Monuments outlive history: Confederate monuments, the legacy of slavery, and black-white inequality

ABSTRACT

The conceptual linkages among Confederate monuments, slavery, and race suggest that Confederate monuments are relevant for explaining contemporary black–white inequality, yet we have little evidence on these relationships. I aim to further develop these possible connections. My analysis relies on a unique data set of Confederate monuments located in public spaces in the US South. I find that counties with Confederate monuments – specifically monuments inscribed with rhetoric glorifying either the soldiers as “heroes” or the cause as “pure” – have higher than expected levels of black–white poverty inequality. However, this relationship is stronger where the legacy of slavery is weaker, namely in counties with smaller historical concentrations of slaves. Confederate monuments are intertwined with a complex history, one that may continue to be reflected in the contemporary landscape of black–white inequality. The presented results are only suggestive, but they provide guidance for important avenues of future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Confederate monuments
• legacy of slavery
• black–white inequality
• US South
• history
• symbols

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Seattle, WA. I would also like to thank Danequa Forrest for her assistance coding the inscriptions and my colleagues at Rice University and Louisiana State University for their support during data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Heather A. O’Connell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7797-4028

Notes

1 There are other features of Confederate monuments – e.g. their size and location – that also may be relevant in understanding their relationship with local racial inequality, which should be considered in future research. However, inscriptions are ideal for this analysis because those words not only shape the feelings and conversations had by future generations who view the monument; they provide a window into the sentiments of those who erected the monument. I discuss an alternative approach for identifying a monument’s connection to the Lost Cause in endnote 3.

2 In alternative versions of this variable I included other Confederate symbols and forms of memorialization. First, I included places coded by SPLC as “Commemorative License Plate,” “Flag,” and “Holiday.” Second, I added counties with prominent public spaces that are named in honour of the Confederacy or its soldiers (i.e. bridges, roads, schools, parks). Finally, I constructed a variable that indicates whether a county has any type of Confederate marker as identified by the SPLC. This extended the coverage of memorialization to include buildings, county and city names, campgrounds, trails, rivers, etc. Analyses using these alternative variables are consistent with what is presented for all public Confederate monuments.

3 Inscriptions are not the only words associated with a monument. Speeches given at unveilings and subsequent events may also be relevant for understanding the meaning associated with a monument. Unfortunately, information on the speeches given at the unveilings of the more than 800 identified monuments is not consistently available.