Some of the most obvious, in-your-face lies are in the huge physical reminders—the monuments, markers, and signs venerating the Confederate dead. Most of these monuments didn’t go up immediately following the Civil War. They first appeared in the 1890s as part of the backlash to Reconstruction. A second wave took place in the 1950s and ’60s during the civil rights movement. These weren’t coincidences; as Clint Smith writes in his book How the Word Is Passed, monuments to the Confederacy were part of “an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded.”
These structures have been powerful symbols of racism, our nation’s original sin. But now time is catching up with them and they have started coming down—sometimes by popular choice, sometimes by force. While more than 700 Confederate monuments are still on display in the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2020 Whose Heritage? report, which tracks public symbols of the Confederacy across the United States, found that 94 Confederate monuments were removed from public spaces last year. This was more than had been taken down in the preceding four years combined, according to the group.
Fueled by episodes of police violence and institutional racism, many Americans are finally seeing these monuments for the first time not as benign relics but as part of a campaign to dehumanize Black citizens. Cities, counties, churches, and universities are awakening to the bitter significance of these symbols and covering them up, tearing them down, or dismantling them entirely. Where elected officials have been slow to act, ordinary people have taken matters into their own hands.
In the fall of 2020, I became interested in the question: What’s next? That monuments were coming down at all clearly spoke to a shift in Americans’ perception of history, but what would happen to those statues seemed like it might be even more telling—a sign of the nation’s future.
Earlier this year, in April, I started a five-week, 7,300-mile road trip through the South to document Confederate monuments that had been taken down since George Floyd’s death the previous spring. My goal was to create a record of an unraveling—this moment in time when long-held narratives about Southern pride and the memorialization of Civil War “heroes” are literally being knocked off their pedestals. I’m photographing the spaces where the monuments once stood, as well as where they’ve ended up. I’m also pairing these photos with archival images of the monuments, sometimes commemorated on postcards, other times in state and university archives, or in the Library of Congress.