Down George Washington's Statue?" Hartford Courant (August 17, 2017)

Laura Edwards, " Why Confederate Statues Fails to Represent Southern History," The Hill (August 23, 2017)

Jennifer Evans, " The Nazi Next Door-Make No Mistake, White Supremacists Live among Us," Ottawa Citizen (August 18, 2017)

*Eric Foner, " Confederate Statues and 'Our' History," New York Times (August 20, 2017)

Lesley Gordon, " Empty Pedestals: What Should Be Done with Civic Monuments to the Confederacy and Its Leaders?" Civil War Times (October 2017)

Adam Goodheart, " Regime Change in Charlottesville," Politico (August 16, 2017)

Annette Gordon-Reed, " Charlottesville: Why Jefferson Matters," New York Review of Books (August 19, 2017)

Sarah Handley-Cousins, " Falling Out of Love with the Civil War," Nursing Clio (August 21, 2017)

Jeffery Herf, " Lessons from German History after Charlottesville," History News Network (September 10, 2017)

Brian Hosmer, " Trauma, Reconciliation, and Historical Responsibility," Reconciliation Annual Symposium (May 2016)

Kyung Moon Hwang, " Monuments Are Not Untouchable," The Korea Times (August 30, 2017)

Mark Jacobson, " Rename US Army Bases for Heroes, not Confederates," Defense One (August 17, 2017)

Caroline E. Janney, " Why We Need Confederate Monuments," Washington Post (July 17, 2017)

Ibram Kendi, " What Would Jefferson Say about White Supremacists Descending upon His University?" Washington Post (August 13, 2017)

Keri Leigh, " Charlottesville and the Confederate Legacy ," Bill Moyers (August 17, 2017)

Jim Leloudis, " History Speaks on Intentions Behind Confederate Statues," The News & Observer (August 23, 2017)

Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor, " After Charlottesville," Medium (August 22, 2017)

Patrick Lewis, " History Is a High Stakes Profession," Kentucky Historical Society (August 15, 2017)

Stuart MacKay, " Those Confederate Monuments Are Built on Racist Lies. Tear Them Down," iPolitics (August 17, 2017)

Nancy McTygue, " We Can Do Better: Lessons from Charlottesville," California History-Social Science Project (August 14, 2017)

Keri Leigh Merritt, " Charlottesville and the Confederate Legacy," Moyers & Co. (August 17, 2017)

David Motadel, " The United States Was Never Immune to Fascism. Not Then, Not Now," The Guardian (August 17, 2017)

Carly Muetterties, " The Histories Told and Ignored at Cheapside," Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (August 16, 2017)

Giuliana Perrone, " Confederate Monuments Always Embodied a White Heritage of Hate," Haaretz (August 17, 2017)

David Perry, " Why It's Important To Name The Nazis," Pacific Standard (August 17, 2017)

Katherine Pickering Antonova, " How the British Defeated Homegrown Fascism-and How Americans Can Do the Same," Washington Post (August 16, 2017)

Susan Reverby, " This Doctor Experimented on Slaves: It's Time to Remove or Redo His Statue ," The Hastings Center (August 7, 2017)

Jon Sensbach, " The Face of Terror, 1931 to Today," Daily Progress (August 16, 2017)

Daniel Sherman, et. al., " Tear Down the Confederate Monuments-But What Next? 12 Art Historians and Scholars on the Way Forward," ArtNetNews (August 23, 2017)

Nina Silber, " Worshiping the Confederacy Is about White Supremacy-Even the Nazis Thought So," Washington Post (August 17, 2017)

Manisha Sinha, " Heather Heyer Is Part of a Long Tradition of White Anti-Racism Activists," Washington Post (August 16, 2017)

Manisha Sinha, " What Those Monuments Stand For," New York Daily News (August 18, 2017)

Richard Steigmann-Gall, " How to Resist the Trump Administration: Lessons from Nazi Germany," Huffington Post (January 5, 2017)

Richard Steigmann-Gall, " Star-Spangled Fascism: American Interwar Political Extremism in Comparative Perspective," Taylor and Francis Online (January 6, 2017)

Richard Steigmann-Gall, " One Expert Says Yes, Donald Trump is a Fascist. And It's Not Just Trump," Huffington Post (July 18, 2016)

Paul Sturtevant, " Leaving 'Medieval' Charlottesville," The Public Medievalist (August 17, 2017)

Jeremi Suri, " The Guns of Auguest 'Locked and Loaded'," American Prospect (August 16, 2017)

Marc Tucker, " Teaching History in Troubled Times," Education Week (August 23, 2017)

Nancy Unger, " From 'Sip-in' to the Hairpin Drop Hear Round the World, Protests Can Work," Nursing Clio (March 23, 2017)

Kevin Waite, " The Largest Confederate Monument in America Can't Be Taken Down," Washington Post (August 22, 2017)

Kevin Waite, " The Struggle over Slavery Was Not Confined to the South, LA Has a Confederate Memorial Problem Too," Los Angeles Times (August 4, 2017)

Jason Ward, " The Myth of Southern Blood," Washington Post (August 21, 2017)

Darin Waters, " Whose Story? Democratizing America&rsquo;s Collective Historical Memory," Mountain Xpress (June 16, 2014)

Victoria W. Wolcott, " Six Flags has taken down its Confederate flag. But that's not the only legacy of Jim Crow at the park.," Washington Post (August 28, 2017)

Timothy Wright, " Removing Confederate Memorial Will Not Erase Seattle's History of White Supremacy ," Seattle Times (August 21, 2017)

Jonathan Zimmerman, " The Civil War, Race, and the Whitewashing of History," Newsday (August 14, 2017)

Jonathan Zimmerman, " In Charlottesville, Some on the Left Attacked Free Speech: Even White Supremacists Get to Talk without Being Hit," New York Daily News (August 16, 2017)

Jonathan Zimmerman, " The Progressive Case for Keeping Confederate Statues Standing: We Shouldn't Cart Away Reminders to Our White Supremacist History," New York Daily News (August 21, 2017)

AHA Member Interviews
* Indicates former Council member
Interview with Sean Adams, " Daytona Beach Removes Confederate Markers," Daytona Beach News-Journal (August 17, 2017)

Interview with Jennifer Allen, " What Our Monuments (Don't) Teach Us About Remembering The Past," NPR Code Switch (August 23, 2017)

Interview with David Atkinson, " Before Charlottesville, Purdue Got a White Nationalist Wake-Up Call," Journal & Courier (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Ed Ayers, " Battle over Confederate Monuments Renewed after Charlottesville Violence," NBC Nightly News (August 15, 2017)

Interview with Ed Ayers, " The History of White Supremacist Groups in the US," NPR Here and Now (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Ed Ayers, " The Shifting History of Confederate Monuments," PBS NewsHour (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Brian Balogh, " Moral Leadership in the Wake Of Charlottesville," Christian Science Monitor (August 15, 2017)

