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Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Confederate monuments and the history of lynching in the American South: An empirical examination

Kyshia Henderson, et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 
Oct 2021, 118 (42) e2103519118
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103519118

Significance

The fight over Confederate monuments has fueled lawsuits, protests, counterprotests, arrests, even terrorism, as we painfully saw in August 2017 in Charlottesville, VA. The fight rests on a debate over whether these monuments represent racism (“hate”) or something ostensibly devoid of racism (“heritage,” “Southern pride”). Herein, we show that Confederate monuments are tied to a history of racial violence. Specifically, we find that the number of lynching victims in a county is a positive and significant predictor of Confederate memorializations in that county, even after controlling for relevant covariates. This finding provides concrete, quantitative, historically and geographically situated evidence consistent with the position that Confederate memorializations reflect a racist history, marred by intentions to terrorize and intimidate Black Americans.

Abstract

The present work interrogates the history of Confederate memorializations by examining the relationship between these memorializations and lynching, an explicitly racist act of violence. We obtained and merged data on Confederate memorializations at the county level and lynching victims, also at the county level. We find that the number of lynching victims in a county is a positive and significant predictor of the number of Confederate memorializations in that county, even after controlling for relevant covariates. This finding provides concrete, quantitative, and historically and geographically situated evidence consistent with the position that Confederate memorializations reflect a racist history, one marred by intentions to terrorize and intimidate Black Americans in response to Black progress.

From the Discussion

Activists have long argued that Confederate memorializations are hateful, that they represent violence and intimidation, and that they are racist. In 2015, after scaling a flagpole at the South Carolina State House to remove the Confederate flag, activist Bree Newsome wrote in a statement, “It’s the banner of racial
intimidation and fear ... a reminder how, for centuries, the oppressive status quo has been undergirded by white supremacist violence with the tacit approval of too many political leaders”.  Similarly, activist De’Ivyion Drew, in response to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s making a deal with the Sons of Confederate Veterans to keep a monument on campus, stated, “Not only is UNC actively emboldening white supremacy through giving monetary support to them, but they’re also giving them the power with the statue to harm communities of color in the state”. Both Newsome and Drew call to the symbols’ racist and harmful associations, and the current data are consistent with these claims. In the present work, we find that county-level frequency of lynching predicts county-level frequency of Confederate memorializations. Statistically linking lynching, a recognized form of racial oppression intended to maintain White supremacy and suppress civil rights for Black Americans, with Confederate symbols provides compelling evidence that these symbols are associated with hate, and intentionally so.