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  • Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments by Roger C. Hartley
  • Candace Cunningham (bio)
Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments. By Roger C. Hartley. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99.)

In Monumental Harm, author Roger C. Hartley examines the recent arguments both proponents and opponents of Confederate monuments have made. The monuments and controversies surrounding them are steeped in a history dating back to the 1870s, but Hartley is also interested in contemporary discussions. For Hartley, simply stating that a Confederate monument presents an incomplete or inaccurate depiction of the past is an insufficient critique, as this would be true of any monument. Instead, he argues that in order to truly understand what these monuments mean, and why they have the power to elicit emotionally charged responses from proponents and opponents alike, one must gain a deeper understanding of the context in which they were erected.

Monumental Harm is divided into three sections, or “phases.” In phase 1, Hartley outlines three common approaches to the Confederate monument debate. The “distortion-of-history” approach is based on the belief that Confederate monuments depict a false historical narrative, most accurately summed up as the Lost Cause, in which the Civil War was a fight between honorable white men, diminishing the central role of slavery and the participation of black Union soldiers. The “warping-of-history” approach contends that Confederate monuments are white supremacist symbols. Hartley specifically focuses on the fact that the rise of Confederate monuments coincided with the creation of Jim Crow laws and customs, working in tandem with rising racial violence. In the “racial-reckoning” approach, a community focuses on the impact a monument has on society. Hartley acknowledges that this approach can be difficult to prove since most Confederate monuments do not directly address race. Yet he points to a generation of historical research on the fact that Confederate [End Page 297] monuments cause harm because they perpetuate the image of the heroic white Confederate soldier and were largely erected in a period in which no positive monuments of Black identities were raised to counter them.

In phase 2, Hartley considers the three most common methods communities use to deal with their Confederate monuments—destroy, contextualize, or relocate—and outlines the benefits and disadvantages to each option. Historically, destruction has been deemed a valid way to deal with monuments that have caused “great emotional pain” (129). However, Hartley argues that this may not be the appropriate way to deal with Confederate monuments, since a select few have artistic value and most have valuable lessons to impart. Hartley outlines dual heritage ideology—that Black and white people have separate yet parallel heritages—in order to dismantle the validity of contextualization, because the weight of following through on this allegedly mutual activity most often falls on African Americans’ shoulders.

In phase 3, Hartley discusses the legal frameworks that have been created over the last decade to protect Confederate monuments, largely in reaction to demands that Confederate monuments be removed. In general, it is difficult to make a persuasive legal argument that a Confederate monument violates an individual right to free speech. Still, communities who collectively agree that they no longer want a Confederate monument on their publicly held lands can make a reasonable legal claim that such monuments violate a municipality’s right to “government speech.” But some Confederate monuments have received a historic preservation designation from state or federal entities, which grants them protection from removal or augmentation and makes it difficult for a local government to maintain jurisdiction. Furthermore, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina have enacted laws that prevent the removal or alteration of any war monuments, including Confederate monuments.

If there is anything to critique in Monumental Harm, it may be Hartley’s insistence that removing Confederate monuments will not lead to the removal of other monuments honoring enslavers. For instance, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, protestors targeted both Confederate monuments and Christopher Columbus monuments. Still, this does not necessarily take away from one of Hartley’s central arguments—that one must understand the historical context in which monuments...

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