Interview with Brian Balogh, "' Sadly, This Is Not New': UVA Professor Reflects on History of Racism in America," EdSurge (August 15, 2017)

Interview with Brian Balogh, " Shock and Outrage at University of Virginia after White Nationalist Rally," NPR Here and Now (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Brian Balogh, " White Supremacists Don't Just Arrive in Charlottesville. They've Always Been There," Washington Post (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, " President Trump and the Alt-Right: A Test of Leadership," NPR On Point (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Marty Blatt, " Reckoning with the Past: The Civil War and Its Role in Current Politics," News@Northeastern (May 12, 2017)

Interview with *David Blight, " Confronting Hate: Tolerance, Intolerance, and the Rise of White Nationalism," WNPR Where We Live (August 22, 2017)

Interview with Nathan Connolly, " The Statue at the Center of Charlottesville's Storm," New York Times (August 13, 2017)

Interview with *David Blight, " Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?," The New Yorker (August 14, 2017)

Interview with *David Blight, " How the Cult of Robert E. Lee Was Born," History (August 14, 2017)

Interview with *David Blight, " Stunned historians wrestle with calls to remove Confederate statues," Boston Globe (August 21, 2017)

Interview with A'Lelia Bundles, " Trump Defiantly Defends White Nationalists, Provoking Fury," MSNBC (August 16, 2017)

Interview with *David Blight, " Racism in America: Should the U.S. Get Rid of All Confederate Monuments?," Newsweek (September 9, 2017)

Interview with Nathan Connolly, " The History of White Supremacist Groups in the US," NPR Here and Now (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Nathan Connolly, " Terror in Charlottesville," WYPR (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Matt Drwenski, " Matt Drwenski at Houston City Council Public Forum 8/15/2017," Houston City Council Public Forum (August 15, 2017)

Interview with Donna Gabaccia, "' Say No to Hate': Hundreds of Toronto Rally Decry Racial Violence in Charlottesville Attack," CBC News (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Alexi Garrette, " Listen at 0:19:20," BBC Outside Source (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Joy Hakim, " What Should Teachers Say about the Hate Speech Seen in Charlottesville?" USA Today (August 14, 2017)

Interview with David Hopkins, " Midland College Professor Explains Recent Racially Motivated Rallies from Historical Standpoint," News West0 (August 18, 2017)

Interview with Ann Keating, " Confederate Monument Stands on Chicago's South Side as Questions Swirl around the Country," Chicago Tribune (August 17, 2017)

Interview with Ibram Kendi, " Panel Discuss Family Repudiates Son Over Racist Charlottes Ville Rally. #Virginia #Breaking," CNN (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Ibram Kendi, " Washingtonians Process Violence And White Nationalism In Charlottesville, Va.," The Kojo Nnamdi Show (August 14, 2017)

Interview with JoAnne Mancini, " There Has Always Been a Discomfort about the Statues," Newstalk (August 18, 2017)

Interview with Glenna Matthews, " California Confronts Its Confederate Past as Monuments Are Abruptly Removed," Los Angeles Times (August 16, 2017)

Mary Niall Mitchel, " A Tale of Two Cities: New Orleans and the Fight Over Confederate Monuments," The History Channel (May 11, 2017)

Interview with David Nirenberg, " Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed with Jews," The Atlantic (August 15, 2017)

News coverage of Jenifer Parks, " Understanding Confederate Monuments: Crowd Hears from Montana Historians at Billings Library," Billings Gazette (October 10, 2017)

Interview with Sara Patenaude, " Group Seeking to Remove Decatur's Confederate Monument May Have Found a Legal Solution," Decaturish.com (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Sara Patenaude, " Legal Questions Loom over Georgia Confederate Memorials," Fox 5 Atlanta (August 17, 2017)

Interview with Christopher Phelps, " White Supremacists Have Been Emboldened by Trump," Aljazeera (August 13, 2017)

Interview with Jason Phillips, " Heritage Vs. Hate: A Military Historian Explains Confederate Memorials in the Mountain State," WV MetroNews (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Jason Philips, " Sunday Edition with Stacy Smith," KDKA-TA Pittsburgh (August 20, 2017)

Interview with Jason Phillips, " Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval," WV MetroNews (August 21, 2017)

Interview with Blain Roberts, " Southern States-and Trump-Resist Calls to Remove Confederate Memorials," McClatchy (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Blain Roberts, " Unsure about Confederate Statues? Ask Yourself If You Support White Supremacy," Fresno Bee (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Blain Roberts, " Fresno State Professor on Confederate Monuments: 'It's the Moral Thing to Do to Take Them Down,'" Your Central Valley (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Joshua Rothman, "#RaceNYT Video," New York Times (Facebook video) (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Adam Rothman, " Confederate Statues Are Coming Down across America," WUSA9 Offscript (August 17, 2017)

Interview with Adam Rothman, " The Story behind DC's Confederate General Statue," WUSA9 Offscript (August 15, 2017)

Interview with Ann Rubenstein, " Say No to Hate': Hundreds at Toronto Rally Decry Racial Violence in Charlottesville Attack," CBC News (August 14, 2017)

Interview with Jonathan Sarna, " Jewish Leaders Say Anti-Semitism around the Nation Is a Disturbing Trend," NPR Around the Nation (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Howard Segal, " WVII Interviews Segal for Story on KKK's History in Maine," WVII Channel 7 (November 22, 2016)

Interview with Manisha Sinha, " FACT CHECK: Did Robert E. Lee Oppose Slavery?" Daily Caller (August 15, 2017)

Interview with Manisha Sinha, " Why The North Honored Confederates: 'These Are Not Just Innocuous Monuments'," Gothamist (August 17, 2017)

Interview with Kevin Waite, " Does Los Angeles Have a Confederate Problem?" KCRW Radio (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Kevin Waite, " Hollywood Forever Cemetery Removes Confederate Monument," KPCC Radio (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Darin Waters, " The Future of the Vance Monument Pt. 1-A Closer Look at Zebulon Vance's Political Career," Blue Ridge Public Radio (August 8, 2017)

Interview with Darin Waters, " NC Confederate statue Debate Likely to Include Vance Monument," Citizen-Times (August 16, 2017)

Interview with Kidada Williams, " A More Perfect Union? The Reconstruction Era," BackStory (March 31, 2017)

Interview with Kidada Williams, " How Should We Deal with Monuments to Deeply Flawed Historical Figures?" WDET Detroit Today (August 17, 2017)

Interview with Jonathan Zimmerman, " Confederate monuments Removed and Covered Up Overnight across the US," The National (CBC News) (August 16, 2017)

