The start of classes was just a week away when white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville. The town that is home to the University of Virginia is now synonymous with American carnage. At the heart of the August 12 riot that left one young woman dead sat Robert E. Lee atop his horse. The city had decided to remove the monument, one of many dating to the early 20th-century “vindication era” of memorialization. It hadn’t intended to ignite a proxy war over America’s racial sins nor to re-enlist Dixie’s ghosts on the side of white supremacy.
The problem of whether such symbols should stand—and what for—especially on or near college campuses pervades with a terrible urgency. Students must look anew at these memorials to the “Lost Cause” or notice their absence. Professors and administrators call monument removal a pre-emptive strike against the emotional and physical violence.
President Gregory Fenves of the University of Texas flagship in Austin decided within a week of Charlottesville to relocate statues of Lee and four other Confederate generals from the campus’s Main Hall to a historical display. Daina Berry, an associate professor of history at school, praised her president’s “pre-emptive” decision to remove Confederate monuments when we spoke one the eve of students’ first day of classes, “so that we don’t have a Charlottesville on our campus.” Berry, a scholar of African-American history, cautions: “We’re an open carry state and a closed conceal carry on campus, so there are guns on our campus,” she added.
At North Carolina’s prestigious Duke University, a likeness of Lee stood beside the door to the Durham campus’s Gothic revival chapel—until Charlottesville. “Like any decision involving history and symbols, the removal of the Lee statue provoked a range of responses,” said Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president of public affairs, when asked about the president’s decision to remove the recently vandalized Lee. “The statue had an odd origin and was controversial in one form or another from the moment it was unveiled,” he told me. When it was unveiled in 1932, trustees balked at its scant resemblance to Lee and the letters “U.S.” on his belt buckle, visibly scratched at over the years. The University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill still has its monument to the generic Johnny Reb. A statue of a soldier known as “Silent Sam” stands amid daily protests demanding its removal and round-the-clock protection by police prepared to ward off vandals and quell clashes with counterprotesters. UNC now faces a possible federal lawsuit from students and faculty threatening to take their case against Silent Sam to the Department of Justice; university counsel, meanwhile, finds that under North Carolina state law, Chancellor Carol Folt lacks the authority to decide.
In these episodes that have dotted headlines as summer turns to fall, a statue’s removal sends a clear message: We reject racism on this campus. What’s in store for those schools whose explicit Confederate connections can’t ever be cleanly severed?
At the University of Mississippi, for instance, thousands of fans tailgate before every Rebels home game on leafy acres orbiting a compass point called “the Circle”—a small park where a Confederate soldier atop a towering plinth greets all who arrive on the Oxford campus. Faculty wonder now not whether but when he’ll come down. Ole Miss has taken nimble steps back from its past in recent years: Until 2010, the red- and blue- clad Rebels’ mascot was a bearded Southern plantation owner slouching on his cane and reminding sports fans that the university’s affectionate nickname refers to a slave owner’s wife. The Mississippi state flag—the last in Dixie to include inset “stars and bars”—hasn’t flown at the center of the Circle since 2015. But until last year, the marching band still played “Dixie.” Since Charlottesville, Ole Miss chancellor Jeff Vitter has reaffirmed his commitment to adding, not removing, testaments to the university’s history: Recent additions include a “contextualization” plaque at the base of the Confederate monument. Installed in 2016, it explains that the monument arrived on campus in 1906 “as Confederate veterans were dying in increasing numbers” and that it stands today as “a reminder of the university’s divisive past.” The previous administration added a statue in 2006 to commemorate civil rights leader James Meredith’s courageous stand against segregation: He enrolled at Ole Miss in the early 1960s, against the incessant protests of an all-white student body. Retired administrator and current education professor Andy Mullins, who serves on the contextualization committee, tells me their most recent report recommends name changes to two dorms that honor a segregationist senator and a white supremacist governor. “The board might still say no,” he said. Alumni, he recalls, protested the text of the aforementioned plaque for its failure to remember Ole Miss’s Confederate veterans, a group called the University Grays.
