This timeline designation enables the temporal indexing of persons and memorials, monuments, or other objects and places to persons who fought for or otherwise supported the Confederacy, or advocated theories of white supremacy and Black racial inferiority, or who actively campaigned for the preservation of slavery in the United States and/or argued for its protection or expansion into territories under the dominion of the United States. This period corresponds to several significant historical developments highlighted by this database. First, it corresponds to the displacement of indigenous peoples from territories appropriated by the United States, enabling the rapid expansion of the cotton economy and forced migration of enslaved persons southwestward into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and eventually Texas. It also encompasses the rise of anti-slavery movements in the northern United States and the reshaping of American political parties around the politics of slavery and its expansion. Finally, it incorporates the outbreak of the Civil War with the secession of the southern states and formation of the Confederacy and the destruction of chattel slavery in the U.S. following the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), defeat of the Confederacy, and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
This timeline designation enables the temporal indexing of persons and memorials, monuments, or other objects and places to persons who were active in resurrecting and/or influencing institutions of higher education and related entities in the three decades after the end of the Civil War. Such persons may have resisted social and political policies, arrangements, and alliances associated with Reconstruction, including the extension of civil and legal protections to freed persons by the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These persons (or the monuments dedicated in their name) may have engaged in educational practices that advocated white supremacy, taken formal political actions (such as election to office) to “redeem” the southern state and local governments. Even as African Americans pursued full participation in political, economic, and social life, white southerners joined (or publicly defended) violent organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and similar paramilitary bodies that terrorized Black male voters and politicians and their white Republican allies. This period includes the imposition of “Black codes” at the state level and the resulting rise of Black “convict leasing” and other forms of re-enslavement. The period also saw the spread of white organizations in the South that recognized and honored veterans of the Confederate military (such as Ladies’ Memorial Associations and veterans groups). In the academy, a new generation of instructors developed and taught a literature of pseudo-scientific theories arguing for the innate inferiority of Black persons and justifying their social and political suppression.
This timeline designation enables the temporal indexing of persons and memorials, monuments, or other objects, places, and events associated with persons in various arenas of public life who contributed to the imposition of formal or informal systems of race-based segregation, disfranchisement, and/or others forms of anti-Black discrimination. These persons may have been associated with such “Lost Cause” organizations as the United Confederate Veterans (1889; later, the Sons of Confederate Veterans) or the United Daughters of the Confederacy (1896). Such groups venerated the creators of the Southern nation for their defense of white racial supremacy by celebrating the military valor of its soldiers, asserting the constitutionality of secession, and spreading the fiction that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. The period corresponds to white southerners’ adoption of new laws and policies associated with “Jim Crow” discrimination, which limited the political rights and civil and legal protections of Black people. This period also was one of extraordinary violence and terrorism led by white Americans against Black Americans through lynching or the wholesale destruction of African American neighborhoods in Wilmington, N.C., Tulsa, Okla., and other cities and towns in the southern United States. During these years, too, and especially during wartime periods of social disruption, large numbers of African Americans emigrated from the southern countryside to growing industrial centers in northern cities. The period ends with the close of World War II, which emboldened Black veterans to demand full citizenship and contributed to the erosion of support for discriminatory practices in the military and federal government and in American life in general.
This timeline designation enables the temporal indexing of persons and memorials, monuments, or other objects and places to persons who were active in education, politics, or other arenas of public action and who contributed through their actions to the imposition of formal or informal systems of race-based segregation, disfranchisement, and/or others forms of anti-Black discrimination. This period corresponds to exceptional and successful challenges to laws that enforced racial discrimination, and imposition of new federal, state, and local laws seeking to redress generations of formal and informal practices that discriminated against Black and Brown people. The period also corresponds to new movements to resist Civil Rights legislation and policies, portended by the political campaigns of Alabama Gov. George Wallace and invigorated in the anti-busing and anti-affirmative action campaigns of Republican Richard Nixon and new conservative leaders. By the end of this period, a new and younger generation of Black leaders identified with “Black Power '' ideology which and focused on the violence inflicted against people of color and the social conditions of American cities. These leaders gained notoriety and power by rejecting earlier generations’ reliance on non-violent protest and court decisions to end racial discrimination and calling for more militant action to end white supremacy in the U.S. At the same time Black leaders gained new and visible formal sources of political power, signaled especially by election to mayoralties in major cities from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Indicative of the persistence of memorialization in this era of Civil Rights gains was the completion of the nation’s largest “Lost Cause” monument, at Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, the construction of which began in the 1920s and officially finished in 1972.
This timeline designation enables the temporal indexing of persons and memorials, monuments, or other objects and places to persons who were active in education, politics, or other arenas of public action and who contributed through their actions to the celebration of Confederate “heritage” (including other euphemisms for the Lost Cause) in the period of the New Conservative ascendancy in American politics, society, and culture after 1976. This period corresponds to the successful campaign, embraced by conservative Republicans and later by “New Democrats,” to eliminate or weaken instruments for redressing social inequity, such as busing to achieve racial desegregation and expanded social welfare supports to address urban and rural poverty. African Americans were disproportionately benefited by these policies. The early 1980s saw a resurgence of Klan organization and activity, and an invigoration of southern nationalist organizations, which deliberately distanced themselves and their rhetoric from racism but promoted the preservation of “southern culture” – the display of Confederate flags at public buildings, participation in Civil War battle reenactments, rallies at Confederate memorials – under the banner of “heritage not hate.” These developments were keyed to the “culture war” battles waged against supporters of the welfare state and “multiculturalism” in the 1980s and 1990s, which fed on fears of a declining birthrate of whites and the displacement of the white majority in the U.S. by Brown immigrants. They likewise drew energy from the “War on Drugs” launched by Reagan-era Republicans, which often unfairly targeted Black and Brown people, exploited the myths of “Black criminality,” and disproportionately channeled them into federal and state prisons. In the 1990s, white nationalist organizations grew in size, number, and public acceptance all across the U.S. Thanks to the successful lobbying of various state divisions of the Sons of Confederate Veterans – and indicative of the enhanced power of organizations celebrating the Confederacy and “Old South” in the 1990s – residents of states from Maryland south to Texas could purchase license plates featuring the Confederate flag in the seal of the SCV.