Unite the Right rally

• The shooter intended to start a race war and had posed with Confederate imagery in photos posted online.
• Monument removal efforts grew in 2017 after a counterprotester was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist groups defended the preservation of Confederate monuments.
• Further research I conducted shows that these political effects disproportionately occurred in areas with a larger share of Black residents.
• These findings demonstrate that a connection existed between racism and these monuments from their inception – and provide context for modern monument debates.

Monumental history

• These monuments largely honored the dead and were placed in cemeteries and spaces distant from daily life.
• They compartmentalized the trauma of the war, commemorating lives but not placing the Confederacy at the center of Southern identity.
• As Reconstruction neared its end in 1875, a Stonewall Jackson monument erected in Richmond, Virginia, foreshadowed the different monuments to come.
• Additional Confederate monuments have been dedicated since that period, but those numbers pale in comparison to the monument-building spree of 1878 to 1912.

Monumental effects

• My research investigates the political effects of Confederate monuments in the Reconstruction and early post-Reconstruction – 1877-1912 – eras, namely their effects on Democratic Party vote share and voter turnout.
• I expected monuments’ potential effects to be directly related to their centrality to everyday life and glorification of the Confederacy.
• I expected to find little political effect from soldier-memorializing Reconstruction monuments, but some pro-Jim Crow effects from Confederate-glorifying post-Reconstruction monuments.
• I conducted further exploration and found that these political effects disproportionately occurred in counties with larger Black populations.