According to a study done by the far left Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of Confederate Monuments are actually growing.
But today, the law center’s list of public Confederate memorials – monuments, place names, symbols, holidays – is 237 entries longer, at 1,740, than in 2016.
That’s because the same outrage that led to the removal of some memorials has led to the identification of others. Confederate sites, most of them established long ago, are being discovered faster than they’re being removed.
The growing national inventory of Confederate tributes suggests that whatever direction the nation takes on two other issues that went viral in 2017 – sexual harassment and gun violence – there will be no reckoning soon for public Confederate symbols. There are just too many.
Some of the newly listed memorials were in plain sight, such as a monument to Lee in downtown Fort Myers, Florida; Charleston’s Wade Hampton Park, named for the scion of one of the largest slave-owning families in America; and Nicholls State University in Louisiana, named for a Confederate general and postwar governor who helped strip blacks of the vote. Â
But who knew that Winnie Davis Hall at the University of Georgia is named for the daughter of the Confederate president? That Graceville, Florida, pop. 2,200, “Where the Living is Easy,’’ is named for a Confederate officer? That there’s a Jefferson Davis Highway marker in Las Cruces, New Mexico, or a monument in Monterey, California, to an officer who left the U.S. Army to serve the Confederacy?
After the law center released its first survey two years ago, it was deluged with reports – from journalists, historians, members of the public – that its staff checked out while continuing its own search for memorials.
Now, there is undoubtedly a war on these monuments. The left has taken aim at not only Confederate monuments but also those of the founding fathers and Christopher Columbus. Even with that war on history, this study shows that the fight for them isn’t anywhere near to over.
