Confederate Monuments and the Fight for Racial Justice

Realms of Memory

In the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd the toppling of scores of monuments to the Confederacy made national and international news. But four years on the vast majority of these monuments remain firmly in place. University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox spent much of her career studying the women responsible for building most of these monuments. She decided to write No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice to help communities make informed decisions about what to do with this past. Her work sheds much needed light on the reasons why these monuments were built, why they have been defended and preserved, and the long struggle to denounce and remove them.