No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
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This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your show host, Dr. Christina Gessler, and today I am so pleased to be joined by Dr. Karen Cox, who is the author of No Common Ground, Confederate Monuments, and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. Welcome to the show, Dr. Cox. Thank you, Christina.

I am so glad that you're here and that we get to dive more deeply into this conversation about Confederate monuments. Before we hear about your book, can you please tell us about yourself? Sure. I am now Professor Emerita from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I taught history there.

for 22 years, and I have a background in public history as well. I've worked in museums and archives, and I consider myself a Southerner. I'm originally from West Virginia, but I grew up in North Carolina. I went to graduate school in Mississippi, and almost all of my research examines Southern culture.

I'm curious about how you found your path as a historian. When did you know this is what you wanted to specialize in? Did you know before college? Was there a professor who inspired you? Right. Well, I think I long had a love for it.

And that goes back to junior high school with a teacher I had. And then when I got to college, I was too busy having fun and didn't do so well that first year. But the class I did well in was history. And I've always been fascinated by that. And so I think that when I...

I think I knew that I was going to be a historian. I was kind of actually recruited from my undergraduate degree to start the master's program. And it was during the course of that that I came to understand myself as a historian. I think that in

initially I was terrified of graduate school. I, I thought, and I nearly dropped out from my master's program because it was a leap up. I don't think a lot of undergraduates understand this, that it's, it's, it's a leap up from what you've been doing as an undergraduate. But, um, I really enjoyed the rigor of it. Um, and, and the, um, uh,

And writing, the research and writing, which I, you know, I love to do research. Then comes the writing. And then that's always the thing itself. But it's like, it's a challenge. And

I often say, you know, I think of it as like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. You know, when I, as a historian, when I'm working on a book, I think that, you know, in the same way that when you were working on a puzzle, you build out the frame of it, you know, the edges of it, and then you start to fill in the pieces until the full picture emerges. And so, I don't know. I just love it. I think I, you know,

If I had time, I could write a lot more. I won't have time to do that. But yeah, I think I've just always been drawn to the study of history.

What drew you specifically to public history? That's what you originally did before you went to the professoriate full-time. And there's a strong thread of public history throughout this book in particular. Sometimes historians don't really see ourselves as public communicators. We see ourselves as communicators directly with our students or as communicators with other like-minded scholars, and we can end up kind of siloed. What led you specifically to wanting to work

in a more public venue? Well, I think I've always wanted to write in a way that was broadly accessible. And I think it has to do with my personal background. I grew up poor. I was the first person to go to college in my family. My grandparents, only one grandparent graduated high school. My parents both graduated high school, but my mother never had the opportunity to do the things that I've done. And

I just thought I want something I want to be able to write in a way that a member of my family could read. And and I think I've improved on that over time because you can't just start out that way with a dissertation. I mean, but I think I've improved on that over time. So I wanted people that.

in my family or people I grew up with or just people more generally because I think that it's so important that we communicate with the broadest possible audience.

You tell us in the introduction and again in the acknowledgments how this particular book came to be. But it sounds a bit like you were reluctant to write this particular book. Yes, very reluctant. I just had been on the road for, gosh, two years talking about Confederate monuments. Everybody wanted to know about it and understand it. And a lot of that came back.

out of my public pieces, my editorials for the New York Times and Washington Post, etc. And people look to me to help them understand. And so I had been doing this for a couple of years. And

It's a heavy subject. And it's like carrying around an anvil. And so I, you know, I wasn't looking to work on a book about like this one. I wasn't seeking that out. I actually have, you know, had another project in mind. But when they came, you know, UNC Press kind of approached me about it. And I said...

I took some time to think about it, but I looked at myself in the mirror and knew that I had to write the book because I knew it was something that people needed to understand. And I felt like I was the best person to do that. I really do. A lot of people have weighed in on this issue, but I understood it from my first book, which was about the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

And I knew that they were the ones who put up the monuments. And and so I wanted I felt like I knew it better than other people. And the people who were speaking on it had probably read my book. So I wanted to to take ownership of that. And so that's really what like I kind of convinced myself of it.

You said a few moments ago that you really like research. And it was, if I understand it correctly, at your museum job when you were doing research that you first came across this group that you just referenced, these United Daughters of the Confederacy. And they're in very organized work that directly contributed to the fundraising and everything else that went into these monuments. Yes. Is that a question or just a statement? Yeah.

