SPLC’s 2018 Confederate Monument study @ Hyperallergic

Last week, Southern Poverty Law Center released an update to its eye-opening 2016 report, Whose Heritage?, which sought to locate and quantify the number of Confederate symbols being presented in monuments within the public sphere. The original report was motivated by the 2015 terrorist attack by a gun-wielding white supremacist on the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which killed nine parishioners and devastated the surrounding community. Once the shooter was identified, self-promotional imagery surfaced that featured him brandishing a handgun and a Confederate flag.

“In the aftermath of the tragedy, there was this kind of grassroots national push to get some of these monuments and symbols that glorify the Confederacy off of the public square,” Senior Research Analyst Keegan Hanks with the SPLC’s Intelligence Project department, who has worked on the study since its inception, said in a phone interview with Hyperallergic. “We started to poke around out of curiosity, to see how many of these monuments there are in the public square, and we realized that there was no register of those. So we decided to make one.”

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Only 110 Confederate Monuments Have Been Removed, While 1,728 (and Counting) Remain