INDY Week 7.28.21

FE AT U R E

Where They Stood A photojournalist documents North Carolina’s (and the nation’s) fallen Confederate monuments.

BY MELISSA LYTTLE backtalk@indyweek.com

This photoseries was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

I

t’s been a long time since I sat in an American history class, but what I remember of my education in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1980s and 90s, is how much of it was not fact, but myth.

I was taught that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights—a concept that seemed plausible to a kid—and that our side had its own heroes and its own stories worth remembering. Where did slavery and white supremacy fit into that history? Plainly, they didn’t. We must have skipped the chapter explaining that the South’s fight was in defense of slavery, if it existed at all.

In high school, I played soccer and ran track and competed regularly against teams from Nathan B. Forrest High School and Robert E. Lee High School, the former named for a Confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the latter named for the famous Confederate Army general. The history of slavery was everywhere if you wanted to find it—even in the city’s name. Jacksonville comes from Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president and a prominent enslaver. (We weren’t taught that part of his life in school either.)

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Raleigh Confederacy Monument, Highsmith, C. M., photographer. / via the Library of Congress. ALL PHOTOS BY MELISSA LYTTLE UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. Several of my relatives who live in north Florida still fly the Confederate flag on their boats and paste stars and bars stickers on their trucks. Some of them wear it on T-shirts, claiming, of course, “Heritage Not Hate.” But to me, what the Confederate flag celebrates is Southerners’ long tradition of lying to ourselves about the past. It’s not a rallying cry of loyalty to our homeland; it’s an unspoken threat, a reminder that white supremacy lives on.

I do believe there’s a lot of good to celebrate in the South, from writers Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty to grits, sweet tea, syrupy drawls, and mossy oak trees.

These days, Jacksonville makes me proud, as it’s home to “the three D’s”—celebrated writers Deesha Philyaw, Dawnie Walton, and Dantiel Moniz.

Long after I moved away, the schools named for Forrest and Lee were renamed Westside High School and Riverside High School. Monuments, markers, and signs venerating the Confederate dead have come down in Jacksonville and throughout parts of the South, sometimes by popular choice, sometimes by force.

Most of these monuments didn’t go up immediately following the Civil War; instead, their time frame coincides with the segregation era in the South as a reminder of who was in charge.

“These monuments were also built in an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded,” writes journalist and author Clint Smith in his book How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America.

“In the late nineteenth century, states began implementing Jim Crow laws to cement this country’s racist caste system.

Social and political backlash to Reconstruction-era attempts to build an integrated society was the backdrop against which the first monuments arose,” Smith said.

“These monuments served as a physical embodiment of the terror campaign directed at Black communities. Another spike in construction of these statues came in the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement.”

Across the South and far beyond, they have been powerful symbols of racism, our nation’s original sin. Now time is catching up with them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2020 Whose Heritage? report, which tracks public symbols of the Confederacy across the United States, found that 168 Confederate symbols were renamed or removed from public spaces in 2020. Ninety-four of those symbols were Confederate monuments.