Historical Society Statements

On Race and Medieval Studies, A Collective Statement by Medievalists of Color (August 1, 2017)

On Charlottesville and the Study of the South, Center for the Study of the American South (August 15, 2017)

Charlottesville and the Mississippi Flag, Joint Statement of Mississippi College Professors, Jackson Free Press (August 21, 2017)

Statement on Charlottesville, National Council on Public History (August 16, 2017)

Medievalists Respond to Charlottesville, The Medieval Academy of America et al. (August 1, 2017)

NEHA Statement on Charlottesville, Racism and History, New England Historical Association (August, 24, 2017)

ASALH's Position on Confederate Monuments, Association for the Study of African American Life and History (September 2017)

Statement on Confederate Monuments, North Carolina Preservation Consortium (September 26, 2017)

Other Collections

" Charlottesville: HNN's Full Coverage," History News Network

Interactive Resources

See how historians are using the Clio app to offer interpretations of monuments and historic markers around the country. You can join in this crowd-sourced guide to history in your own backyard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America Inside Out: Historians on the Confederate Monument Debate | AHA

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"History is what the present chooses to remember about the past." ~ Carl Becker (AHA President, 1931) You may have found this webpage thanks to National Geographic Channel's documentary series, "AMERICA INSIDE OUT WITH KATIE COURIC ." The premiere episode, "Re-Righting History," discusses various perspectives and controversies in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last August.

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C- September 26, 2018
R-  Yes
A-  The Guardian
A-  No
P- Inform

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ape Town was the first. In March 2015, a student named Chumani Maxwele brought a bucket filled with shit to the University of Cape Town, where there stood a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond magnate, colonial politician and avowed white supremacist. "There is no collective history here - where are our heroes and ancestors?" Maxwele announced. He splashed the contents of the bucket over the monument.

The incident attracted national attention and within days had grown into a full-scale protest. Students covered the Rhodes statue with graffiti and plastic bags, and promised to demonstrate until it was removed. The statue had drawn criticism before, but none of such sustained anger, even though there was no mistaking what the Rhodes monument represented. Erected in 1934, it occupied the very centre of the campus, the bronze Rhodes gazing out over the city as though contemplating creation: his and, perhaps, God's.

Rhodes believed black Africans were a "subject race" and that white rule was the natural order. The setting and the figure's obvious stylistic debt to Rodin's The Thinker symbolised the "civilisational" ambitions Rhodes harboured for the colony he governed, ambitions made plain by the inscription from Kipling along the plinth: "I dream my dream / By rock and heath and pine / Of empire to the northward / Ay, one land / From Lion's head to line."

But there was an air of fragility, of the elegaic, at work too: the figure that looks out from its seat in photos from before the protests is bare-headed, middle-aged, mortal. It is Cecil Rhodes near the end of his life. (He died in 1902.) He contemplates his life's work, and with it, the future that will come to pass without him. The monument didn't satisfy itself with celebrating Rhodes; it lamented that he did not live long enough to enjoy the white-ruled South Africa he helped to create.

When the statue was installed in the pre-apartheid era, white rule couldn't be taken for granted - not yet. The suffering of its black residents needed to be naturalised first, and to that end the monument cast Rhodes's life's work as a noble struggle, with his supposed civilisational achievements implicitly justifying his policies and the pain they caused. If black Africans were admitted into this anxious reality, it was so their suffering could be diminished and finally negated. They were the obstacle Rhodes surmounted. In place of their suffering we got, obscenely, his suffering.

The statue finally came down a few weeks after the Rhodes Must Fall protests began. It had stood for more than 80 years, including through two decades of majority black rule under the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela. The protests and the removal of the statue took the South African establishment by surprise, including those, such as the then president, Jacob Zuma, and the archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who a generation earlier had helped end apartheid.

The blindness of the everyday

There was a time not long ago (though it feels like forever) when a kind of blindness was possible as you moved through your city - any city. You could step out of your front door and cross street after street without giving much thought to the former colonies and forgotten diplomats they memorialised; go to school or work in a building named for a famous statesman without doing a moral accounting of his achievements; eat your lunch beneath the statue of another long-ago luminary renowned for his charity without wondering about the provenance of his wealth; stop on your way home to take in a view of the city at night without imagining what, or who, was there before. To never wonder, never imagine: this was possible if your skin was a certain colour.

This is the blindness of the everyday. We grow used to the spaces we inhabit. We stop seeing them. And we grow used to the ideas around us until we can't see them either. Not long ago it was possible to believe the past was irrelevant - that history had no purchase on the postcolonial, post-cold war, post-everything present. With the horrors of the 20th century behind us, the free market would deliver us into a future where democracy and prosperity were available to all. (Again, this was easier to believe if your skin was a certain colour, if you belonged to a certain class, if you had a certain set of experiences.)

Little by little, that narrative began to fray. The growth and exuberance of the 1990s set the tone for a decade of reckless military adventurism, financial deregulation and economic globalisation, which in turn gave us the disastrous wars in Iraq and Syria, a market crash, multiple refugee crises and massive, rising inequality. At some point along the way, around the time of Brexit and Donald Trump, the ideas we took for granted lost their explanatory power. All around us the historical forces that have always shaped our lives have become visible. The urban monuments we barely noticed have become the centre of protest movements around the world.

As the Cape Town protests spread across South Africa, students at Oxford University in England launched their own version of Rhodes Must Fall: they marched on a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, demanding it be torn down and that the university curriculum be changed to reflect the diversity of thought beyond the western canon.

In Berlin, social justice groups launched a campaign to rename the African Quarter because of its connection with Germany's genocidal colonial reign in the early 20th century. The protests have challenged Germany's self-image as a bastion of tolerance, coming as they have while the country struggles to integrate hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East.

Across the US, Confederate monuments have become the target of protests, most spectacularly in Charlottesville, where anti-racism activists clashed with white supremacists last August over a statue of Confederate army commander Robert E Lee. One woman who was peacefully protesting died and many people were injured. Trump defended the torch-wielding far-right extremists as "very fine people".

The fury of the counterprotests in Charlottesville and in other cities show how high the stakes in the so-called statue wars are, and how difficult removing the symbols of slavery and colonialism will be. But the protests continue to gain momentum. In the past month, protesters toppled the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina and defaced another monument in Virginia. The city of San Francisco quietly removed a 19th-century statue that celebrated the founding of California - and the humiliation of Native American peoples. Austin, Texas, is supposedly mulling a name change because of its namesake's association with slavery.

In Canada, the country's founding prime minister, Sir John A MacDonald, has become the focus of opposition for his role in the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. The city of Victoria recently announced it would remove his likeness from outside city hall, and MacDonald statues in Montreal and Regina were defaced as pressure mounted to recast his legacy.

From New York to Bristol to Sydney to Bulawayo, no monument is apparently safe.

