Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

• 1. Introduction

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  The removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in the United States has taken down more than 160 statues, plaques, and markers from public land. All but three of those removals happened after 2015. In New Orleans, the company hired to lower the city's Confederate monuments could not find a single local crane operator willing to take the job. A crane eventually arrived from an out-of-state firm willing to do the work. Workers wore bulletproof vests, helmets, and masks to hide their faces. They feared for their own safety.

  More than seven hundred of these monuments had gone up on public land over past generations. Most had stood for decades before anyone organized to bring them down. Why did a routine public works job suddenly turn dangerous? Why did some states pass laws to block removal entirely, while other cities acted overnight? And what happens to the ground where a monument once stood?

• 2. Built To Intimidate

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  Over seven hundred Confederate monuments and memorials were built on public land in the United States. Most of them rose across the South. Nearly all of them went up between 1877 and 1964, the decades governed by Jim Crow laws.

  The first wave of monument-building ran from the late 1890s through 1920. A second, smaller wave followed from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s.

  Both waves lined up precisely with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War's end. The second wave also coincided with the nationwide commemorations known as the American Civil War Centennial.

  The American Historical Association would later examine closely why builders chose those specific decades.

• 3. The Historians Weigh In

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  In an August 2017 statement, the American Historical Association addressed the controversy directly. Removing a monument, it said, 'is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history.' The association said most monuments were erected 'without anything resembling a democratic process.' It recommended that it was 'time to reconsider these decisions.'

  The AHA tied the first wave of construction directly to segregation. It called that wave 'part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South.' The statement said many memorials were meant, in part, 'to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically.' It said they were also meant to 'isolate them from the mainstream of public life.'

  Michael J. McAfee, curator of history at the West Point Museum, noted there are 'no monuments that mention the name Benedict Arnold.' He argued Confederate leaders were traitors of the same kind, men who 'fought for white racial supremacy.' University of Chicago historian Jane Dailey wrote that many monuments were built around a 'white supremacist future' rather than a memory of the past. Villanova historian Judith Giesberg put it more simply: 'White supremacy is really what these statues represent.'

  Karyn Cox of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte called the monuments 'a legacy of the brutally racist Jim Crow era.' James Leloudis of UNC Chapel Hill said the monuments' funders wanted 'a political education and a legitimacy for the Jim Crow era.' They also wanted, in his words, 'the right of white men to rule.' Adam Goodheart of Washington College told National Geographic the statues were '20th-century artifacts' built on a vision of unity that 'still excluded black people.'

  Author Frank McKenney, in a 1993 book about Georgia's monuments, described them as 'communal efforts, public art, and social history.' He said the funds were raised mostly by women who had been widowed or bereaved by the war. Cheryl Benard, president of the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage, wrote in The National Interest that destroying disliked relics was 'highly alarming.' Civil War historian James I. Robertson Jr. rejected the idea that the monuments were a 'Jim Crow signal of defiance.' He called the modern push to remove them an 'age of idiocy.'

  Robert Seigler once catalogued more than 170 Confederate monuments in South Carolina. He found only five that honored the Black people the Confederacy had used as laborers, cooks, and musicians. Just one of those five named an individual, a musician called Henry Brown. Historian Julian Hayter of the University of Richmond proposed a third option beyond keeping or tearing down a statue. He called for adding 'a footnote of epic proportions' to explain its history.

• 4. Three Sparks, Rising Numbers

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  The modern campaign to remove Confederate monuments began after the Charleston church shooting in 2015. In the century and a half between the Civil War and that shooting, only five Confederate memorials had been removed anywhere in the country. Eight more came down in the two years that followed.

  New Orleans had already ordered the removal of its monuments in 2015, though court challenges delayed the work until 2017. Mayor Mitch Landrieu later said, 'These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history.' He added that they 'purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.' A local preservation group, the Monumental Task Committee, countered that the city had been 'stripped' of 'nationally recognized historic landmarks.'

  The following August, the Unite the Right rally gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Protesters there objected to a plan to remove the city's statue of Robert Edward Lee. The rally turned deadly, and within days other cities acted. Baltimore removed its Confederate statues overnight, between the 15th and the 16th of August 2017. Mayor Catherine Pugh said she ordered the overnight work to preserve public safety. The next day, Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Jim Gray asked his city council to approve removing two statues from a courthouse.

  According to The Washington Post, the pace kept climbing. Forty-eight monuments came down in the three years after Charlottesville. A hundred and ten more came down in the two years after the murder of George Floyd. The Southern Poverty Law Center separately counted at least 114 monuments removed within three years of the Charleston shooting. Texas removed 31 of them, more than any other state.

  In 2017, Georgia state legislator Jason Spencer confronted a Black colleague who backed removal. He warned she would be met with something 'a lot more definitive' than torches. He said people who wanted the statues gone 'will go missing in the Okefenokee.' Supporters organized anyway, holding 'Take 'Em Down' conferences in New Orleans in March 2018 and in Jacksonville, Florida, in March 2019.

  A study published in 2020 looked at where monuments were most likely to come down. Removal was more common in places with a large Black and Democratic population. It was also more common where an NAACP chapter was active, and where the state legislature let local governments decide.

• 5. Statehouses Fight Back

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  Seven states have passed laws that block or slow the removal of Confederate monuments from public property. Georgia's law dates to the early 20th century. North Carolina passed its version in 2015, and Alabama followed in 2017; all three prohibit removal or alteration outright. South Carolina in 2000, Mississippi in 2004, and Tennessee in 2013 passed laws that make removal harder without banning it entirely.

