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FOR 150 YEARS, BLACK JOURNALISTS HAVE KNOWN WHAT CONFEDERATE
MONUMENTS REALLY STOOD FOR
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Donovan Schaefer
January 30, 2024
The Conversation
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_ Despite meager financing and constant threats, Black newspapers
represented the views of Black Americans and documented the nation’s
shortcomings in achieving racial equality. _
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In October 2023, nearly seven years after the deadly Unite the Right
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white supremacist rally, the statue of Confederate General Robert E.
Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, was melted down
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Since then, two more major Confederate monuments have been removed:
the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery
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and the Monument to the Women of the Confederacy in Jacksonville,
Florida
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Defenders of Confederate monuments have argued that the statues should
be left standing
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to educate future generations. One such defender is former President
Donald Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being
ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and
monuments,” Trump tweeted
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in 2017. “The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns
and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably
replaced!”
But since the end of the Civil War, journalists at Black newspapers
have told a different story. Despite meager financing and constant
threats, these newspapers represented the views of Black Americans and
documented the nation’s shortcomings in achieving racial equality.
According to many of these writers, the statues were never designed to
tell the truth
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about the Civil War. Instead, the monuments were built to enshrine the
the myth of the “Lost Cause
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the false claim that white Southerners nobly fought for states’
rights – and not to preserve slavery
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In 1921, for instance, the Chicago Defender published an article under
the headline “Tear the Spirit of the Confederacy from the South”
and called for the removal of the statues
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across the country because they “lend inspiration to the heart of
the lyncher.”
‘Lost Cause’ propaganda
For the last several years, I’ve studied the history of Confederate
monuments [[link removed]] by poring over
the letters and records of the organizations that campaigned for their
construction. My research students and I have also reviewed countless
reactions [[link removed]] to the monuments published
in real time in Black newspapers.
What is clear is that from the late nineteenth century until today,
Confederate monuments were part of a relentless propaganda campaign to
restore the South’s reputation at dedication ceremonies, parades,
reunions and Memorial Day events.
The dedication in Charlottesville
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of the Lee monument in 1924 – 100 years ago this May – was one
such event.
Timed to coincide with a reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans
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sweeping Northern-authored textbooks out of Southern schools and
replacing them with friendlier accounts
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of the Civil War.
[Underneath a burning cross, a group of white men dressed in white
robes and white hoods march holding American flags.]
Ku Klux Klan members march under a burning cross near Washington in
1925. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
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In the weeks leading up to the dedication, members of the Ku Klux Klan
paraded down Charlottesville’s Main Street
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in daylight and burned crosses in the hills
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at night.
The master of ceremonies of that unveiling was R.T.W. Duke, Jr.
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of a Confederate colonel who was a popular orator at events like
these.
A few years earlier, Duke made his own views of the Civil War plain.
He told a crowd gathered at a Confederate cemetery in Richmond,
Virginia, that he was “still a believer in the righteousness of what
some of our own people now call the ‘rebellion.‘”
Duke further said “that slavery was right and emancipation a
violation of the Constitution, a wrong and a robbery.”
A critical Black press
Contrary to the claims of today’s defenders of Confederate
monuments, a review of Black newspapers
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conducted by my research team shows that Black journalists’
criticism of these memorials had already begun by the late nineteenth
century.
The first truly national Confederate monument was the statue of Robert
E. Lee in Richmond. It was unveiled before an audience of as many as
150,000 attendees on May 29, 1890, and provoked sharp alarm among
Black commentators across the country.
In a May 31, 1890, article, Richmond Planet
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editor John Mitchell, Jr. pointed out that Confederate flags and
emblems far outnumbered U.S. flags at the unveiling.
[A Black man wearing a business suit sits at a desk with his right
hand on a sheet of paper.]
John Mitchell Jr. at the Richmond Planet in 1917. Encyclopedia
Virginia
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“This glorification of States Rights Doctrine, the right of
‘secession’ and the honoring of men who represented that cause,
fosters in this Republic the spirit of Rebellion and will ultimately
result in handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and
blood,” Mitchell wrote.
Mitchell further detailed the enthusiasm
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of the crowd assembled in Richmond.
“Cheer after cheer rang out upon the air as fair women waved
handkerchiefs and screamed to do honor,” Mitchell wrote. But the
South’s insistence on celebrating Lee “serves to retard its
progress in the country and forges heavier chains with which to be
bound.”
By reprinting articles from other Black publications, the Planet in
1890 effectively created a forum for commentary on the Richmond Lee
statue from around the country
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[A large statue is seen in the middle of a park that depicts a white
man siting atop a horse.]
The statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., in 1905. Library of
Congress/Getty Images
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An article republished from the National Home Protector, a
Baltimore-based Black newspaper, also took aim at the statue.
“When the unveiling of the monument is used as an opportunity to
justify the southern people in rebelling against the U.S. government
and to flaunt the Confederate flag in the faces of the loyal people of
the nation the occasion calls for serious reflection,” the article
said.
The editors of the newspaper accused white Southerners of trying to
use the glorification of Lee to resurrect the “corpse of
rebellion.”
Writing truth to power
No one knows what the Black-owned Charlottesville Messenger said about
the unveiling of the Lee monument in its city in 1924.
Only one copy of a single issue still exists
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In fact, one of the only things known about the Messenger is that in
1921, the white-dominated Charlottesville Daily Progress reprinted a
Messenger article
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that called for Black civil rights. The Black newspaper later
retracted the story after receiving threats from white supremacists.
But we do know what other Black newspapers of this period were saying
about Confederate monuments. For many Black editors, the monuments had
become symbols of the violent backlash against Black citizenship by
white Southerners.
In 1925, the Pittsburgh Courier
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criticized the Confederate carving on Stone Mountain in Georgia, the
site of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan
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Taking square aim at the Lost Cause myth, the newspaper called Stone
Mountain “a living monument of the cause to which white Southerners
have dedicated their lives: human slavery and color selfishness.”
The Confederate monument on the side of Stone Mountain still stands
today.
Telling the truth about American history requires transforming these
memorials into true reflections of the seemingly never-ending battles
initially fought during the the Civil War.
* Confederate Monuments; Racism; Black Journalism;
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