Remembering Racial Terrorism: the Contested Politics of Memorializing Lynching across the US South

Keywords: Confederate statues; removal; reconciliation; racial terror lynchings; Equal Justice Institute
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

In 2017, the city of Gainesville, Florida removed its only confederate monument from the west lawn of the Alachua County Administration Building, the memorial’s location for more than One Hundred years. Dedicated in 1909 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, calls to remove the statue from its downtown location were finally realized amidst growing public outrage to remove Confederate symbols from the cultural landscape, giving way to broader public debate over their contested meaning. This paper theorizes the removal of Confederate symbols by anti-racist activist and their supporters as the beginnings of a broader campaign and movement for historical truth-telling and racial reconciliation in the United States.

As activist historians have well-documented, many of these Confederate symbols were erected across the US during the Jim Crow Era, a period of legalized segregation, voter dissent, and political violence. Following the removal of “Old Joe” from the Alachua County Administration Building, for example, a new historical marker has been erected in its stead to acknowledge at least twelve lynchings that took place in in the city of Gainesville, during the Era of Jim Crow (1877-1955). This paper documents the local efforts of the Alachua County Remembrance Project to memorialize this period of racial terror lynchings, following Reconstruction. Here and elsewhere, the removal of the city’s Confederate monument marks the beginning, not the ending point, of local anti-racist activists and their supporters to tell more truthful stories about past and how racial violence is both embedded and erased from the American landscape.