  Tennessee updated its Heritage Protection Act in 2016. The update requires a two-thirds vote of the Tennessee Historical Commission before any public monument can be renamed, removed, or moved. A 2018 amendment let any 'entity, group or individual with an interest in a Confederate memorial' sue for an injunction to preserve it. By 2022, the commission had reviewed seven removal petitions and approved only one, a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the state capitol.

  North Carolina's Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act of 2015 bars local governments from removing monuments on public property. In August 2017, Governor Roy Cooper asked the legislature to repeal it. He wrote that the state 'cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.' These monuments, he said, 'should come down.' The legislature refused, but Cooper still removed three Confederate monuments from the state capitol grounds, citing public safety.

  Alabama's Memorial Preservation Act, passed in May 2017, was written specifically to stop the removal of Birmingham's Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument. A circuit judge struck the law down as unconstitutional on the 14th of January 2019. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed that decision by a vote of nine to zero on the 27th of November 2019. The court ruled that a municipality has no constitutional right to free speech of its own.

  Virginia's 1902 law protecting Confederate monuments was repealed in 2020. Governor Ralph Northam signed the repeal on the 11th of April, letting local governments decide the monuments' fate, effective the 1st of July.

  A federal attempt to act nationally stalled in 2020. The House voted 305-113 to remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney from the Capitol. The bill died in a Senate committee without a further vote.

• 6. A Renaming, Then A Reversal

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  In 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he would order the renaming of United States military bases named for Confederate generals. He was following the work of the Defense Department's Naming Commission of 2021-22. That May, the commission recommended new names for nine Army bases and two Navy ships. Austin pledged to follow every recommendation.

  Fort Benning, Georgia, became Fort Moore, honoring Lieutenant General Hal Moore and his wife Julia Moore. Fort Bragg took the name Fort Liberty in 2023, replacing its tribute to Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Fort Gordon, Georgia, became Fort Eisenhower. Fort Hood, Texas, became Fort Cavazos, after General Richard E. Cavazos, who won the Distinguished Service Cross during the Korean War.

  Fort Lee, Virginia, was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams on the 27th of April 2023. The new name honored Lieutenant General Arthur J. Gregg and Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams. Fort Pickett, Virginia, became Fort Barfoot on the 24th of March 2023. Fort Rucker, Alabama, became Fort Novosel on the 10th of April 2023, after Medal of Honor recipients Van T. Barfoot and Michael J. Novosel.

  Fort Liberty reverted to the name Fort Bragg, this time honoring World War II veteran Roland L. Bragg rather than the Confederate general. Nearly every other new name changed as well. Fort Benning's name was restored on the 3rd of March 2025, credited to Corporal Fred G. Benning instead. Fort Cavazos returned to being Fort Hood, now honoring Colonel Robert B. Hood rather than the Confederate general John Bell Hood. Fort Gregg-Adams reverted to Fort Lee, honoring Spanish-American War soldier Fitz Lee instead of Robert E. Lee. The last of these changes were finalized in June 2025.

  By December 2022, the Naming Commission had also ordered the Naval Academy at Annapolis and the Military Academy at West Point to rename buildings and roads. West Point removed a portrait, a bust, and bronze panels that had depicted Robert E. Lee alongside members of the Ku Klux Klan.

• 7. Divided At The Ballot

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  A 2017 Reuters poll found 54% of American adults wanted Confederate monuments to remain in all public spaces. Just 27% favored removal, and 19% were unsure. Reuters reported that the answers split sharply by race and party. White respondents and Republicans mostly favored keeping the monuments, while Democrats and minorities mostly favored removing them.

  A separate 2017 poll by HuffPost and YouGov found 48% wanted the monuments to remain. Thirty-three percent favored removal, and 18% were unsure. An NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist poll that year found most Americans wanted the statues to stay, including 44% of African American respondents.

  Opinion shifted after the George Floyd protests in 2020. Support for removal rose to 52%, against 44% who wanted the monuments left in place.

• 8. After The Statue Comes Down

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  The bust of Robert E. Lee stood in the median of Monroe Street in Fort Myers, Florida. Overnight between the 11th and the 12th of March 2019, someone removed its mounting bolts. The bust was found toppled and face down the next morning. It was carried away undamaged by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Most Confederate monuments came down a different way, through official action by state and local governments. Only a relative few were toppled outside the law, the way the Fort Myers bust was.

  At least three monuments were destroyed by protestors in states whose laws made legal removal difficult. Silent Sam, a statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, came down but was not seriously damaged. It went into storage awaiting a decision on its fate. A Confederate Soldiers Monument in Durham, North Carolina, and the Screven County Confederate Dead Monument in Sylvania, Georgia, were both damaged beyond repair. The Sylvania monument was pulled from its pedestal between the 30th and the 31st of August 2018. The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans offered a reward, originally $2,000, later raised to $10,000, for whoever was responsible.

  In Baltimore, one of four bare plinths became the base for a new statue in 2017. Artist Pablo Machioli's work, Madre Luz, showed a pregnant Black woman with a raised golden fist. Machioli said his goal was 'to construct a pregnant mother as a symbol of life.' At the University of North Carolina, two scholars argued for leaving Silent Sam's stripped pedestal standing as a ruin. Chancellor Carol Folt had the plinth and its plaques removed instead, on the 14th of January 2019. In Richmond, Virginia, the plinths came down in 2022. Along Monument Avenue, spotlights that once lit the statues still point upward into empty space.

  The same reckoning reached past the water's edge. Statues and public artworks tied to the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism have also come down or been destroyed in cities around the world.