Together with schools (201), counties and municipalities (104), parks (38), buildings (51), holidays (22), military bases (10), commemorative license plates (7), bodies of water (6), and bridges (6), these places do important cultural work to reinforce white supremacy.Ģ. Most Confederate memorials are not what are commonly referred to as monuments.Īlthough there are 723 live monuments in SPLC’s database as of January 20, 2022, there are more roadways (741) honoring Confederates than there are monuments. Finally, the conclusion looks ahead to how we can make our collective history. Action items provide suggestions for how you can work to remove Confederate symbols from your community. The analysis section outlines five main conclusions drawn from the data. Next, the methodology section explains how SPLC works in collaboration with communities to source our data, and how we make decisions about what to include (and exclude) from our database. The introduction details the long history of Black protest over Confederate memorials, drawing on scholarship to help contextualize our data, and argues that Confederate monument removal offers an important education in democracy and civic participation. This report has five parts in addition to our public map and dataset. Situating the recent activism within a longer historical context provides a fuller account of why this moment (and not others) enabled the removal of so many memorials while simultaneously honoring Black activists working on monument removal in the past. This has shifted the focus from understanding to action rather than just understanding when and why memorials were erected, forces facilitating memorial removal became more active. More recently, protests over the murder of George Floyd sparked the removal, relocation, or renaming of at least 200 memorials. The second edition had an updated count of Confederate memorials, a map, and a major methodological change: tracking whether a monument was live, relocated, renamed, or removed. Our data showed that Confederate monuments were erected in the wake of Reconstruction during the Jim Crow era, which reinforced arguments historians made about how Confederate memorials were part of an organized propaganda campaign to promote the Lost Cause and venerate the white supremacist values of the Confederacy.Īfter the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia prompted many communities to grapple anew with the Confederate memorials in their presence, SPLC reissued Whose Heritage? in 2018. In 2015, after nine Black worshippers at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina were murdered by a white supremacist gunman who had previously been photographed with Confederate iconography, the Southern Poverty Law Center launched a project to identify Confederate memorials, compiling a comprehensive and publicly accessible database that accompanied the 2016 Whose Heritage? report. This Third Edition of Whose Heritage? builds upon and expands the first and second editions.
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