'Fake news before there was fake news'

In a recent essay for the Guardian on the Oxford protests, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri wonders: "When is it possible to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols, and when does it become hard to do so?" Chaudhuri remembers visiting Oriel College as a student in the early 1990s and finding "its old-fogey students with monarchist enthusiasms, its conservatism ... uncharming but weirdly funny". During the visit he caught a glimpse of Enoch Powell, the former MP whose race-baiting "Rivers of Blood" speech a generation earlier was "synonymous with a dark moment in British history", and barely flinched. Chaudhuri didn't even notice the Rhodes statue that would become so controversial. Looking back, he marvels at how irrelevant any reminders of the colonial era felt, and how he shrugged them off so easily.

Our relationship to a statue, or a building, or a sign is always changing. Often the change is so gradual, happening over decades and generations, that the monument - the version of reality it embodies - simply recedes into the background. Of its time: this is the explanation we reach for as we shrug and walk past, if we've bothered to look at all. We make the assumption that the past is past, that those ideas and values no longer have the power to threaten or harm, or never did.

The reality is more complicated. For one thing, this is what monumentsdo: they normalise the past, for better or worse. They make injustices easier to defend and, more insidiously, harder to see. For another, it's the people most likely to defend those injustices who ultimately decide what is or isn't threatening, not the people who have been most affected. Only the dominance of the settler majorities in the US, Canada and Australia, for example, can explain their indifference to the statues of Theodore Roosevelt, John A MacDonald, and Captain James Cook that for many indigenous peoples have long represented genocide.

But as the past resonates in unexpected ways as social and economic conditions change, so a monument's power ebbs and flows. Its semiotics are always volatile. What the Oxford Rhodes represents to students of colour and their allies right now might be closer to what it represented to their counterparts in the 1960s, when the lived experience of colonialism was fresh, than either would be to Chaudhuri's cohort in the early 1990s, when - as Chaudhuri points out - multiculturalism was ascendant in Britain and their place in an equal, just society felt increasingly secure.

The hated Rhodes statue in Cape Town was relatively uncontroversial in the 1990s. It stood for more than two decades after apartheid, as did (and do) many other white supremacist monuments across South Africa. With Mandela's election and the transition to black majority rule, victory seemed total: the future was too bright for the past to matter very much.

The country embarked on a forward-looking restorative justice process whereby the perpetrators of apartheid were forgiven so South Africans could move on with the job of building a free and equal society. School curriculums were updated to play down the more painful aspects of the country's past and many black parents chose not to burden their children, the "Born Frees", with the history they had lived through and which had been so psychologically devastating. There was power in forgiveness, and in that moment of great optimism it was suddenly possible to regard the figure of Rhodes and feel pity or disgust rather than fear or anger. The statue now contemplated a city whose future, in spite of his life's work, belonged to all South Africans. Contemporary South Africa was a living, breathing repudiation of Rhodes's legacy. What need was there to remove the statue?

For black Americans, the symbols of the Confederacy have always had the power to menace. The many hundreds of monuments built in the century following emancipation speak to the brutal, persistent fact of white supremacy; that nearly all of them have remained standing through the civil rights era and the decades that followed, up to the present day, speaks to the fact that, however enlightened white Americans might think they are, their understanding of racism differs wildly from black Americans' experience of it.

If you believe that America is more or less equal, and whatever discrimination black people face is a problem with individual racists and not the symptom of a racist system, then you might struggle to appreciate the persistent, malevolent power of a stone likeness of Robert E Lee or Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Even if you dislike Confederate iconography, you might still struggle to grasp how fully the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow continue to circumscribe black lives, how they limit opportunity. If black people have failed to thrive in the post-civil rights era, you might convince yourself they just need to strive harder.

This way of thinking has deep, unbroken historical roots in the "Lost Cause" movement that emerged in the southern states after the civil war - what the historian and public monument expert Madge Dresser calls "fake news before there was fake news". Led by groups such as the United Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Lost Cause movement sought to recast the defeat of the Confederate army as something tragic and even noble.

In this version of history, the south went to war not to preserve the institution of slavery but to protect states' rights to self-determination against a federal government determined to impose its secular, cosmopolitan values on southerners' way of life. What was being defended was tradition, in other words, rather than economic self-interest. Central to this aggressive campaign of historical revisionism were pageants, plays, novels and monuments that portrayed the old south as a proud, Christian culture where men were chivalrous, women virtuous, and black people their spiritual and intellectual wards, in need of correction and uplift.

Hundreds of statues went up across the US between the 1890s and 1950s. Lee, the commander of the losing side, was a favourite avatar of this sentimental and dishonest vision. The Lee mythologised in the Charlottesville monument was brave, honourable and enlightened - if not opposed to slavery, then sensitive to its excesses.

Compare him with the man who emerges from the actual historical record, though, and the revisionism at the heart of the Lost Cause narrative becomes pretty clear: as Dresser noted in a TEDx talk, it was "under [Lee's] watch that the Confederate army kidnapped free blacks and slaves who had fled north, and forcibly returned them to slavery". The Lost Cause version of history is at such odds with established fact that when you peel away all the pomp and ceremony, you're left with kettle logic: the Confederacy didn't fight to preserve slavery, but even if it did, there were good slave owners, and anyway, those who were enslaved benefit ed from it. Like colonialism, it was a "civilising" mission.

The Lost Cause narrative shaped white Americans' understanding of slavery and racism. For southern segregationists at the turn of the 20th century, it was a way to reassert their identity within the union and recover a measure of dignity. For northern abolitionists, it was a bargain to be struck for the sake of national unity: let them have their statues and their Confederate flags if it brought them back into the fold. But it did something else too.

Comforting but destructive

These symbols of the Confederacy were allowed to mean very different things to different groups of white people, even as the symbols reaffirmed for both the cherished idea of America as a land of freedom and opportunity. The monumentalisation of figures like Lee allowed segregationists and abolitionists alike to invest themselves in the comforting and ultimately destructive idea that slavery (and, by extension, racism) was a "people" problem - bad slave owners, as the segregationists saw it; all slave owners, as the abolitionists did - and therefore not an "America" problem, not something woven into the fabric of the entire project of American capitalism from the very beginning. As the historian Ibram X Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, has pointed out:

When you make it about ignorance, you're not making it about power and policy and structures and systems, that the problem centrally is not America's institutions, is not the American story, is not American capitalism, that the problem is ignorant individuals. So it allows people to deny how fundamental racism has historically been to America.

By shifting the problem of racism on to the individual, white Americans of all political persuasions absolved themselves of their complicity in, and responsibility for dismantling, systemic racism.

