A statue of Jefferson Davis was carted off in Memphis. Busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were pulled from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx. A memorial fountain was uprooted from a park in Helena, Montana, and a war monument outside an old courthouse was hauled down in Durham, North Carolina.
In the year since the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, about 75 Confederate memorials have been renamed or removed from public places across the nation, according to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group.
That’s in addition to another 40 or so that were erased in the year after a white supremacist opened fire on a Bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
But today the SPLC’s list of public Confederate memorials – monuments, place names, symbols, holidays – is 237 entries longer, at 1,740, than in 2016.
That’s because the same outrage that led to the removal of some memorials has led to the identification of others. Confederate sites, most established long ago, are being discovered faster than they’re being removed.
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