Can you tell us more about that? Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I, I, yeah, I was working in a museum setting. I've told this story often. And that is that I worked with a man who was my colleague who built exhibits at the museum, but he was also a woodworker. He did traditional woodworking. He even made his own tools before he used the tools to make other things and

And he had salvaged wood from the Confederate woman's home, which was in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the museum I was working in, where we were working in, existed. And he...

He was historically minded and he wanted to know if I would research something about the women's home and where, in other words, where this wood came from. And so he could help tell the story of the things that he built from it.

And so I started looking into that and I was, I found myself just completely sucked in to this story because he, you know, what I'm seeing is I know this is a conservative Southern women's organization, but when I began looking through local newspapers about the, let's say the unveiling day, you know, of, of the Confederate women's home there, it was like, wow,

you know, first of all, front page news, every dignitary in the state was there and the women were front and center. And I'm thinking, and they are the ones that made it happen. And I thought this is really an interesting story because they're conservative women's organization. And yet they're exerting a power that most women didn't without the vote because this was pre-suffrage. And so it was from there that,

I began doing that research, but I also interviewed several women who were members of the UDC from the time they were in children's chapters. And so that's how that all got started. One of the things that you show us in your research is that there was always a very clear intent behind these events.

and you take us through the difference between monuments and memorials and battlefields. The book specifically looks at the Confederate monuments, and there was always a very specific intent. And some of the public pushback about taking down monuments or...

disagreeing with monuments is that this is revisionist history. We're saying they were white supremacists, but there was no intent at that time. Can you take us through what you found in digging into the receipts and the records of what the actual intent was behind these monuments? Sure. I mean, first of all, you know, the United Daughters of the Confederacy shared with the men of their generation, their views on race,

and white supremacy. And they were very intentional about where the monument would be placed, which was, you know, they're known for the courthouse monuments throughout the South, as well as some larger monuments, of course. But, and it, you know, the details of

of what was intended come out of unveiling speeches during, you know, when the monuments were finally unveiled. And, and, and I think it's in that where they, they basically state that they, they want these monuments to be signposts for future generations of what the, what they believe the Confederacy is about, what it stood for. And, and, and,

they were, you know, the UDC, you know, had, they had chapters of the children's chapters. They had a Ku Klux Klan children's chapter of the, of the children of the Confederacy. They had, um, they, you know, spoke highly of the, the clan of reconstruction, which we know is a vigilante organization, um, that is about reestablishing white supremacy. And, uh,

um what's not in the book and what i've learned more recently um just because i've done a little more research into a an individual monument um it's in the individual monuments that you can really really find out the story and um and digging into that you can see that the intention is white white supremacy they actually chose speakers who were uh

blatantly white supremacists. And so, yeah, there's a lot. I mean, they're not saying, oh, we're going to put up a monument to white supremacy. Nobody comes out and says that, right? But everything, you know, the context for it

choosing speakers that represented, you know, that believed in white supremacy, the unveiling speeches, the type of lessons that they taught Southern children, all of those things point to a belief in white supremacy around these monuments and beyond. And, you know, the intent to preserve white supremacy

And the other thing to just note that we're talking about monuments that are going up in the early Jim Crow period. And so the background to that is that there's a lot of lynching in the 1890s when the UDC was founded in 1894. And that period that I cover in that first, say, 20 years, 25 years, is intensely violent. And

And, you know, racial violence, that is. And so those women, you know, they're not saying that. The people aren't saying that. But, you know, everything around it points to we're trying to preserve white supremacy. And these monuments are symbols of that. At Capella University, you can learn at your own pace with our FlexPath learning format.

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And you do create the historical context in each chapter. You explain what Reconstruction was and how people felt during it. You talk about the military occupation and the Jim Crow laws, the lynching that were happening in public, not only in public spaces,

but with public approval and attendance. You talk about the black codes, the poll taxes. All of this is the culture in which the money for the monuments is being raised and the monuments are being built. You also do some...

calculations of what that money in the time period would be today. And one in particular would cost about a million dollars now to build. So this was a very intentional effort.

community project to build monuments. And one of the things that you talk about in the book, as far as taking them down and coming to a public reckoning, is that communities need to be having conversations about their monuments and the decisions about taking them down and where they'll go instead. Can you say more about that? Sure. I think it's important for people to understand that monuments, these Confederate monuments, are local objects. Okay.