This way of seeing things gained a new kind of legitimacy in the 1980s as American politics fell under the spell of the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek, who conceived of society itself as a market, and people as individual economic actors rather than, first and foremost, "bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties".Capitalism could even be the driver of racial progress: the free market would solve the "people problem" of racism because self-interest would lead everyone, eventually, to enlightenment - obviating the need for critical policy solutions. As the writer Pankaj Mishra has noted:

The cruellest trick used by both Republicans and Democrats was the myth that America had resolved the contradiction at the heart of its democracy. For the conviction that African-Americans were walking and running and would soon start flying, enabled by equal opportunity, paved the way for an insidious ideological force: colour-blind universalism.

During the cold war, any serious discussion about the deeper, structural causes of racial inequality was impossible because it required some degree of apostasy - entwined as the problem was with the very roots of American capitalism - and because inequality at home paled next to the threat of Soviet domination. The cold war limited the spectrum of political possibility, not just in the US but around the world. It hijacked the process of decolonisation happening in many of the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. There was to be no renegotiation of their relationships with the west on something like equal terms. Those relationships were reset instead along cold war faultlines.

In the scramble for ideological supremacy, the Americans and the Soviets traded money and arms for allegiance, intervening in elections and propping up sympathetic strongmen where necessary. The dynamic of patron state and client state obscured the dysfunction these fledgling nations inherited from the colonial regimes that preceded them, perpetuating and even exacerbating their inequality and brutality.

The fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s represented more than just a victory of capitalism over communism: it reaffirmed the Enlightenment narrative of progress, so badly tested by the horrors of the 20th century. Western-style liberal democracy was the destination, and free trade and globalisation were the twin engines that would take the world there. Neoliberalism's time had come.

The problem was that neoliberalism preserved classical liberalism's blind spots: its pretense to universalism (of the exceedingly white, male landowner variety) and over-idealisation of the market. Never mind the deep inequality that existed between and within nations: a deregulated global market would be the tide that lifted all boats. Applied as a broad, one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing impoverished and traumatised post-Soviet and postcolonial nations (as well as increasingly multicultural countries in the west, with complicated histories of their own), neoliberalism couldn't help but be disastrous for many people.

For a while, though, things looked pretty good. The economies of the west grew rapidly and countries such as China, India and Brazil began to emerge as economic powers in their own right. In many countries the upper and middle classes flourished. Even if your own situation was tenuous, a kind of aspirational fellow-travelling was still possible. From your vantage point on the lower rungs of wealthier countries or the middle rungs of poorer ones, you might watch other people growing richer and think, One day that will be me. The promise of neoliberalism was the promise that the burden of history was being lifted from your shoulders.

And this was true in a sense: the victory of the west over the Soviet Union lifted the threat of global cataclysm that had existed for most of the previous 75 years. But the psychological weight of the cold war and now the euphoria and triumphalism of the neoliberal moment obscured the other forces of history that had been (and still were) bearing down on you all along. All of which paved the way for the hubris of the 21st century's first decade.

Fast-forward to 2018. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have displaced nearly 20 million people, part of the largest refugee crisis in modern history. The top 1% of people now own half of global wealth, while the bottom 70% account for less than 3%. The past few years have seen the Great Recession, the steady breakdown of international norms, the rise of illiberal democracy and re-entrenchment of authoritarian regimes, and the emergence of rightwing populism in the west, leading to the self-inflicted wounds of Brexit and the Trump presidency. Meanwhile the world faces a new existential crisis: climate change. The impact of decades of unchecked growth is now undeniable, with rising temperatures and quickening cycles of natural disasters that threaten new calamities every day.

Suddenly life feels overdetermined, shaped by forces larger than any individual, community or nation. Larger than the now. In the anxious present, it has become very hard indeed for anyone to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols of the past.

In an article published not long after the Cape Town protests broke out, young activists describe the experiences that led them to Rhodes Must Fall. Chumani Maxwele, the student who started the protests, recalls looking around his neighbourhood and struggling to understand why, nearly two decades after the end of white rule, everyone was still so poor. A student from an upper-middle-class background remembers seeing the mostly white faces and white professors in his classes and wondering why he was the exception. A third student remembers having to discover for herself the works of black thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko because they weren't taught at school.

Each was troubled by the feeling that the world around them didn't make sense, and little by little they began to connect the inequality of the present to the past that Rhodes represented. The South African government's well-meaning attempt at a clean break with history played a significant role in the alienation of the post-apartheid generation. As the upper-middle-class student says in the story: "Our experience of racism is worse. It's subliminal. The form of racism that makes you ignorant about your subjugation."

Those policies alone don't explain the sudden fury of the protests, though. Even as the ANC had tackled the problem of race with a comprehensive programme of reconciliation, it did not dismantle apartheid's economic legacy to alleviate the poverty of the many. Instead the government pursued a long-term strategy of austerity and privatisation, which entrenched the highly stratified society in slightly different form: a tiny group of white and now black South Africans at the top, a small black bourgeoisie in the middle, and a massive black underclass. No surprise, then, that for the students who came of age in the post-apartheid era, the Rhodes statue would be flush with menace once again.

The cognitive dissonance the students describe is not unique to Cape Town or South Africa. As the lens through which people view the world comes to feel insufficient, they go looking for deeper explanations and discover the buried continuities between the injustices of the past and the present. For the Oxford protesters, it's the privatisation of British society and, as Chaudhuri notes, "gradual extinction ... of the ideals of multiculturalism" over the past several decades. For Americans, it is extreme inequality, which has made reconciling the idea of America with the grim prospects they face nearly impossible. And so on.

But many other people have arrived at the opposite conclusion: the situation is bad today because we have strayed too far from the way things used to be. The nostalgia of Brexit and Make America Great Again is exactly an appeal to the consoling idea (for some white people) that the moral failures of the past are, in fact, the triumphs we once thought they were.

Statues, buildings and street signs have become flashpoints because they embody the tension between these two worldviews.

Reconciliation

So what should we do with troublesome monuments? Based on the media coverage that the Cape Town and other protests have attracted, you'd be forgiven for thinking that controversial monuments are falling all the time, all over the world. In fact, most - including the statue at the centre of the tragic Charlottesville protests, and the vast majority in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - remain untouched.

There are those who would remove the most offensive signs and statues (the so-called antagonistic approach), those who would modify them to reflect contemporary sensibilities (agonism), and those who would leave them alone (conservatism).

Conservatism is clearly the easiest option, and the least tenable one because if the past is not past, and some monuments never totally lose their power to threaten certain groups of people, then they can't be left to stand unaltered. We have a responsibility to take those threats seriously whether we see them at first glance or not. They are not idle threats: these monuments have not lost their power to normalise the dominance of one group of people over another. At best they seem embarrassing or irrelevant; at worst they help to nourish an aggrieved sense of superiority among what is clearly a growing number of people. The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville is only one of the more obvious examples of their everyday toxic effect.

