Monuments Meant to Honor, or Intimidate?

 My curiosity can send me down a lot of rabbit holes, and so it was when I saw the scene below involving a bunch of middle-aged white guys passing the time outside a courthouse in the 1949 movie Intruder in the Dust. I was curious about the monument they were gathered around, which included the inscription “Erected 1907” (Fig. 1).  

Fig. 1

With all the recent uproar over Civil War monuments and their removal, including the removal of one of Robert E. Lee, which provoked the Unite the Right unrest in Charlottesville, VA, I wanted to see what else was inscribed on this one, so I zoomed in for a closer look. What was legible was innocent enough, reading “In Memory of the Patriotism of the Confederate Soldiers of Lafayette County, Mississippi” (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

But I was curious about the second part of the inscription that appears to be blotted out. Thus began my trip to the rabbit hole. A quick Google search brought up modern day images of the monument which still has the full inscription, including the obscured part that reads “They Gave Their Lives in a Just and Holy Cause” (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

No wonder it was blotted out in the film. And no wonder there is a movement to remove these monuments. This particular monument, like so many others, was erected during the rise of the South’s Myth of the Lost Cause more than a generation after the end of the Civil War at the height of the Jim Crow era when not only were southern Blacks denied equal access to buses, schools and dining establishments, but also equal protection under the law. That this monument sits in the square directly in front of the county courthouse was at best an insult to those Black citizens who saw it, and at worst, an intimidating reminder of the deprived justice their second-class citizenship was likely to deliver inside, just as intended.

That the bulk of these monuments went up at the same time that public lynchings were at their height in the U.S., with Mississippi leading the way with an estimated 539 black victims during the South’s reign of terror, peaking at about one every other week during the period when these monuments went up, according the Tuskegee Institute, only makes their existence that much more troubling.

One of the ironies of this particular monument, however, is that it exists where it does and is oriented as it is because of the actions of Sally Murray Falkner, grandmother of William Faulkner, author of the novel that inspired the film above. It was, in fact, the second such monument erected in Lafayette County, following a similar, but less strident, monument that had gone up the year before on the nearby campus of Ole Miss. That one simply references the 600 county sons who sleep in the nearby shade and of their battlefield bravery at Gettysburg and elsewhere. That did not satisfy Sally Falkner, who broke with the United Daughters of the Confederacy responsible for the original monument, leading her to raise money for a new one to be placed on the courthouse square, defiantly facing south, rather than north as originally planned.

What makes the irony all the more pointed is that Intruder in the Dust, which started me on this journey of discovery, could be considered a Social Justice Warrior piece of art, detailing the lack of justice a wrongly accused Black man could expect inside that very courthouse. 

Today, this monument is subject to the same controversy that so many other Civil War monuments face. Many in the South argue they are a testament to their history, their ancestors and their culture. But one has to ask, exactly what history and culture are they celebrating, and to what degree does that honor their ancestors? The cause they died for was not that of states’ rights as the Lost Cause argues, but to protect the institution of slavery they argued a state had the right to inflict upon their fellow human beings. We are right to want to remember that, but it should be done in museums where all the good, bad and ugly of our history can be put in proper context, including the individual sacrifice of many young men who owned no slaves. But it should not be honored, especially on our public squares.