The debate over Confederate monuments debate has largely been one focused on American history; on slavery, on the Civil War, on Reconstruction, and above all on the overarching, ongoing struggle against racial discrimination against Black people in the United States.
As it turns out, the case against symbols to the Confederacy extends beyond the history textbooks. In this analysis of the data surrounding symbols dedicated to the Confederacy, I will make the case that even the raw numbers and statistics describing these symbols show that across time and place, these symbols to the old Confederate States of America are deeply and directly tied to a legacy of discrimination against Black Americans.
To do this, I’ll focus largely on charts and images that are hopefully readable and accessible. You can read everything in-depth if you like, but glancing over the graphics alone should give you a sense for what’s going on. We’ll look at the characteristics that Confederate monuments have with regards to their history, their locations, and the kind of places where they tend to be built.
Without further ado, let’s get into the numbers.
Part 1: Erasing History
A common argument for the preservation of Confederate symbolism is that these symbols and monuments are “a part of history,” and that we risk erasing or censoring historical fact by removing them from public places.
With this in mind, we’ll start off by looking at how the Confederate symbols are distributed across **time. **That is, we’d like to know the years of post-Civil War history during which most of them went up. The SPLC dataset that I based this report on includes information on when most of these symbols were instated, so we can plot these in a histogram to track the creation of such symbols across history:
This plot groups symbols by their year of dedication, and shows how many symbols went up within each (approximately) 4-year span between the end of the Civil War and today. Clearly, the biggest spike in Confederate symbol creation happened between 1900–1920, followed by a second pronounced spike centered on the 1960s.
What was going on during these years? Well…
This plot represents something slightly different from the first one. Now, we’re looking at the relative proportion of symbols that belong to each 4-year period.
You’ll also notice that this plot includes some major historical events to put things into context. Historians generally associate the first wave (1900–1920) with a push to memorialize the Civil War as the last veterans began to pass away; the second wave (1950–1968) is generally associated with the Civil Rights Movement.
At any rate, these distributions show that the history of Confederate symbolism is much more closely associated with pushes for Black equality than to the Civil War itself. Major events tied to the Jim Crow era like Plessy v. Ferguson and the Civil Rights Movement directly coincide with peaks in symbol dedication.
My Take:_ Confederate symbolism, across history, is directly tied to major pushes for Black equality. The 1950–1968 spike is a clear response to the Civil Rights Movement pushing for the end of Jim Crow laws._
As for the early 1900s spike, we know that the extinction of Civil War veterans during that period re-inspired a lot of interest in the war. But we also know that this was an intensely racist period in history during which the infamous Jim Crow laws were first being put into place in the wake of Reconstruction amidst the backdrop of a Ku Klux Klan rising to power.
At this point it might be too early to definitively see a pattern, but we’ll revisit these facts in a minute.
#data-science #confederate-monuments #data-visualization #united-states #social-justice