On the other hand, what is actually lost when a statue of Rhodes or Lee falls? Virtually all western cities are monuments to colonialism. Either they were superimposed on earlier indigenous settlements (New York), founded to support the trade in slaves and natural resources (Cape Town), or substantially built with capital extracted from the colonies (pretty much any major European city). Removing a few of the most egregious statues will not, as some people fear, erase the histories of these places, nor diminish the cultural heritage their residents are, for better and worse, heir to.

Dresser makes the case that something else is lost: an opportunity. "As a historian, I love the idea that you have all these different statues from different eras that represent changing value systems - a palimpsest that enriches the urban landscape," she tells me. "But then I'm not a black student in Oxford feeling that the white imagination is excluding me from belonging, which is important. So do we eviscerate this historical building? If we get rid of problematic statues, we foreclose the discussions we can have about those statues, which is important to the evolution of our shared identity. But if we keep them, what are we saying to these students?"

Oxford University has tried to stake out the middle ground, announcing that the Rhodes statue at Oriel College will stay, with modifications that "draw attention to this history [and] do justice to the complexity of the debate". Proposals include building a second version of the statue that could be defaced with graffiti. This idea of agonism is appealing: it seems both creative and reasonable. Cities such as Asunción, Hamburg and Odessa have all invited artists to rework and recontextualise statues with troubling legacies, with interesting and even powerful results. In Asunción, a hated statue of the former dictator Alfredo Stroessner was crushed and the pieces reassembled into a much-praised monument to those who resisted his regime.

Amin Husain, one of the organisers of recent protests at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that saw a statue of Theodore Roosevelt splattered with red paint, argues that agonism doesn't go far enough. The problem with keeping but modifying statues, he says, "is that it's still the dominant group that sets the terms of the debate. Shouldn't affected communities have a say? If you want to learn from it, but you don't want to perpetuate that mythology that is doing harm every day, you can put it in a museum or a statue garden."

Even if agonism can work as a dialogue between cities and affected communities, it is limited in what it can do. It remains centred on the sins of the coloniser, in relation to which the colonised are thus always secondary. We can modify statues to recognise historical truths, and to perform a kind of apology, but that's as far as agonism goes. Given the now impossible-to-ignore continuity between the misdeeds of the past and the conditions people face in the present, this feels insufficient.

No single solution - leave up, tear down, modify - is equal to the problem, because each is zero-sum when applied case by case. A thoroughgoing approach that considers each case in relation to the larger urban landscape might be needed to tackle such complexity. Modify some monuments to reflect those histories, whether by adding interpretive signs or re-engineering them. Tear down others to make space for new ones that represent affected communities on their own terms, not just in relation to their victimisation. Representation is critical.

Vancouver, where I live, offers an unlikely example of what that approach might look like. Today the city is known for its easygoing charm and expensive real estate. 150 years ago, and for millennia before that, the area was the hunting and fishing grounds of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their settlements dotted the shores of the Burrard inlet and Fraser and Capilano rivers. The arrival of Europeans and founding of Vancouver precipitated their almost total erasure over the next 150 years.

In 2014, Vancouver declared itself a "city of reconciliation", formally recognising its occupation of the unceded territories and embarking with local First Nations governments on a longterm plan to decolonise and indigenise the city. To begin with, some streets, parks, schools and landmarks will be renamed, including Siwash Rock, a well-known sea stack near Stanley Park whose name (derived from the French word for "savage") is seen as an offensive slur against indigenous people.

The new names will be specific to the group whose territory the landmark or sign is on - for example, Sir William Macdonald elementary school, which sits on Musqueam territory, recently became Xpey' elementary school, meaning "cedar" in the local hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Halkomelem) language. The University of British Columbia, which also sits on Musqueam territory, has replaced all of the street signs on campus with bilingual street English-hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ ones. The sites of historical villages will be reinscribed with signs and interpretive displays, and other artistic interventions. "The point is to make sure Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh are reflected and visible everywhere in Vancouver," Ginger Gosnell-Myers, the city's aboriginal relations manager, tells me.

Renaming and monumentalisation are only the most obvious aspect of the process. "Colonial structures permeate every part of the city, from the place names to the architecture and the use of space, even the way city departments are organised," Gosnell-Myers says. "So for reconciliation to actually work, the plan needed to be comprehensive, too." Inspired by a similar exercise in New Zealand, the partners have together created a set of indigenous design principles that will inform the design of all future public space in Vancouver - including sightlines and building materials, the ways structures relate to the natural environment, and how they are used. There will be greater emphasis on communal, intergenerational public spaces, for example, because in the local indigenous cultures, all buildings are meant to be used by all people.

Everyone agrees that reconciliation can't just be about the past; it must be forward-looking. "When we say we want to indigenise the city, the first thing somebody's going to say is that we need to put a longhouse [a traditional dwelling] here," Gosnell-Myers says. "But what does a city with contemporary indigenous culture look like? A mixture of the wood and the glass and the metal from a design standpoint?"

The challenge is that Vancouver does not have any Musqueam, Squamish or Tsleil-Waututh architects or urban designers, because local indigenous people have for so long been shut out of opportunities for education and professional advancement. "We could have done the easy thing and hired indigenous architects from other parts of Canada," she said, "but it's not true to who we are as a city of reconciliation." Part of the process is training local indigenous designers and planners who can translate and synthesise their cultures into contemporary urban forms. In the meantime, the city has begun the work of hiring indigenous professionals across all departments, from engineering to finance, so that every civic decision takes indigenous perspectives into account.

Obviously, not every city would benefit from the same solutions as Vancouver. Even the success of the City of Reconciliation project is not assured. For one thing, Vancouver must solve its longstanding affordability crisis - the result of decades of policies geared toward globalising the local real estate market - which affects indigenous and other vulnerable groups disproportionately. If indigenous people can't afford to live in the city, then "reinscribing" their presence will amount to a branding exercise. Such a risk raises the much bigger question of whether decolonisation is even possible within capitalism as it is currently constituted.

But in spirit at least, the project shows how cities might begin to rethink their relationship to the past. Public space is one of the few truly populist mediums we still have, especially as people retreat in their private lives to the echo chambers of social media. If, as Dresser argues, the right tends to be "more effective at mobilising public opinion because they focus less on abstract, universal values and more on the particulars of place, historic and family traditions ... on people's emotions and their need for belonging," then here is a way to engage people with the facts of historical injustice while also appealing to their sense of belonging.

For minority groups, this means seeing themselves represented in ways that recognise their historical marginalisation but also go well beyond that, making their contemporary perspectives and experiences a central part of civic culture. For everyone else, this means relating to these perspectives and experiences as we move through the city every day, in ways that include but aren't limited to that painful history. It is in spaces where everyone belongs that justice and equality begins.