Okay. And so, um, you know, people who suggest, well, why not create a park and put all the Confederate monuments in a park, you know, that are, is run by the sons of Confederate veterans or something like that. You just, because you can't do that because people take ownership of their local monuments. And, and that's, that's, um, um, that's part of the problem. Um,

And so, I'm sorry, I want to ask you to repeat the last part of your question. Well, it was more of a thought blob than a question. It was synthesizing a number of the key parts of your book and the braided threads, really, of how the monuments came to be. And

that it's not a one and done to say, well, we're going to take them down because of this intense community participation that created them in the first place. And this intense community feeling about them existing now. Yeah, no, they, there is absolutely that.

not among everyone, but a very vocal, you know, minority of people who want to keep it. I think that people's mind was, minds were changing over time. I think in my book, I quote, quote,

uh from a a study done by Elon University in North Carolina and you know from the first time they did the study to the second time they did the study you could see that there was changes in people's minds about whether or not you know monuments should stay in place but yes um locally um

These monuments really, let's just be honest in this day and time, are part of a conservative culture war. They see this as a means of

you know, protecting against, you know, quote unquote, woke liberals. And, and so the defense of these things has extended to into the law itself, from all over the states of the former Confederacy, where it's, it's an offense, you know, it's,

You can't move a monument or if you do, you know, damage to a monument, you could end up in jail or things like that. And so and it's also become part of, you know, the current administration's executive order about restoring, quote, truth and sanity to history. Right.

in which it also states, a lot of people fixated on the issues about the Smithsonian, which is absolutely valid, but there's also a thing about returning monuments that were taken down, and that's a clear reference to Confederate monuments.

And so it's an interesting time. But those, you know, the people, you know, again, it's good to remember that these are local monuments and then local communities are the ones that will, you know, end up deciding how to do that, except that.

Even when they do decide they would like to remove a monument, there are state laws that prevent them from it. In some ways, this is sort of antithetical to the idea of states' rights, which I

Which extends to local rights, the ideas around that, because it's so, in some ways, just not southern of them, really, to say, oh, local communities can't make their own decisions. It would be like saying states can't make their own decisions. And so even when a local community wants to make a change, the states are stepping in with their laws to prevent that change from occurring.

And some of these laws fall under the sort of umbrella term of heritage laws. But one of the other layers of complexity of removing monuments is while they are in communities and the money was raised back in the day by the community, they are often located on courthouse lawns and courthouses can often fall in a very weird jurisdiction of being state, local and federal all at the same time.

Yes, that's true. And so what happens is even if it's a local courthouse, the state can do things like

you know, withhold funding for that locality. If they're, you know, in other words, the politicians can be really take this to that level. So there's concern there. And, and so it's interesting because right now, excuse me, right now, as I mean, I, I,

You can consider it a local issue, but now it's more of a state issue because these state legislatures have taken over. Now there's the federal government's hand in things, but that's on federal property. I think most Confederate monuments fall under state law, and that won't be how they are handled. Honestly, since in the last few years...

the issue had quieted down quite a bit. And what I have learned and know since 2015 during the Charleston massacre, in which Dylann Roof goes into Mother Emanuel Church and murders nine people. And from that moment to today, it's an issue that has ebbed and flowed.

So it quieted down. And at that time in 2015, it was more about the Confederate flag, but monuments were still very visible on the landscape. And then it quieted down. Then you had the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and everything bubbled up again. And there was some backlash then. And you had some removals after that. Then it went quiet again. And that was so...

2020, George Floyd is murdered. And the issue bobbled up again. And then it had been quiet until Trump's executive order. And it's kind of interesting because I think to myself, you know, okay, maybe it's over now. Then it's not. And then it keeps returning and returning and returning because it's a...

It's a political hot button issue, and the GOP plays it like a fiddle. In the book, you tell us that these silences and bubbling up are not maybe as neat as they might seem, that there has always been opposition to the monuments from the Black community. They have always been...

aware of what the intent of the monuments were and they were not in support. You also point out that no, there's no monolith, that there will be people in the white community who were against the monuments. And, um,

But overall, who felt they could speak and where and when is very racially divided. We've pointed out a few moments ago about the Black Codes, about Jim Crow, about lynchings. This was not a safe time for African-American people to speak out and certainly not in all locations. One of the places that you tell us about in the book where people could speak out was a newspaper called the Chicago Defender, which was founded in 1905.

And we learn more about it in chapter three, which is the Confederate culture and the struggle for civil rights. Can you talk to us about how that was a space where, and it was male authors overwhelmingly, could speak out against the monuments and have these robust conversations? Yeah, I think Black journalism in general has been a space for, for, for,

Leaders of the black community, at least in the Jim Crow era, which is, you know, again, late 19th, early 20th century, they are primarily men. And but like the the Robert Mitchell Jr., who was the editor of the Richmond Planet, which is an African-American newspaper, spoke about it.

