White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

by Robert P. Jones

In contemporary debates, the primary argument for preserving Confederate monuments rests on the assumption that these symbols are simply surviving markers that date from the time of the old Confederacy and therefore should be preserved as history. But the comprehensive database compiled by the SPLC, illustrated in Figure 4.1 on the next page, confirms that few Confederate monuments in public spaces were put in place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Rather, more than nine in ten of the public monuments were erected after 1895. Fully half of them were erected between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1920s, with another boomlet of intense activity between 1955 and 1970.24 In other words, the Confederate monument phenomenon was no innocent movement to memorialize the dead; it was primarily a twentieth-century declaration of Lost Cause values designed to vindicate white supremacy and bolster white power against black claims to equality