A new consensus on reality?

We live in uncertain times. As neoliberalism stutters and falters, political space is opening up. For the xenophobia and illiberalism of Trump and his imitators, yes, but also for the emancipatory politics of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Idle No More, Rhodes Must Fall and monument protests around the world. They are as bold as any in recent memory. Even if they don't amount to a single movement, we are seeing a shift in thinking in the west; a repudiation not just of the neoliberal status quo but of the deeper historical structures that support it.

It's an open question whether, in this era of fake news and hyperpartisan politics, we can even hope for something like a new consensus on reality: a set of facts, a way of seeing the world to replace the neoliberal narrative we are leaving behind. That won't stop people from trying to establish one, in good faith and bad, and without resistance it is the powerful who will set the terms. Which is what gives the protests in Cape Town, Charlottesville, Berlin, Oxford and beyond such urgency.

The Cityscape: get the best of Guardian Cities delivered to you every week, with just-released data, features and on-the-ground reporting

Facts matter, and the protests are, at bottom, about facts - the historical truth of colonialism, slavery and patriarchy, and the contemporary truth of the people they still marginalise. Without facts and without protest, the best we can hope for is that these systems and their legacies will continue to exert their insidious effect. At worst, they will be fully rehabilitated and weaponised. We are seeing this already in the resurgence of rightwing populism all over the world.

Until it happened, no one would have imagined that the spontaneous protest of a South African student would inspire long-overdue discussions about structural racism, not just in South Africa but in Britain and Canada and Germany, too. Nor that cities like Berlin, Toronto, Baltimore and New Orleans would begin quietly removing racist monuments of their own accord, or that Auckland and Vancouver would commit wholeheartedly to indigenisation. All these things were impossible to imagine until they happened, just as the injustices of the past are impossible to see until you see them everywhere. Minds and eyes are opening - come what may.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here

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Statue wars: what should we do with troublesome monuments?

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The global protest movement to tear down urban memorials that reinforce racism is rewriting the very story of our cities. Should any monument be safe?

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C- 8/15/17 Countable
R- It relates on asking if Civil War statues should be taken down. The article is neutral it doesn't take a side on this topic.
A- Author is Countable and its an article that has a survey asking your opinion on the topic.
A- No spelling or Grammar errors
P- The purpose is to inform about civil war statues.

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C- 2018/8/5
R- Yes no sides taken on the topic
A- Noah Caldwell and Audie Cornish
A- None
P- Inform

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Van Turner has a secret: He knows the whereabouts of the controversial Confederate statues removed last year from two parks in Memphis, Tenn.

"They have to be kept in a secretive location," said Turner on a recent afternoon, standing in a park overlooking the Mississippi River where one of the statues - of Confederate President Jefferson Davis - once stood. "For fear of someone trying to go in and get them."

Turner, a Shelby County commissioner, has been hiding the Jefferson Davis statue since it came down in December, along with a statue of Confederate Gen. and slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest and a bust of Confederate Capt. Harvey Mathes.

They're among the more than 45 Confederate monuments that have come down in at least 27 cities across the country since last summer, when white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In the aftermath, counterprotester Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, was killed. The violence amplified calls for the removal of such monuments and spurred an ongoing debate over whether tributes to the Confederacy have a place in public spaces.

Amid that debate, cities like Memphis are now dealing with a different problem: what to do with the controversial statues once they're removed from public spaces. In many cases, they remain hidden in storage while municipalities decide their fate.

It's not just Memphis. New Orleans is still storing four Confederate monuments more than a year after they were taken down. Mayor LaToya Cantrell has yet to announce a plan for relocation.

The city of Baltimore is also keeping four monuments, which came down last August, in a secret location while a city task force decides what to do with them.

The situation is particularly complicated in Memphis, where the majority-black city had to resort to an intricate legal loophole to remove the statues in the first place.

In Tennessee, it's illegal for cities to remove historical monuments without approval from the state. Six other states - Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia - have similar laws. Memphis petitioned the state for a waiver but was denied. So Mayor Jim Strickland, a Democrat and Memphis' first white mayor in 24 years, found a workaround.

"It prohibits government from doing it, but it doesn't prohibit a private person from doing it, on private property," says Strickland, who took office in 2016. Protests against the statues had been growing throughout the summer of 2017, and he needed to act. "We needed to find a way to do it legally."

The city's attorney pitched an idea to Turner, the local county commissioner: Turner would create a nonprofit, the city would sell the two parks to the nonprofit - for $1,000 each - and the nonprofit would remove the statues.

It was a risky gambit.

"You would possibly get death threats," Turner says, recalling his thoughts at the time. "Are you willing to endure this, knowing that you are a husband and a father? And I said yes."

The plan worked. On Dec. 20, the Memphis City Council approved the sale to Turner's new nonprofit, Memphis Greenspace. That same night, he brought in cranes and the statues came down.

Turner wasn't planning to hold on to the statues indefinitely. He had imagined a museum would take them. Or maybe a Confederate cemetery or a historic battlefield.

Instead, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nationwide organization that fights to preserve Confederate history, sued the nonprofit and the city, accusing them of violating state law.

A lower court ruled in favor of Memphis and the nonprofit. The suit is now with the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and Turner is forbidden from moving the statues until the proceedings are over.

But even without the legal morass, it's unclear who would be willing to take the three Confederate monuments. Museums, which might seem like the obvious choice, are often hesitant to take them on.

"Truth is, we absolutely could not take them," says Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va. Coleman often receives calls from cities hoping to find homes for their Confederate monuments.

"The biggest reason, I'd say, that museums aren't able to accept them is that they simply can't afford to take care of them," says Coleman.

Many of the statues were built for large public forums, creating logistical challenges for museums. A prominent statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, for example, is more than 60 feet tall, including its pedestal.

"[Most] museums are not equipped ... to not only take and place them, but to provide the kind of care and conservation required to ensure that they are around for perpetuity," says Coleman.

That's not the only challenge.

"Sometimes when you take on artifacts or things that will skew one's mission and/or collection direction and resources toward something that you know strays from its strategic work, that's problematic," Coleman says.

In 2016, a history museum in Gainesville, Fla., refused to take a Confederate statue from the county government, citing the high costs of creating an entirely new exhibit. The Smithsonian has also said that it does not accept monuments - Confederate or otherwise - into its collection.

Even if a museum could accommodate the costs and logistics, contextualizing Confederate statues for visitors is a challenge for curators, considering how racially and politically charged the objects still are.

"They say things about gender, they say things about race, they say things about militarism that would take more than a plaque to sanitize," says Ben Wright of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin.

Despite these challenges, Wright and his team believe they've figured out one approach to the curatorial dilemmas: focus specifically on the time period in which the Confederate statue was created.

