ATLANTA — Last month, dozens of protesters squared off against 50 police officers in riot gear at the Georgia Capitol and began to chant.
"Tear down Gordon! Tear down Gordon!"
The target of their ire was the regal figure of Confederate Gen. John Brown Gordon, a former Georgia governor, senator and a white supremacist who is generally regarded as a state leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the years following the Civil War.
The statue depicts Gordon in his Confederate uniform astride his horse, and has held a prominent spot on the statehouse lawn since its unveiling 113 years ago to a throng of white Atlantans and a band playing "Dixie."
Gordon remains, but Confederate statues across the Southeast are falling, including the court-ordered removal of a 112-year-old obelisk from the Decatur square June 12. Gone, too, is the contextual marker, placed just last year, that informed visitors the monument was erected to "glorify the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy."
Likewise, on June 30 Rockdale County removed a 1913 Confederate monument from the courthouse lawn in Conyers, and officials in Henry County officials voted July 7 to take down the memorial on McDonough square.
While U.S. President Donald Trump and others have called the removals an attempt to erase American history, historians have long discounted Confederate memorials as accurate representations of the Civil War.
Erected in most cases decades after the war ended, the monuments better illustrate how white southerners sought to rewrite history and impart noble motives to the dead, they say.
"I’ve been studying history in some ways all my life. I’ve been doing it professionally for over 30 years, and I can’t say that I’ve ever learned much history at all from a monument," said Kenneth Noe, Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. "Those aren’t the sources we use."
University of Alabama history professor Hilary Green was succinct.
"Monuments do a very poor job in talking about history," she said.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke to five historians who specialize in Civil War and Southern history about calls to remove Confederate statues many consider a vestige of segregation and white supremacy. William Sturkey, a professor of Southern history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said white Southerners erected the monuments decades after the Civil War in a bloody campaign to reassert white supremacy and strip Blacks of newly earned freedoms.
"People that make the argument that taking down monuments is erasing history truly have no idea how much history has been erased," he said. "These activist organizations (who erected the monuments) sought to reshape history, reshape the meaning behind the Civil War, reshape what happened during Reconstruction, reshape the participation of African Americans in the history of this region and in our country. Those were the people who were actually erased."
More and more local leaders are reflecting that academic perspective as they confront controversies over memorials in their own communities. Last month, the Kennesaw City Council approved a resolution removing the Confederate battle flag from a war memorial on the city’s Main Street. Mayor Derek Easterling said the decision was met with overwhelming approval from local residents. He said addressing these monuments isn’t erasing history.
"Removing a statue is not going to change how people feel," he said. "It’s not going to change what happened."
But he said local leaders can take actions to address the message monuments send. In the case of Kennesaw, the council removed the Confederate battle flag, replacing it with the flag flown during the Civil War, an action designed to remove the most controversial element of the display.
Thomas Brown, a history professor at the University of South Carolina and scholar on the role of monuments in American culture, said the ground is shifting rapidly since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis refocused the nation’s attention on institutional racism. As well, popular opinion on the meaning and relevance of Confederate memorials has shifted too, he said.
"The community that put up the John Gordon statue in 1907 is not the community that will debate its fate today," he said. "I do think it could be a healthy discussion for Atlanta now."
Forty-four of Gordon’s living descendants are among those who have joined the discussion, noting in a letter to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp that the "primary purpose of the statue was to celebrate and mythologize the white supremacists of the Confederacy." The descendants want Kemp to remove it.
Legally removing Confederate monuments in Georgia is difficult. A Senate bill Kemp signed last year forbids the removal of monuments, markers, plaques and place names dedicated to "historically significant military, religious, civil, civil rights, political, social, or cultural events or series of events" or to honour military service, including in the Confederate Army.
Yet, elsewhere in the Deep South, authorities are moving ahead. Last month, the University of Alabama removed a plaque and memorial boulder placed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1914 on the campus quad.
Alabama has a law protecting monuments as well, but the university found a loophole in the law that allowed the removal of the memorial boulder. Similarly, DeKalb County removed the Lost Cause obelisk after a judge declared it a public nuisance.
DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, who has written books about Georgia history, ordered the removal of the monument, but he dismisses the idea that history is being erased.
"I’ve spent a major portion of my adult life and even earlier researching and writing about the American Civil War. For me, it was and remains the defining moment in the history of our nation," he said.
But he said the monuments that were erected after the end of Reconstruction were put there to romanticize the South’s role in the Civil War as a heroic struggle, rather than a fight to preserve slavery.
Karen Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said the monuments do have a historical meaning, just not for the Civil War.
"What it teaches us is about the history of the Jim Crow period," she said. "What it’s about is the generation of people who put those monuments up, who attended the unveilings, etc. It’s about their desire to memorialize the Confederacy and Confederate principles — things like states rights, things like white supremacy."
She said white leaders sent a distinct message to the Black community by placing many of the statues in front of the courthouse where trials were held and citizens registered to vote.
Before the flood of Civil War monuments were erected, Americans did not have much of a history of building such memorials.
"John Quincy Adams famously said, ‘Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no metals,’" Brown said. For example, Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the most universally admired of the Founding Fathers after George Washington, had no statue to his memory until the mid-1850s. "It was a cultural form that had been developed in monarchical and imperial orders."
The soul-shaking death count of the Civil War changed that.
"So many people died," Brown said. "They died far from home, away from their families, violently at a young age, and most importantly of all, their bodies didn’t come back."
To commemorate the lost, Brown said local leaders began erecting monuments — in the North. "It is death that puts the public monument on the national landscape," he said.
But the proliferation of monuments decades later in the South took a somewhat different tone. And it did not go unnoticed by the newly freed African Americans and their children, Green said.
"From the very beginning African Americans were openly hostile to this landscape because it is occurring in the time with disenfranchisement. It also is occurring in a time with lynching. It’s also coming at a time where Jim Crow realities are becoming real and that moment of Reconstruction is closing," she said. "They are seeing themselves being erased."
— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution