Analysis Interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based on past events.
A record number of Confederate monuments fell in 2020, but hundreds still stand. Here’s where.
More than 140 Confederate monuments have been removed from public land since the Charleston, S.C., church shooting in 2015, and about two-thirds of those came down in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death on May 25.
Monuments and status shown are based on an accounting done by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Washington Post reporting found a handful of others and one monument with an unknown removal date. According to the SPLC, only four monuments were removed between 1923 and 2015.
Confederate statues: In 2020, a renewed battle in America’s enduring Civil War
Symbols of the Confederacy have long been controversial, but many communities refocused on them after a young white supremacist killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston and again after the deadly white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
But neither of those events supercharged demands to bring down the stone-and-metal symbols of racial injustice as much as the killing of Floyd, a Black man pinned under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is White. (Jury selection for Chauvin’s murder trial began this week.)
Some monuments were yanked down by protesters; others were removed by local authorities. A few have been relocated to private land, such as cemeteries or museums.
“There’s a long history since the civil rights movement of actions against the monuments,” Karen Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told The Post in June. “This is the same exact debate we’ve seen since the end of the Civil War.”
While dozens of Confederate monuments have been removed since 2009, more than 700 remained at the end of 2020, along with hundreds of names on roads, schools, parks and the like.
Recent monument removals by year
90
At least 90 monuments
were removed in 2020
70
50
36 removed in 2017, the
same year as Charlottesvile
30
4 removed in 2015,
all after Charleston
10
‘09
‘12
‘13
‘14
‘15
‘16
’17
’18
’19
‘20
90
At least 90 monuments
were removed in 2020
70
50
36 removed in 2017, the
same year as Charlottesvile
30
4 removed in 2015,
all after Charleston
10
2009
’12
’13
’14
’15
’16
’17
’18
’19
’20
90
At least 90 monuments
were removed in 2020
70
50
36 removed in 2017, the
same year as Charlottesvile
30
4 removed in 2015,
all after Charleston
10
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
90
At least 90 monuments
were removed in 2020
70
50
36 removed in 2017, the
same year as Charlottesvile
30
10
4 removed in 2015,
all after Charleston
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
There is one monument not represented here, because its removal date is unknown. Three New Mexico monuments removed sometime between 2016 and 2018 are accounted for above in 2018.
Perspective: What to do when the Confederate statues come down? Leave the pedestals empty.
At least 28 monuments in Virginia were removed or relocated last year, the most of any state, but the commonwealth still has more than 110 remaining — also the most of any state. Georgia is next, with more than 105 remaining.
Activists railed against monuments in both states last summer.
Protesters in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, tore down a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and another of Gen. Williams Carter Wickham.
(Dylan Garner/Richmond Times-Dispatch via Storyful)
They also attempted to topple the 60-foot-high likeness of Gen. Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue before Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) tweeted on June 4 that it would be taken down. It is on state property, and the battle to remove it has gone to the Virginia Supreme Court. Richmond City Council leaders removed the four other Confederate statues along the street that stood on city land.
On Richmond’s evolving Monument Avenue, myth and ugly lies run deep
Just up Interstate 95 in Alexandria, Va., “Appomattox,” which had stood at an Old Town intersection since 1889, was removed in June by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The memorial had long been a source of controversy, and the group had been planning to remove it in July anyway. Less than 10 miles away, protesters in D.C. toppled a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike near Judiciary Square.
In Decatur, Ga., a judge ordered that the 30-foot “Lost Cause” obelisk be taken from a town square. Groups in DeKalb County had spent years trying to get the monument removed and had added a marker near it saying it has “bolstered white supremacy and faulty history,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Noted monuments came down in several parts of Alabama as well. At the state’s flagship university in Tuscaloosa, where Gov. George Wallace stood in a doorway in 1963 to block two Black students from entering, a monument and three plaques honoring students who served in the Confederate army and student cadet corps were removed.
An hour away in Birmingham, crews dispatched by the mayor dismantled a 50-foot obelisk memorializing Confederate soldiers and sailors in a downtown park. In Montgomery, protesters pulled down another Lee statue from in front of a high school named for him, and the port city of Mobile was fined for taking down a statue of Adm. Raphael Semmes.
The mayor of Jacksonville, Fla., ordered the removal of the city’s three Confederate monuments and eight historical markers, including a controversial 62-foot statue and plaque that had stood in a park since 1898.
