The posts named for Confederate officers during World War I also served to knit white America back together as it fought a common foe. And it worked, but we must recognize that reconciliation came at a steep and horrifying cost. African Americans paid the price with lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the loss of the franchise. The price for white reconciliation remains far too high.
This is really key to arguments surrounding names and monuments. We want to remember “all” Americans in a spirit of reconciliation and treat the war as a shared experience. However, that ignores the very different experience African Americans have with it.
