Tuesday, March 12, 2019
North Carolinians can’t seem to agree about what to do with Confederate monuments and other memorials of the Civil War. A series of programs over the last two months titled “Beyond the Myths: The American Civil War in History and Memory” concludes Wednesday.
After a Confederate memorial on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus was toppled by protesters last year, the debate over removing statues that were built during the Jim Crow Era across the South has received a lot of recent attention.
Tension in the debate has followed Gov. Roy Cooper’s efforts to remove three Confederate memorials from state capitol grounds in Raleigh, which has been blocked by a 2015 law that prohibits moving statues and memorials from public property unless they’re placed in an area of equal prominence or to get them out of the way of construction.
There are statues commemorating the Confederacy and those who fought to protect it all across the state — some have been torn down by protesters while others remain intact. But how did these statues and memorials to the Confederacy even get built? And when?
On this edition of Charlotte Talks, we learn more about the history of the embattled statues, North Carolina’s selective memory on college campuses and elsewhere, and hear from experts of what the future of these kinds of memorials is.
GUESTS:
Karen Cox, history professor at UNC Charlotte and host of the panel discussion on March 13.
Hilary Green, associate professor of history and co-director of the African American Studies program at the University of Alabama.
William Sturkey, assistant professor in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
EVENT DETAILS
“Commemorating the Confederacy: History, Memory and Meaning in the 21st Century South” is a panel discussion sponsored by Atkins Library and UNC Charlotte’s department of history at the UNC Charlotte Center City auditorium at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 13.
You can find out more information or register here.
