In a symbolic rebuke of the American South’s racist history, an old Confederate monument now has a meaningful new life, four years after it was toppled in Virginia.

In June 2020, protesters in Richmond used ropes to pull down the bronze statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, splashed paint on its surface and slung a toilet paper noose around its neck.  Charged discussions over what should become of it followed.

In 2022, the statue – carefully and controversially preserved in its degraded state and displayed on its back instead of its original upright position – went on display in a Richmond museum.

As part of his research into white supremacy, David is travelling to each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023 during the national reckoning sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement.  As a sociologist who studies legacies of historical conflict, his goal is to understand how those sites – and the objects that for decades stood upon them – are reshaping where and how the Confederacy bears upon the nation’s current identity.

Writing in The Conversation, Mitchell Institute Visiting Scholar Professor David Cunningham explores the themes of monuments as artifacts and monuments as memory.  He asks: Who defines American values?  In their respective reckonings with the Confederacy – and with modern racial justice movements – relocated Confederate statues are bellwethers of ongoing struggles to resolve this question.

Read the article here.

 

Professor David Cunningham

David Cunningham is Professor and outgoing Chair of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis.  His research has focused on drivers of political repression as well as organized racist campaigns by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups, and currently centers on how legacies of historical racialized violence shape ongoing inequalities and divisions.