Last year, the Briscoe Center designed an exhibit featuring a statue of Jefferson Davis that once stood on campus. Instead of highlighting Davis' role in the Civil War, it tells the story of the statue's creation, placement and the subsequent controversy on campus.

"It's a history of the statue, which touches on race relations, it touches on the way the monuments were contested at the time," says Wright, who curated the exhibit. In this case, it was the 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow laws. "What we did by concentrating on the statue and the rich archival sources around the statues, we were able to create a space where all those things get talked about."

For those who fought to remove the statues, the question of what to do with them is a simple one to answer.

"I believe that Confederate statues should be disposed of," says Tami Sawyer, the founder of #TakeEmDown901, the group that formed in Memphis to protest the city's Confederate monuments. "You don't need oppressive structures in museums."

One idea being floated as a possible solution is to return the statues to the Confederate organizations that, in many cases, paid for them in the first place. (Around the turn of the 20th century, as Confederate veterans began to die in larger numbers, these groups erected hundreds of monuments across the South.)

Last year, the United Daughters of the Confederacy accepted the return of one of its statues - the one the local museum in Gainesville, Fla., refused - and placed it in a private cemetery nearby. But it's unclear whether the group, which has thousands of members nationwide, has an organizational policy about accepting returned statues. (NPR reached out multiple times to the group for comment but did not receive a reply.)

In Memphis, the Sons of Confederate Veterans - which helped pay for the city's two prominent statues - wants more than just the return of the monuments.

"The statues go back up, of course," says Lee Millar, regional spokesman for the group, which is suing both Memphis and Turner for removing the statues.

"We'll fight as long as it takes, all the way to the end. Because the solution is to put the statues back up," Millar says.

Opponents of the Forrest statue point out that the Confederate general was a slave trader who, according to the Mississippi Civil Rights Project, was also an instrumental figure in the early years of the Ku Klux Klan.

But for Millar, who says he is a distant relative of Forrest, the statues deserve to be in the public sphere because they were meant to honor military service.

"The citizens back then were erecting these statues to those veterans," says Millar, who lives in Collierville, a suburb of Memphis. "It had nothing to do with race, nothing to do with slavery."

In mid-July, the Sons of Confederate Veterans threw its annual birthday celebration for Forrest, at Davies Manor Plantation in Bartlett, Tenn., just outside of Memphis.

Confederate soldier re-enactors marched in formation and fired off a musket salute to honor the general. At a folding table in a corner of the yard, Millar collected donations in a large water jug with the label "Save Our Parks" to help with the legal costs of the lawsuit.

Seven months after the Forrest statue came down, attendees were still angry.

"I think it's deplorable," said Paul Alford, an group member from Memphis. "The city council all needs to go to jail."

Others, like Gary Elam of nearby Potts Camp, Miss., are fighting with their wallets.

"Since they took the statues down on Dec. 20 of last year, I have not spent one red cent in Memphis," said Elam. "I'm not going to put any money in the coffers as long as they're acting the way they're acting."

Elam is not alone. In April, the Tennessee legislature stripped $250,000 earmarked for Memphis from the state budget, with Republican lawmakers citing the statue removals as the reason for the vote.

But Mayor Strickland isn't worried. "We'll be able to handle it," he says. "We knew that there would be some pushback."

And Strickland stands by the decision to take the city's Confederate monuments off public property.

"If you go to Germany, there is no statue of Adolf Hitler. But you certainly learn about Adolf Hitler. And people ought to have in their history textbooks and in museums a history of Nathan Bedford Forrest," Strickland says. "But statues are for honoring people. And Memphis of the 21st century does not want to honor that individual."

The saga is far from over. The lawsuit against Memphis and the nonprofit that removed the statues is expected to stretch on for the rest of the year.

In the meantime, the tedious responsibilities of owning recreational parks - mowing the grass, cleaning the sidewalks, keeping the lights on, paying for insurance - are beginning to add up for Van Turner, the statues' reluctant owner. He estimates it will cost him at least $30,000 this year. And, as he feared, his family has received death threats.

Still, Turner believes that once the litigation is over, he'll be able to find the statues a new home.

"I think there will be more than one group interested," he says. "This is still American history."
Jolie Myers edited and Noah Caldwell and Melissa Gray produced the audio stories. Maureen Pao edited the Web version of the story.

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Where Do Confederate Monuments Go After They Come Down?

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Van Turner has a secret: He knows the whereabouts of the controversial Confederate statues removed last year from two parks in Memphis, Tenn. "They have to be kept in a secretive location," said Turner on a recent afternoon, standing in a park overlooking the Mississippi River where one of the statues - of Confederate President Jefferson Davis - once stood.

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Plus they are an important part of History, meaning don't take them down so we have knowledge about what happened. Plus Southerners mainly fought because they thought rights were being taken away. Even though the things Southerners did were truly awful and horrific they believed what they did would boost their Country, and they fought for what they thought was right.

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C- 8/16/17
R-  Yes relates to topic and no side
A-  New York TImes
A- None
P- Inform

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Proposal to remove monument

Durham, N.C.

Confederate soldier monument toppled by protesters

Protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, N.C., on Aug. 14. The statue, which had stood since 1924, was protected by a special law. On Aug. 19, Duke University removed a Robert E. Lee statue from Duke Chapel.

Tampa, Fla.

Confederate statue considered for removal

A Confederate monument in Tampa will only be removed if enough private money is raised, Hillsborough County Commissioners decided on Aug. 16. On Thursday, Tampa's three major sports teams said they would help pay for the monument's removal.

Washington, D.C.

Proposal to remove Confederate statues from U.S. Capitol building, park

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted late Aug. 16 that he plans on introducing a bill to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building. On Aug. 17, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, called for the removal of the statues, describing them as "reprehensible." There are at least 12 Confederate statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection of the Capitol building. D.C. officials have called on the National Park Service to remove a statute of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, from a park.

More removed monuments

Ellicott City, Md. "

Confederate memorial removed

Late Monday night, Howard County officials removed a Confederate memorial that had stood outside of a courthouse in Ellicott City, Md. "The more appropriate place for the memorial is in a museum," said Alan H. Kittleman, the county executive, in a post on Facebook.

San Diego "

Plaque honoring Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, removed

The plaque at Horton Plaza Park was removed on Aug. 16. "Monuments to bigotry have no place in San Diego or anywhere!" City Councilor Christopher Ward wrote on Twitter.

St. Petersburg, Fla. "

Plaque honoring Stonewall Jackson removed

A marker honoring the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway was taken away on Aug. 15 by city officials who said they did not want it to become a "flashpoint in this national debate."

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Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the United States. Here's a List.

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Proposal to remove monument Confederate soldier monument toppled by protesters Protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, N.C., on Aug. 14. The statue, which had stood since 1924, was protected by a special law. On Aug.