It took generations to erect all the nation’s Confederate monuments but a new report shows they’re being removed at a pace of about three each month.
The study, which was released Monday by the Southern Poverty Law Center today, shows that 110 Confederate monuments have been removed nationwide since 2015 when a shooting at a black church in South Carolina energized a movement against such memorials.
The number of statues, which includes schools and roads that have been renamed in California, a repurposed Confederate holiday in Georgia, plus rebel flags and monuments that have been taken down in Alabama, Louisiana and elsewhere, represents a relative handful compared with the more than 1,700 memorials that remain to hail the Southern “lost cause.”
Many of the Confederate monuments that are now controversial were erected in the early 1900s by groups composed of women and veterans. Some honor generals or soldiers; others bear inscriptions that critics say wrongly gloss over slavery as a reason for the war or portray the Confederate cause as noble.
The Old South monuments are supported by groups including the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is erecting new memorials even as others are removed. Members have raised two giant Confederate “mega-flags” on private property and erected four monuments in Alabama alone this year.
