Many claim that Confederate statues and the Confederate flag have always been about white supremacy. Should they come down? 

A cell phone video recording of a white officer mercilessly suffocating a detained and unarmed Black man, while three other officers idly watched for 8 minutes, sparked public outcry and massive protests calling for police reform, defunding, accountability and, most importantly, justice. 

Geroge Floyd’s killing is only one of many to occur as a byproduct of casual police brutality. Less than three weeks before the death of George Floyd, a cell phone recording surfaced depicting the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was slaughtered by armed white residents while jogging in a South Georgia neighborhood. 

Many call such occurrences a modern form of lynching: young people randomly executed for alleged offenses without trial. 

While protests provoked legislation at both the federal and municipal level — such as the Texas Black Caucus’s George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 and the Louisville Metro Council’s Brianna Taylor Law — they also resurrected old discussions about the country’s original sin of slavery and the systemic racism that still plagues the United States today. One of those conversations is on the topic of Confederate monuments. 

The public pressure to remove memorials of the Confederacy is spotlighted more than ever before as statues and symbols connected to slavery, colonialism and the Confederacy are being vandalized and torn down by protestors across the country. 

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced that the well-known statue memorializing Confederate general and war hero Robert E. Lee would be removed from the state’s capital immediately. Moreover, NASCAR, a sport most popular in the south, announced it was categorically banning Confederate flags — a controversial symbol fans frequently waved — from all future events. 

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump rejected the Pentagon’s idea to rename military bases named after Confederate generals, including Fort Lee in Virginia.

The president insists that such Confederate names remain part of America’s heritage. Most critics who agree with him repeat the common trope that the Confederate statues are, in reality, about Southern pride. They do not commemorate the pro-slavery departure from the Union that the Civil War was. 

Notably, they profess that removing Confederate symbols would expunge an important part of American history, as the Civil War was fought over states’ rights.

To resolve this conflict, America must ask itself what exactly it was that the Confederacy stood for. If the Confederacy, in fact, stood for slavery, does memorializing its heroes validate white supremacy?  

The historical evidence is clear. The Confederacy believed in white supremacy to the extent that it was willing to fight a gruesome war for the ideology, all while knowing hundreds of thousands of its citizens were dying in the process. 

That said, the critics are correct in their argument that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. However, the states’ right they were fighting for was specifically the right to continue exploiting and enslaving human beings. 

In an 1861 address, Louisiana Commissioner George Williamson encouraged Texas to secede from the Union. He explicitly argued that the Confederacy was required “to preserve the blessings of African slavery,” and what all the Confederate states had in common was “the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”

Other Southern states consistently attributed the conservation of slavery and white superiority as their main motives for leaving the Union. Those who declare that the Civil War was fought for other reasons are turning a blind eye to the objective and explicit written statements of history. 

The totemic symbolism that the Confederate flag carries even today is rooted in the values of white supremacy. While the Ku Klux Klan grew in response to President Harry Truman’s public promise to promote Civil Rights and recognize the NAACP as a legitimate organization, so did the popularization of the Confederate flag. 

This was no coincidence. The Confederate flag was only re-popularized in white culture as a symbol of resistance to the growth of the Civil Rights Movement. Civil War historian John Coski wrote in his book “The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem” that the popularity of the banner surged in the 1950s, when car racing fans and students at Southern universities embraced it as an emblem of their white southern culture.

Like Williamson almost 100 years before him, Roy Harris, a powerful politician from Georgia, explicitly and publicly spoke about what the Confederate flag meant to those who displayed it, calling it the “symbol of the white race and the cause of the white people,” according to Coski’s book.

Similarly to flags, language can carry historical and cultural significance, but can draw controversy when used in the wrong context. For example, the word “thug,” which was frequently used to describe Black men, now carries racist connotations. 

While some may use coded language in an attempt to appear politically correct, given the historical use of the word, the message still comes across as racist. In 2015, Baltimore City Councilor Carl Stokes, who is Black, said on CNN, “Come on. So calling them thugs? Just call them n——.” 

Yet, in response to the recent Black Lives Matter protests, which were largely peaceful, Trump described protestors as “thugs.” 

Like the word thug, the true purpose of the Confederate flag and the many Confederate statues has been obscured by its defenders to symbolize politically correct falsehoods, like white heritage and states’ rights, rather than the expressions of racist white supremacy that they are. 

This truth is reaffirmed when white supremacists and neo-Nazis march into cities like Charlottesville, defending Confederate monuments. Such recurring events prove that Confederate symbols and monuments do not stand to preserve history, but to represent the racist ideology that the KKK still champions today: white supremacy. 

Society erects statues to honor and respect the persons represented in their carving. When monuments that represent an evil and outdated ideology remain standing, contemporary viewers may then believe that such racist ideologies are acceptable. 

Black Americans still suffer today from the country’s original stain of slavery and systemic oppression. A consequential first step in eradicating such ideologies and systems is to topple the monuments that personify them. 

After their removal, Confederate symbols should be carefully studied, photographed and placed in museums, so that what they stood for cannot be misinterpreted over time and our American history is not forgotten. When we forget what Confederate statues represent, history will repeat itself. 

In her novel “Go Set A Watchman,” Southern author Harper Lee wrote, “As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.” 

Confederate monuments must be removed and Confederate flags must be taken down.