In the old capital of the Confederacy, the once-sacred statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederates are finally coming down, according to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam.
The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, and now, at last, the war over the meaning of the Civil War is also ending.
We finally agree that it’s good that the Confederacy lost. It deserved to lose. And what’s more, its leaders don’t deserve to be memorialized in stone and metal in places of public honor. The Confederate flag belongs in the history books and on old Lynyrd Skynyrd albums.
The question of whether we should honor the leaders of the “Lost Cause” is changing rapidly, after so many years of stasis. Change in politics is often like that. Forty years ago, Democratic and Republican politicians had to go to Jackson-Lee days, or Jefferson-Lee days, or even just Confederate History events. Very few people spoke out against honoring Confederates, either with holidays or statues or political events. What would the point be? You’d lose votes in the South and border states and gain few elsewhere.
Charlottesville and the South Carolina church shooting were key turning points. When Nazis and white supremacists marched to defend a statue of Lee, when a fierce defender of Southern white pride entered a black church to massacre parishioners, it became much harder to defend Robert E. Lee.
Now, after George Floyd, after Tamir Rice, after all the vividly documented killings of black citizens by police, we are finally ready to cleanse the public square of those who fought for slavery’s preservation, because they fought against the fundamental humanity of African Americans.
This is not about “rewriting history” or “removing history” in the slightest. Lee will remain in every history book about the Civil War. It’s about who we honor. What we, as a nation and a society, revere. In Germany, they remember World War II and the Holocaust not by building statues of Goering or Rommel, but by putting up small brass plates on the houses of Jews who were liquidated by their government, saying, “In this house, on this date in 1940, this family was arrested, imprisoned, and here’s where and how they died.”
We could do a lot of that here. Put up a memorial at the site of every lynching. At the location of every slave market. Hey, maybe melt down some statues of Lee to get the metal?
The indefensible naming of military bases for Confederate generals who took up arms against the very military that uses the base will end soon, as well. It’s inevitable.
Still, it won’t happen everywhere all at once. In more rural areas, on the back of privately owned cars and trucks, Confederate flags will still fly. In the center of some small towns and cities, Confederate statues will still stare down at a rapidly changing world. At Trump rallies and similar polarizing events, white people will still try to ignite the old pride and power that comes from those symbols.
Gov. Northam, whose 1980s medical school yearbook photo features a picture of a Klansman and a white man in blackface, is an unlikely leader on this issue.
But that’s the point. Back then, a nice, young Southern white man could make a lighthearted “joke” about the Klan and lynching. Back then, politicians had to respect the “Lost Cause,” the fiction that the Confederacy was a noble endeavor, a rebellion motivated by freedom and states’ rights that had little to do with slavery.
We don’t believe those lies anymore. We don’t have to respect the Lost Cause or the men who led it.
It’s time for new heroes, new statues, new causes. Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer… we don’t have nearly enough statues of them.
Jeremy Mayer is an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