And then in the national paper, a national black paper like the Chicago Defender, which was read widely throughout the South, just had a column in which people could express themselves. And it was a question about should these monuments, should there be a federal law against erecting these monuments? And there was an overwhelming positive response to that because people

The people who responded with their letters to the editor were saying, absolutely, they must be gone. And here are the reasons why. And it centered around the understanding that they were symbols of white supremacy and that having those objects in their community brought out hatred against African-Americans. And that it taught young white children to also understand

you know, dislike African-Americans. And so it's, they saw the negativity in this symbol, the meanings of racism and white supremacy in that particular column was from 1932. I think it's interesting because I, you know, you hear a lot of, you know, times for people, it's like, oh, no one cared about this until Black Lives Matter, you know, movement came. And that's absolutely not true.

They've always cared. They've always understood. They couldn't have protested in the way people have protested in recent years because they could have been lynched for it. People understood that. And so the ways of protesting it was to, you know, to maybe write a letter to, you know, write something in the Chicago Defender. Maybe, you know,

defacing a monument in their town, you know, in the dark of night or hosting meetings, you know, at their churches where they could speak freely about what this meant to them. And there's a number of ways in which people, African-Americans, push back against the narratives that Confederate monuments stood for.

And the narratives were pervasive. You show an interconnectedness between different powerful groups. You have

already introduced us to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. There was also a group that grew out of that called Children of the Confederacy. We also see a linking between that group and the KKK. We see a linking between the monuments and the school curriculum. This is all very sort of, if we almost imagine it like Legos, they're all very tightly clicked in together. And it did make it...

pervasive. Even if you didn't live in a town with a monument, if it was part of the school curriculum, you would be taken there on a field trip. It was an important teaching tool of white supremacy. And in the notes that you went through of these different groups, they state as much that it was an educational project in some ways. Yeah, I've said repeatedly that, you know, a group like the United Daughters of the Confederacy was not looking backward, it was looking forward.

You know, people think of them as a bunch of old ladies who were just, you know, putting up monuments and to honor their Confederate ancestors. The reality is the early UDC, there were lots of young women in that organization. And there was a leader, one of their presidents in, say, in the early 20th century was only like 35 or 36 years old. These were young women. And

And and they they often talked about that. It's actually in their, you know, bylaws that they wanted or their original constitution or however you want to call it, that they their one of their primary goals is to perpetuate the values of the Confederacy onto America.

future generations. And so they're always top of mind for the women in this organization. And you can see the results of that. At mid-century, when those children who grew up on this lost cause narrative

basically become the next group of segregationist and white supremacists. One of the figures who appears on the monuments quite a bit is Robert E. Lee. And it might not be that he can, is outnumbered in these almost 900 monuments, but there's one of them where he's 109 feet tall. So he might arguably be the largest monument. How did Robert,

How did Robert E. Lee come to sort of this prominence in the monument making? Because you also show ads in the book of how you can order a monument. There's companies growing up and there's a whole industry to provide you with them. Well, Robert E. Lee becomes a symbol of Southern masculinity everywhere.

In the late 19th century. He died in 1870. He's almost a martyr of the lost cause. I mean, I know people thought of Jefferson Davis that way, but I think it's true also of Robert E. Lee. And he, his, you know, even though he surrenders,

To Grant, he, you know, the Confederacy goes down in defeat. He's not necessarily some great military strategist as people think he is. But, you know, he is, there is a rewriting of the narrative of Robert E. Lee as the noble Christian warrior. And that, and it, and he comes to symbolize

southern masculinity of a resuscitation of southern masculinity in the ashes of defeat and so when you get you know you get more monuments to him than anyone one of the first very first monuments i document has a figure of robert e lee on it from 1878 and

And then the next one is from 1883 in New Orleans. And then the big one in 1890 of Lee on his horse, Traveler, which was on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. And so its site kind of reaches its apex there. But Robert E. Lee...

by resuscitating him, you are resuscitating Southern masculinity. And I truly believe that. I mean, he's like, he is, he's the man, right? He's like supposedly the primary example of what a Southern man is and a Southern warrior is because the whole narrative of the Lost Cause is that

these white soldiers were heroes, that they fought for a sacred cause, that their cause was just. And Lee, for them, embodies all of that. We've talked about the goal to have the monuments be this educational tool that taught this very curated version of Southern history. But one of the other things you make clear in the books is that in the book that they...