Still, the work of circumscribing a complex history continues. “As a result of the committee’s work, UM will soon contextualize nine other sites on campus,” Dr. Alice Clark, vice chancellor for university relations, told me in a recent statement, “including recognition of the contributions of enslaved people.”
Moving the Confederate monument from the Circle—perhaps to the Confederate cemetery on campus, as some faculty have proposed—wasn’t on the table when the Advisory Committee on History & Context convened, chair of the African American studies program and committee member Chuck Ross recalls. Everyone assumed, Mullins says, that it would be eventually, just not yet. “Mississippi takes perverse pride in being last. Do we always have to be last? I want to first. I wish we’d beat Austin,” Ross lamented. Mississippi may like to be last, but South Carolina remembers who was first: first to secede from the Union—and in the case of Charleston’s military college, the Citadel, the first to take hostile shots at a Yankee armament. “It’s everywhere you go,” Citadel history professor Kyle Sinisi described the Confederacy’s hold on his campus and culture. “We have five barracks and four of those barracks are named for Confederate veterans or generals. Our football stadium is named for a confederate, our buildings. You go into our library, and it has a number of murals that are dedicated to episodes from the war. The award we give our best-drilled cadet is named after the Citadel’s artillery shots against a naval vessel during the war.”
Every spring, cadets compete for the Star of the West medal. And on January 9, 1861 it was a corps of Citadel cadets who shot the first hostile fire of the Civil War—against a Union steamship, the Star of the West, headed to Fort Sumter. Two months later, Lincoln denounced the scourge of secession in his first inaugural address and concluded with a glimpse ahead to a resolution he did not live to see—a reunion, by some reckoning, unwon even now: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Later that spring, the war began in earnest at South Carolina’s Fort Sumter.
The Citadel cadet who outshoots all other graduates in a nominal re-enactment known as the Star of the West contest has his name carved in the Star of the West monument, erected on campus in 1961 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of those shots that proved war inevitable.
The past haunts the University of Alabama, according to history professor John Giggie. But unlike slow and steady Ole Miss or the stalwart Citadel, UA isn’t fully awake to the problem. “The campus is surrounded by historical signage that celebrates the efforts of the Confederacy to survive and repel Northern troops. These markers form an unofficial belt around the university, which seals in memory of a Confederate past,” Giggie said. As the school year gets under way, some of this historical baggage will have to spill out, he believes. This summer, he added, UA hired its first ever vice president of diversity. (She was too busy for an interview, an assistant said, when I reached her office for comment.)
Washington and Lee University, in contrast, wears its past out front. Renamed from Washington College to honor its late president, the former Confederate commander, in the year of his death, W&L hasn’t forgotten its history. In a “message to the community,” President William Dudley described a coming slate of presentations on the nation’s and the school’s history—and Gen. Lee’s role therein. The next installment is a lecture by a West Point history professor and W&L graduate Col. Ty Seidule (titled “Robert E. Lee and Me”) whose scholarly work on the civil rights movement and the legacy of slavery never skirts from the centrality of slave owning to the Confederate cause Lee led.
Trying to predict the course of Col. Seidule’s talk reminded me of a story Ole Miss’s Andy Mullins told, a story within a story about the purpose of schooling and the work of remembering rightly. He was leading a group of his education students, Ole Miss undergrads training to be public school teachers, on a tour in mid-August. At the monument in the middle of campus, students read the plaque and told him they’d never heard the term “Lost Cause,” the shorthand for systemic denial of the foremost fighting cause: to defend slaveholding. “When I explained it to them, a young woman raised her hand and said, ‘Why do our history teachers tell us that slavery has nothing to do with the Civil War?,’” Mullins told me. He quoted from the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession—which makes no bones about its pledge to preserve slavery—and asked her, a junior at Ole Miss, where she went to high school. He wasn’t surprised, he said, to learn she was a local girl. But he didn’t say whether he’d wondered if she ever would have raised the question without the monument there. I could tell he was glad, as any teacher should be, that she’d been moved to ask—and that, at his school anyway, she won’t be the last.
