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 and justice.