did what you call reanimating the statues regularly. Rather than have these statues be in public places and have people sort of start to mindlessly walk by them and not see them anymore, the way we sort of habituate to things, they had these festivals and celebrations and gatherings that were designed to emotionally connect white people back to these monuments and what they supposedly stood for. Can you talk to us about this idea of reanimating

monuments. Yeah. So I think initially it begins as the creation of Confederate Memorial Day and using that day as a way to, to bring the white community together in celebration of the Confederacy. And so that was done on an annual basis for many, many years. Now it, it goes a little quiet during World War II because,

And it reemerges after the Second World War, but now it takes on a new meaning. You know, now the generation of Confederates is dead. So what does it mean in the context of post-World War II America? It then takes on a meaning for Southern America.

white communities who feel under siege from the federal government, that, you know, the rise of civil rights and the, and wanting to maintain the system of segregation in the South. And so then Confederate Memorial Day sort of becomes about that. So it's reanimated in a way around a different, completely different issue.

And, you know, it continues to be modified throughout the life of a Confederate monument. And so, you know, to the point in recent years, it is a site around which protesters and counter protesters gather. And so it has meaning here.

Everyone knows where it is. I mean, everyone is there. And it's like if, you know, one of the things that in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder was the vandalism or reinterpretation of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia. And I say that because people...

Even though it sat there for well over 100 years and people could drive around this monument, it's not like they didn't know what it was or what it meant or what it stood for. And it was in the aftermath of that that you could really see that.

And so to me, that's how it gets kind of reanimated. It's like different generations do it for different purposes. And you can see that. And in Richmond, what was really also very interesting is that they, protesters like firebombed the UDC headquarters because they understood that the UDC was the organization responsible for most of the monuments.

So for people to think like, you know, it's just, yeah, that people don't understand these things or it's not kind of in their psyche. It really, it really is. And you point out in the book that it's never left their psyche. While there was sort of a heyday, if you will, of the monument, there's

buying and erecting that you date from 1890 to about 1920, it never stopped. There was a time during the war periods, World War I, World War II, where it maybe wasn't as possible to build as many, but you didn't really locate a time when there had ceased being monuments

And it makes it a bit difficult to come up with exact numbers about how many there are, how many still exist. But you are able to track that there are a number of them and that the interest in them has never disappeared. Yes. I mean, what's clear from looking at some of the records that the publicly available records that have been published

charted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other others, even news outlets have done so, is that since the end of the Civil War, there had never there was not one decade in which a Confederate monument was not built up into at least in the last decade.

And and so the numbers, well, I don't I'm not sure we ever know the numbers. I think it gets confusing. The media allows some things to go unchecked. Somebody said, oh, there were seventeen hundred monuments or eighteen. No, no, no, no. So in terms of statuary, OK, maybe around eight hundred.

But memorials are not always monuments. So memorials could be street names, park names, the names of a highway, school names, etc.,

and dorm names. And so those things add up, you know, to that 1700-1800 figure. And so it's everywhere on the landscape of the South. And monuments themselves just have a particular or particularly visible

in a way that people might drive down the street and not notice, you would notice a 30-foot tall statue on the grounds of a courthouse. You mentioned early on in our conversation today about the poll that was done by Elon University. Polls are a little bit difficult because people basically have to answer yes/no questions.

Part of what they were asking was not just if people thought monuments should stay or be removed, but they had another question about should context be provided? And the majority of people said yes, there should be contextual information provided there at the site of the monument. Can you talk more about people's willingness to keep monuments if there's real context and history provided?

Well, I think that context is in the eye of the beholder. And what does it mean to have context? First of all, I've said this before. I think the idea of providing context is a train that left the station probably 15 years ago. There had been efforts to provide context for monuments before.

and they were dismissed. And it was only in recent years with the upheaval against them that I think people changed their mind and said, oh, well, maybe context is a good idea. But they didn't want the monument to be removed, but they would accept context. And

What does that look like? I mean, does it look like a counter monument, like another monument on, you know, to, let's say, a well-known Black leader? Some people say, you know, well, let's put some, you know, material, you know, like on some like, you know, these sort of small exhibits where, you know, it's just like done in print on a little piece.

posted around the base of a monument. Um, here's the thing, you know, visually the Confederate monument and its narrative dominates that a 30 foot monument and its narrative dominates a six foot, you know, plaque or whatever it is that says, Oh, this is what they were really about, you know? And, um, and so, um,

I think people have moved on from, you know, ideas of context, except if that's all they can get, they might be willing to take that.