Robert Walker poses for a photograph with the remains of a Confederate memorial removed in Birmingham, Ala., in June. (Jay Reeves/AP)
A Confederate monument is dismantled in Indianapolis in June. (Mykal Mceldowney/AP)
Robert Walker poses for a photograph with the remains of a Confederate memorial removed in Birmingham, Ala., in June. (Jay Reeves/AP) A Confederate monument is dismantled in Indianapolis in June. (Mykal Mceldowney/AP)
In Indianapolis, a monument honoring 1,616 prisoners of war who died at a Union prison camp was removed from a park, where it had been placed by city officials in 1928 at the behest of the Ku Klux Klan.
This list goes on, from Bentonville, Ark., to Louisville to Rocky Mount, N.C., to Fort Worth.
Discussions and legal wrangling over some of these memorials began years and sometimes decades ago but accelerated in 2020, spurred on by new public scrutiny.
Laws in some states make removing Confederate symbols extremely difficult, including in South Carolina, where a law written in 2000 requires two-thirds of legislators to approve any removal. None of South Carolina’s 58 monuments came down last year. An Alabama law restricting Confederate removals was enacted in 2017; some legislators are trying to repeal it.
Almost all Confederate statues and memorials were erected decades after the Civil War, when states and municipalities were writing Jim Crow laws that codified racial segregation.
Number of monuments dedicated, by decade
1860-1869
20
1860-
1869
‘70-
‘79
‘80-
‘89
‘90-
‘99
1900-1999
205
196
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
1900-
1909
‘10-
‘19
‘20-
‘29
‘30-
‘39
‘40-
‘49
‘50-
‘59
‘60-
‘69
‘70-
‘79
‘80-
‘89
‘90-
‘99
2000-2015
20
2000-
2009
‘10-
’15
1860-1869
20
1860-
1869
‘70-
‘79
‘80-
‘89
‘90-
‘99
1900-1999
205
196
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1900-
1909
‘10-
‘19
‘20-
‘29
‘30-
‘39
‘40-
‘49
‘50-
‘59
‘60-
‘69
‘70-
‘79
‘80-
‘89
‘90-
‘99
2000-2015
20
2000-
2009
‘10-
‘15
205
200
196
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
25
20
10
1860-
1869
’70-
’79
’80-
’89
’90-
’99
1900-
1909
’10-
’19
’20-
’29
’30-
’39
’40-
’49
’50-
’59
’60-
’69
’70-
’79
’80-
’89
’90-
’99
2000-
2009
’10-
’15
205
200
196
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
25
20
10
1860-
1869
’70-
’79
’80-
’89
’90-
’99
1900-
1909
’10-
’19
’20-
’29
’30-
’39
’40-
’49
’50-
’59
’60-
’69
’70-
’79
’80-
’89
’90-
’99
2000-
2009
’10-
’15
There are 70 monuments not represented here, because the dedication dates are unknown.
The battle over our nation’s Confederate remnants
Most were erected in Southern states, but a few appear in unexpected places, such as Arizona and California.
At least 35 new Confederate monuments have been dedicated on public land since 2000, and at least three have gone up since 2014. The most recent listed in SPLC data was dedicated in Pearisburg, Va., less than a month after the Charleston shooting. It is a display in the Giles County Courthouse of a medal awarded in 1995 to a soldier killed in the 1862 Battle of Williamsburg. He reportedly died clutching the Confederate flag.
As municipalities became leery of adding Confederate monuments, some groups have chosen to erect them on private property.
A 20-ton granite block unveiled in Abbeville, S.C., in 2018 was dedicated to the 170 signers of South Carolina’s ordinance of secession from the union. The Sons of Confederate Veterans had intended to place it on public land in Charleston, but their plans were twice rejected by local authorities.
Instead, the monument stands on a portion of a hill owned by Robert Hayes, a retired teacher, former leader of a neo-Confederate group and sometime impersonator of Jefferson Davis.
About this story
The data used for this page is based on a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center which was last updated in March 2021. The SPLC data includes only monuments on public land and does not count monuments located on or within battlefields, museums, cemeteries or other places that are largely historical in nature. Markers that appeared to be approved by historical commissions were also excluded.
Additional Post reporting has been done to identify monuments that have been removed more recently. If you know of a monument that’s not accurately represented, let us know.
Originally published June 17, 2020.
