No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Apr 30, 2025

In this fascinating discussion, Karen L. Cox, Professor Emerita of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, dives deep into the contentious issue of Confederate monuments. She unpacks their historical significance and the intense debates surrounding their removal. Listeners will explore the surprising influence of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the complex legacy of white supremacy, and how community engagement is crucial for addressing these polarizing symbols. Cox's insights provide a thought-provoking examination of race, history, and identity.

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ADVICE

Monuments Are Local Symbols

Understand that Confederate monuments are local public objects owned by their communities. - Solutions such as relocating them to parks fail because monument defenders feel these sites are integral to local identity.

INSIGHT

Persistent Black Opposition

The Black community has consistently opposed Confederate monuments despite danger under Jim Crow. - The Chicago Defender newspaper served as a vital platform for anti-monument voices during segregation.

INSIGHT

Monuments Educate White Supremacy

Confederate monuments were educational tools reinforcing the Lost Cause ideology. - The United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted these narratives to shape Southern identity and future generations.

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When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today.

In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, 2021), Dr. Karen L. Cox offers an eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments. Dr. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Our guest is: Dr. Karen L. Cox, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her other books include Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture and Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

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