No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
Karen L. Cox, professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, explains what Confederate statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning.
Her talk will highlight the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In recent years, monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back.
Part of the Fall 2024 HSOC Lecture Series.