One of the criticisms or pushbacks about removing monuments is that doing so is erasing history. And you outline in the book how well documented the monuments are. You have photos of them. You have old photos of school trips taken to see them. There seems to be ample documentation of evidence of

of where the monuments were and that that documentation and evidence is not in any jeopardy of being erased if a monument is removed. Can you talk more about this? What fuels this concern that taking down a monument is erasing history? Yeah, I honestly think this is about more about white men than white women in the South, but it could include some women. There's a sense, I think, that

erasing history somehow well what they call erasing history right it's not erasing history it's removing an object of Jim Crow that's how I see it but for individuals who are so invested in that Confederate monument in their community they see it as an erasure not just of history but of them personally this is a monument to white men and to their white ancestors and

People see that as like, oh, you're, it's not just erasing them. It's erasing my personal history. And that's how I think they, they see it. And so because there's, they don't want to, they seem to not be willing or able to understand that in any other broader context, like the true historical context of why they're problematic. And so I think, I think that's, that's part of the problem. You know, it's not an erasure of history that,

It's a really a removal of an artifact of the Jim Crow period. It wasn't put up during the Civil War to begin with. And it's often not even about the Civil War in some ways. And so but and you can see this in.

sometimes in video clips or in a documentary. Like I was in a documentary called The Neutral Ground, which is about, it begins with a discussion of the removal of monuments in New Orleans. And so that's, it's kind of, you know, with some interviews with some people there, that's what they talk about. They talk about feeling like, you know, it's an erasure of my history. So they personalize it and think they're being erased. Right.

The book is called No Common Ground, which seems a bit defeating. If people can't come together to figure out what to do about the monuments, do they just stay? Well, that's just the thing. It's no common ground because people can't find common ground on this because of how people understand them.

And this is part of the power of the narrative of the lost cause, that this many generations later, people still espouse those ideas and beliefs in the face of the facts. And there are people, you know, the people who protest that, you know, cannot see, you know, feel like they can understand

achieve peace for themselves as long as this monument standing on the courthouse lawn points to them as though they're second-class citizens. And, you know, my only thought about this is like, maybe not in my generation, maybe not in my lifetime, but perhaps generations from now it could happen. It's hard to know. It's really, really, really hard to know. I can't predict that.

And we're living in a moment in which we have an administration that wants us to study like history and kind of and embellish on the myths of history rather than history itself. Right.

And, you know, when the president of the United States comes to the defense of a Confederate monument, you've got a problem. And so who is to say, you know, what this looks like 100 years from now? It seems that one of your hopes is that people will be having conversations about this at the community level.

but also people who come to hear your talks, people who read the book. What is it you hope these conversations will be about and they will do? I think I want people to first to understand the history of Confederate monuments, understand the intent behind them and the ways in which they've been used by different generations. Um,

I want them to think about, you know, what is your community look like in the 21st century? Is this the best representation for your community? And and so I, you know, I continue to talk to people. I spoke with a group, you know, over Zoom not long ago in a small town in Virginia that would like to remove their Confederate monument.

And they're just sort of, you know, and one of the reasons I think I wrote the book was that it would be in an accessible way. So it would be useful to communities just like theirs because they would have the facts on their side. You know, they could bring this forth in their efforts to remove a monument in their community. And so, you know, it goes back to my

desire to be a, you know, a public historian in that way, or we call it, sometimes you'll hear it as public intellectual, and that makes it seem very high and mighty. But I'm really about, you know, bringing that history to the broadest audience possible.

And I think that's important. And then what people do with that afterward is, you know, is up to them. But I think it's great to, you know, because there's not a person in a small community is not going to put in the work that I did to write this book, but they could benefit from my book because I have done that work and I've made it accessible to them. And I just want, you know, and that's what I want to do. Give them a tool.

to help them communicate better what it is they have an issue with, although they can communicate that just fine themselves. But it's good to have, as you mentioned earlier, the receipts, if you can have that. And again, even when you have the receipts, I have learned that the state laws butt up against that. I have been involved in

at least three monument removal cases, legal cases brought by NAACP or other organizations to remove a monument. And my role in that was to write a history of that monument and place it in context. And even when you have all the receipts, the judge can turn around and say, well, the law says this.

So the monument's not going anywhere. And that's just the way, and that's where we're at with it. Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Karen Cox, and telling us about your book, No Common Ground, Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler. You've been listening to The Academic Life. Please join us again.

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