The Next Generation of Confederate Statues and Monuments
Whole generations of racists never got their flowers
I’m asking readers not to imagine the Confederacy geographically but philosophically. The South is no longer limited to the 13 states that once seceded from the Union. An accurate representation would include Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Oregon, Idaho, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The South didn’t lose the Civil War and has almost doubled in size since then, seizing territory more quickly than Russia in Ukraine, or at the time of this writing, Ukraine in Russia.
The landscape is littered with statutes and monuments to the “heroes” of the Civil War as a reminder of their victories. A few were forced down, and some were moved to better locations, like the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate General and the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. This bust was completed in 1978, a year after I graduated from Fisk University in Nashville. After his supporters resisted decades of protests, his bust was moved from the Tennessee Capitol rotunda to the Tennessee State Museum a few blocks away.
