Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments by Roger C. Hartley (review)

In Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments, legal scholar Roger C. Hartley has produced a much-welcomed addition to our understanding of the work and harm inflicted on us all by the landscape of Confederate monuments. Hartley's premise frames Confederate monuments as built for twin purposes: to valorize the Confederate soldier and to promote white supremacy. Unfortunately, valor is clearly rendered, while the workings of white supremacy are sometimes obscured, allowing supporters to portray these monuments benignly.

Hartley's research builds particularly on the studies of monument and memory by Kirk Savage and W. Fitzhugh Brundage and on Grace Elizabeth Hale's study of twentieth-century whiteness. He relies heavily on secondary sources, and not surprisingly, as a lawyer, he cites dozens of applicable court cases.

Hartley divides his book into three parts. In the first and most robust section, he interrogates three common rationales used to argue against Confederate statues: they do not tell a "complete history," they establish a "warping of history," and they center a "racial reckoning" (pp. 4, 5, 6). He notes that no monument tells a complete history, as that is not its intention. Instead, monuments engage memory; in this case, Confederate monuments sought to establish a collective white memory to suppress basic rights for African Americans while also erasing them from public landscapes infused with power. Although the monuments also warp history, that argument hinges on the intent of those who erected the monuments and allows Confederate supporters to dismiss the argument as no longer relevant. The racial-reckoning approach concentrates on the contemporary impact of the monuments. Hartley details examples of ongoing institutionalized racism to show why the argument that these monuments continue to harm African Americans is the most salient in generating successful action to remove them.

Part 2 evaluates the options available to decenter the monuments. He firmly dismisses destruction, despite noting how it has been a common practice throughout history. Contextualization, he notes, is politically extremely difficult, as anyone who followed the attempts to add contextualization to the monuments that once lined Richmond's Monument Avenue will know. He favors relocation. The book's third section is a vital legal explication of legal barriers to communities' removal of monuments.

While stellar in its stated purpose, the work would benefit from better centering Black resistance to white supremacy throughout. While Hartley includes African American communities in a few distinct sections, too often he frames them as being acted upon, although they often resisted the further installation of white supremacist practices and policies at every turn. For example, he notes that on segregated railways white people "received a powerful message of superiority" by riding in their exclusive cars (p. 71). But what of Black resistance? When a Richmond streetcar company imposed segregation in 1904, African Americans boycotted en masse, bankrupting the company within months. White supremacy repeatedly met Black resistance, and it surely helped produce anxious whites who erected monuments as one means of many to entrench their power even as it was frequently challenged.

Hartley's conclusion thoughtfully suggests how readers might use this text as a handbook for action. He notes that any community looking to address the harm of its Confederate memorials will confront the southern heritage argument, perhaps better known as "heritage, not hate" (p. 188). Knowing how and why to confront and subvert these common arguments in ways that move conversations and actions toward racial justice is invaluable as communities across the South and beyond navigate these racial reckonings.