× Expand Infrogmation New Orleans equestrian statue commemorating P.G.T. Beauregard, in his better days.

When New Orleans officials removed the statue of Louisiana native son and Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard last week, they took an important step toward redressing the lingering national shame of honoring those who fought to defend slavery in the United States.

The decision to remove the Beauregard statue, along with other Confederate monuments, sparked a national debate. But opposition to the removals reveals some deep bigotry, as well as a serious misunderstanding of the bigotry that erected the monuments in the first place.

Opposition to the removal of such monuments reveals some deep bigotry, as well as a serious misunderstanding of the bigotry that erected them in the first place.

On the more genteel side, a preservation organization known as the Monumental Task Committee appealed to history. “It took twenty-two years to raise the funds and build the Beauregard Monument,” the group explained in a formal statement. They also cited the words of the Beauregard Monument Association's Secretary A. B. Booth who spoke to some 2,000 people attending the dedication in 1915. The statute, Booth proclaimed was “not to stand as an advocate of war," but to honor Beauregard’s “duty and true patriotism.”

But that is only half the story. The Committee failed to note that the Beauregard Monument Association was actually a subgroup of the New Orleans United Daughters Confederacy, a group committed to preserving the traditions and legacy of the Confederate South. In a 1903 fundraising campaign to finance their endeavor, for example, the committee urged, “every Confederate veteran and every friend of a truthful history of the great war” to “contribute to this cause.”

Like other pro Confederate organizations, the United Daughters Confederacy anchored its vision of the “truth” in efforts to justify the continued treatment of people of African descent as second class citizens.

“When our final history is written and our statue is unveiled,” one proponent of the statue boldly proclaimed at the laying of its cornerstone in November of 1913, “we fondly hope [it] shall be an inspiration to future generations, while in the eloquence of its silence it invites every patriot to a study of the times it represents.”

In fact, the presence of the monument, and others like it that still pepper the landscape in the states of the Old Confederacy, represents the deafening silence and continuing reverberations of America’s original sin— chattel slavery. That system birthed the our enduring problems of racial inequality in America today.

No matter how artfully apologists attempt to promote a romanticized “Southern” heritage, the Confederacy waged war on the United States primarily for the preservation of slavery. In defense of secession, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens proudly declared that the “cornerstone” of the new Confederate government rested on what he termed “the great truth” of black racial inferiority and that “our new government is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

For legal purposes, the Lincoln administration chose to call the hostilities a rebellion—but it was without question a war over whether the nation could remain, in the immortal words of President Lincoln, “half slave and half free.”

Even with victory on the battlefield, as Yale University historian David Blight explored in his meticulously researched 2001 study Race and Reunion, The Civil War in American Memory, the Union eventually lost the equally important fight over how the war would be remembered.

The Union eventually lost the fight over how the civil war would be remembered.

In the midst of the failure of Southern Reconstruction and rising white supremacist violence, and the emergence of Jim Crow segregation in the decades after the war, an equally important narrative of reconciliation emerged. With whites in the North and South eager to put the memory of the war behind them, this narrative assigned honor to both sides, and paved the way for the erection of monuments to Confederate luminaries like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee whose bronze and marble likenesses stood watch over the continued economic, political and social subjugation of people of African descent.

The dispute over the meaning of Confederate symbols, including the Confederate flag and monuments to Civil War generals, is decades-old. But the brutal massacre of black parishioners last June at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, pushed the issue into the mainstream. The grotesque symbol of the Confederate flag flying high, as state law required, alongside the U.S. flag at the state capitol that was lowered to half-mast to honor the dead massacred by a homicidal white supremacist, was simply too much.

The Confederate flag, monuments and memorials are not harmless remembrances of an honorable war, but of our deepest shame as a nation. They perpetuate an acceptance of the long, ugly history of racial oppression, in spite of emancipation that followed it. Such monuments, as well as the Confederate Flag, are symbols of hate, representative of an inglorious past and a country built on the immoral underpinnings of racial slavery. We must remember that history but we should no longer be compelled, as the New Orleans City Council rightly concluded, to pay perpetual homage to those who trampled on our most sacred values of life and liberty.

The United States Supreme Court once memorably ruled on the meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s stricture against cruel and unusual punishment, arguing that it “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Part of that process can be measured not only in how we punish but what we commemorate. We no longer draw and quarter criminals for offenses, nor should we honor the exploits of persons who fought to maintain human bondage—an especially offensive relic of barbarism.

Our evolving standards of decency marking the progress of a maturing society can be measured not only in how we punish but what we commemorate.

It is time to remove these monuments and put them in spaces like museums that preserve the full story of slavery, where they can foster honest and frank conversations. Maintaining an idealized representation of the past does nothing to lift up the values at the core of our democracy.