A New Orleans native recalls growing up surrounded by Confederate monuments and street names honoring slaveholders like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The speaker describes how Lost Cause mythology obscured slavery's role in the Civil War, and how over 100 schools and roads still bear slaveholders' names, forcing Black children to navigate a landscape that memorializes their oppressors.
Chapters
Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform slung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city. These copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil. After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We call it the Lost Cause, and it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding. They told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved, that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it's only lost if you're not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it's a word that also means "I'm ignoring what we did to you." I was taught the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights, but I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way. It's easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don't see the Black bodies buried behind it. It's easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake. I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads, and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains. Go straight for 2 miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne— translation: go straight for 2 miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of black soldiers who were trying to surrender— take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas. What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?
