By Jo Freeman

 

Last night I watched the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee be hoisted from its pedestal on Monument Row in Richmond.  I watched it on TV, not in person, but it was still a dramatic moment.  It’s about time, were the words that kept flowing through my head.

 

I was born in the South, specifically Atlanta.  My mother was born and raised in northwest Alabama, as was her mother and her mother before her.  My mother took me to California when I was six months old where she raised me to believe that the South was wrong on race.  I spent several months of my childhood in Alabama, at different points in time, living with my grandmother and my aunt, learning about “the War Between the States” from their perspective.  I always considered it to be my second home state, even though I openly opposed its racial practices, as did my mother.

 

Part of me wanted to know why it took 132 years to take down that statue.  The other part knew why.  The South lost the Civil War, but it won the peace.  It took four years to lose the War.  It took forty to win the peace.  It was during the last decade of the 19th Century and the first of the 20th that the segregation laws were passed, ways were found to keep African-Americans from voting despite the 15th Amendment, and most of the statues commemorating the Lost Cause were erected.

 

This was part of a larger movement to institutionalize white supremacy. Today we don’t fully appreciate how normative was the belief in white supremacy.  You have to read the publications of those decades to know how thoroughly it permeated everyone’s thoughts, how socially acceptable it was.

 

While white supremacy was practiced in the North, in the South it became the state religion.  Just as one sees statues of saints in a church, those statues of civil war generals were the symbols of that state religion.

 

Today we accept diversity as normative.  The last one hundred years have seen a 180 degree switch in the social consensus (but not everywhere or among everyone) which is still being institutionalized the way white supremacy was done then.  Now those statues are coming down as the state religion is being dismantled.

 

Why did it take so long?  Actually, it didn’t.  World history tells us that it takes about 150 years for major conflicts to be finally resolved.  Descendants of two-sided wars continue to squabble for several generations before ceasing to see each other as the enemy.  The North/South conflict followed that pattern.

 

I know the country is highly polarized and that the South is mostly on one side of that polarization, but it looks like the Civil War of 1861 is finally ending.

 

© 2021 by Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com