The civil war monuments and statues went up in the 1960's as a response against the

[riversedge]

civil rights movement. Joy saying no one would have done it earlier because the monuments would have been considered treasonous. I had never given it any thought when they were constructed. Joy on msnbc just now

[atreides1]

1. Joy is wrong!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America#Virginia

[Duppers]

4. Yes, seen enough to remember.

But thanks for this link. Had no idea there were so damn many of them.

[Raster]

7. She has the basic premise somewhat correct. The monuments were attempts to sanitize...

...Civil War history and also to respond to the Restoration period when many Blacks became voting citizens, began to own property and were assimilated into society as NOT SLAVES, which many on the side of the Confederacy -long after the Civil War- found abhorrent. In short, as much as they were to "commemorate" Southern heritage and history, they were also used to intimidate and oppress.

Pretty much the same for the "stars and bars" rebel flag, which began as the battle flag of Northern Virginia and became one of many styles of the Confederate flag, and really came into its own as a symbol of white oppression during the years after the Civil War, especially during the years of the Civil Rights movement.

[annabanana]

14. Good info, thanks. . . n/t

[yardwork]

18. Joy's premise is correct. The dates, as quoted here, are a little different.

Her point stands.

[onenote]

26. More than a little different

Even if the point that the monuments were meant to sanitize the confederacy' treachery, it's not a small error to suggest they are of recent origin.

[yardwork]

27. 1920s instead of 1960s.... not so far off.

[onenote]

31. Many date to the 1890s.

Most were erected during the lifetime of many who lived through the civil war, which is much different than those erected 100 years after the war. Again the point is that the purpose and/ or effect of the monuments is to sanitize the Confederacys treachery. It doesn't help mskevthat point to make erroneous and ultimately irrelevant claims about when they were built. Joy seemed to think it mattered that they were built in more recent times. She was wrong.

[yardwork]

33. I disagree with you and I agree with Joy's point.

These "memorials" were not true memorials. Instead, they were symbols created later as part of a mythologizing and reinventing of a past, not just to sanitize it, but to recreate something that never existed in the first place. The purpose of these symbols was to oppress African Americans.

[Lithos]

34. The "Stars and Bars" is not the Battle Flag of the Army of North Virginia

The "Stars and Bars" is a different flag. Also, outside of use in movies and some Veteran gatherings, the Battle Flag was never in continual use. The "comeback" was with the Dixiecrats of the 1940's which of course grew into iconography of the 1960 desegregation movement. Astroturf.

Also, many of the monuments at courthouses were erected in immediate post war era and are just memorials to the local war dead - much like those for other wars including WW1, WW2 and Vietnam. These typically display different flags, list the names of the dead, and talk about regiments and battles. The same companies which supplied them to the South also helped cities in the North honor and remember their dead sons, brothers and fathers.

That said, those monuments which were erected starting in the last 1940's with the rise of the Dixiecrat segregationists were almost assuredly built to intimidate. Personally, outside of a museum and possibly a few very old monuments to the dead, any use of the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is a display of hate speech the modern era and should be treated as such. As for the old monuments, leave them, but build new monuments next to them honoring and remembering the names of slaves who also gave their lives.

[pokerfan]

8. She might be conflating statues with the confederate flag

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150626-confederate-flag-civil-rights-movement-war-history/

[rogerashton]

9. I did know that the

Confederate Monument in Shreveport, LA, was old by the 1950's. I remember sitting in the park near it with a high school classmate reading. We had been to Gilmore's Newsstand, Shreveport's premier educational institution (and, if I am not mistaken, black-owned). I was reading the Wall Street Journal and he the Daily Worker.

When I relocated to upstate NY, I had to remember not to refer to the Civil War monument in our village as "The Confederate Memorial."

That said, I have somewhere an audio of a speech by William Jennings Bryan, arguing for states' rights to regulate monopolies, in which he feels he has to deny any treasonous intent. The 1890-1920 period, when many of the older monuments went up, must have been very polarized.

[LWalko]

24. Joy was very wrong

Thank you for actually taking the time to do a bit of research into when most of the monuments were erected. I find it very refreshing when people do not just open mouth and speak incorrect information.

[yardwork]

2. Nineteen teens, most of them. When Jim Crow was enacted.

[Raster]

15. Within certain Southern "heritage" societies and organizations, there was a...

...major and concerted effort to erect monuments to the Confederacy during the period of 1880 through 1930. Parks in cities were renamed or created specifically to "honor" Confederate generals and politicians. Statues were commissioned and erected. It is fair to say that many times cities and towns DID NOT REQUEST THE MEMORIALS AND STATUES, but had them "gently" forced upon them by said Southern "heritage" organizations. This served several purposes: (1) an attempt to whitewash and sanitize Confederate history and add an air of legitimacy to essentially what was TREASON against the Union; (2) to serve as an "in your face" reminder that even though the Civil War was over and the South lost, there were still many persons that adhered to the reasons and beliefs that led to the Civil War in the first place; and (3) most important of all, the statues and memorials were meant to be a subtle, subtext of Black oppression and intimidation glossed over with a veneer of historical respectability.

[yardwork]

17. Yes. And the towns were charged for the statues too.

It definitely was a deliberate, concerted effort.

[Raster]

21. Absolutely! Local Southern politicians -mayors, aldermen, counselmembers, etc.-...

...were "encouraged" to support the Confederate monument efforts.

Something that needs to be said to give some context: Many WRONGLY believes that the citizens of the Southern states were all in agreement about slavery, succession, and war. THEY WERE NOT. The prime instigators of the Confederacy and succession were rich, white, property-owning men. The fanciful tales of Johnny Reb gloriously heading off to defend the South are just that: fanciful tales. Truth be told, many of the "cannon fodder" Southern soldiers were conscripts, their non-participation was not an option given them.

[SweetieD]

28. Many Confederates put in their children's minds that the south would rise again. That the

Confederacy would reform. I believe that is another reason these monuments were put in place.

[kwassa]

30. Jim Crow started right after the Civil War ...

with the founding of the KKK and other anti-black terror groups. Reconstruction ended in the 1870s, when the Republicans ditched it.

The early 1900s saw the peak of both Jim Crow, lynching, the expulsion of blacks from the voter rolls, and soon the second coming of the KKK, which peaked in the 1920s.

[oasis]

3. That's all the more reason for "rebel" monuments to be removed. nt

[Princess Turandot]

5. Actually, that's not accurate...

The statues removed in New Orleans, as one example, were erected in the late 19th-early 20th Century. The Davis monument went up in 1911. Another was a 1891 monument to some white paramilitary a-holes called the Democratic White League. Similarly, the Beauregard statue went up in 1915, and the Robert E Lee statue went up in 1884.

The Lee statue in Emancipation Park in Charlottesville was dedicated in 1924. They also have a statue of Stonewall Jackson in the city which dates to 1921. (I assume that they are removing that one as well.)

There are others that old.

[malaise]

6. They are treasonous

Monuments to losers

[oberliner]

10. That's not true

The statue in C-ville was commissioned in the 1910s and went up in the 1920s.

If she is saying otherwise, she is wrong.

[obamanut2012]

11. Joy is incorrect

Most went up prior to that, as in quite a bit before.

However, many of the Stars and Bars on state flags being thrown did come about becaus eof calls for integration, etc.

[Lee-Lee]

12. All the ones I see around here are more like 1900-1920 period

I don't think I've seen any in the 60's.

Mostly it's was done during the era when the last of your Confederate veterans were dying off or in their 70's or 80's and their children were of the age to be in charge of local government and civic organizations who put these up.


Now the rise of people using the flag as a symbol, that certainly did happen then.

Now, the naming of military bases all across the south after Confederate Generals also started in this period in the spirit of "reconciliation", and to supposedly ease hard feelings about the government seizing wide swaths of land in the south but not up north for new military bases, and if anything there is a battle to fight to get names changed.

[wishstar]

13. Mayor of Charlottsville said the big Confed. parks and monuments were built in "Jim Crow era"

meaning back about 100+ years ago when there was a white backlash against black voter rights and blacks ability to attain political positions and influence

[Midwestern Democrat]

16. This is an example of why I've never really warmed to Joy Reid - I've caught her too many times

saying things that are absolutely not true. Like her "Leave Nancy Pelosi Alone!" post where she stated that Nancy Pelosi was the greatest House Speaker since Sam Rayburn presided over the passage of the Great Society/Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s - when the fact is that Sam Rayburn died in 1961 and it was John McCormack who was the Speaker during the Great Society years.

[sinkingfeeling]

19. Don't think so.

[kentuck]

20. We must also realize...

..that when many of us were born, there were Civil War veterans still alive. The War was still fresh in historical memory. We had gone thru Reconstruction and were living thru Jim Crow laws. It was the most traumatic time of our nation's history. Wounds did not heal quickly. It was not ancient history. Even today, we are not that far removed from that terrible war.

[ismnotwasm]

22. If they are symbols of racist hate

Especially symbols of racist hate erected before the civil rights movement--they can be melted into something useful.

The US is NOT Europe. Kind of the whole point.

[demmiblue]

23. .

[fleabiscuit]

25. The SPLC has a decent article on this.

You'll want to go the page to get a decent view of the timeline.

Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy

“…4. There were two major periods in which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked — the first two decades of the 20th century and during the civil rights movement….”

https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy

[gratuitous]

29. This graph is very instructive

There have been spasms of confederate commemorations since the end of the Civil War, and there have been different precipitating events for each of them. One common thread, though, appears to be a desire on the part of certain segments of the population to warn some folks against getting any big ideas about notions of "liberty and justice for all" or all persons being created equal.

I think that public property displays in the United States shouldn't honor men who took up arms against the United States. You want public land to honor these treasonous bastards, put them up on public land in the Confederate States of America, if you can find any such place.

[GulfCoast66]

32. This is a fact based community

And that is not the truth.

Most of the memorials were erected after Jim Crow was instituted to remind African-American citizens of their place and to encourage whites to support suppression of African Americans.