# Contested Symbols Hub The fight over Confederate iconography is now in its third act. The symbols themselves — bronze generals, battle flags, the names bolted onto Army bases and county courthouses — were never neutral memorials. They were placed, defended, removed, and now in several cases *reinstalled* as deliberate political acts, each wave tracking a specific struggle over who controls public space and public memory. This MOC is the map of those objects as discrete, trackable cases. For the phenomenon-level analysis of *why* they exist and what the historiography says, the deep catalog lives at [[Confederate Monuments]]. Phase 1 of this folder was Confederate-only. **Phase 2 opens it to non-Confederate contested symbols** (2026-08-26), beginning with the [[Shaw Memorial]] — a Union abolitionist monument whose contest is not over removal but over *composition and inscription*. It is the control case: it shows that the fight is never really about whether to remember, but about whose account becomes the permanent public one. Still queued for this phase: Columbus statuary, the Gadsden flag, militia iconography. ## The Three Waves The analytical spine running through every entry here: **Construction (1890s–1920s, then 1950s–60s).** Roughly 60% of Confederate monuments went up during the [[Jim Crow Era]] consolidation, peaking around 1911; a second wave accompanied [[Massive Resistance]] to civil rights. These were assertions of dominance contemporaneous with disenfranchisement and desegregation backlash, not postwar grief. The [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]] and [[Sons of Confederate Veterans]] organized much of it. **Removal (2015–2021).** Triggered by the Charleston AME massacre (2015), the Charlottesville [[Unite the Right]] rally (2017), and the George Floyd protests (2020). The Floyd year alone saw ~167 monuments removed. Richmond's Monument Avenue and Charlottesville's Lee statue fell in this wave. **Restoration (2025– ).** The second Trump administration reversed direction. [[Executive Order 14253]] ("Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," March 2025) ordered Interior to review and restore monuments removed since 2020; the [[Albert Pike Statue]] went back up in DC; the [[Arlington Confederate Memorial]] is slated to return; and the [[Confederate-Named Military Bases]] had their Confederate names reinstated through a namesake-swap workaround. This wave is the live, midterms-relevant story. ## Monuments & Statues - [[Albert Pike Statue]] — DC's only outdoor Confederate statue; toppled Juneteenth 2020, reinstalled 2025 *(full page)* - [[Arlington Confederate Memorial]] — the "Reconciliation Monument"; removed 2023, slated to return *(full page)* - [[Charlottesville Robert E. Lee Statue]] — Unite the Right epicenter; removed 2021, melted 2023 - [[Richmond Robert E. Lee Statue]] — Monument Avenue centerpiece; removed 2021 - [[Stone Mountain]] — the largest Confederate monument; still standing - [[U.S. Capitol Statuary Hall Confederate Figures]] — state-by-state replacements ## Union & Abolitionist Monuments *(Phase 2)* - [[Shaw Memorial]] — Saint-Gaudens, 1897, Boston Common; named five white officers and waited **85 years** to inscribe the Black soldiers of the [[54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment]] *(full page)* ## Flags - [[Confederate Battle Flag]] — the master symbol - [[South Carolina Statehouse Flag]] — flown 1962–2015, removed after Charleston - [[Mississippi State Flag]] — carried the emblem until the 2020 redesign - [[Georgia State Flag]] — the 1956 / 2001 / 2003 changes ## Named Places - [[Confederate-Named Military Bases]] — the 2022 renaming and 2025 reversal *(full page)* ## Structural Context - [[Confederate Monuments]] — the phenomenon-level analytical catalog (waves, historiography, removal counts) - [[The Lost Cause]] — the mythology the symbols encode - [[The Confederacy]] · [[American Civil War]] — the referent - [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]] · [[Sons of Confederate Veterans]] — the heritage-preservation institutions - [[Executive Order 14253]] — the engine of the restoration wave - [[Cornerstone Speech]] · [[South Carolina Declaration of Secession]] — the primary-source rebuttal to "heritage not hate" ## See Also - [[Robert E. Lee]] · [[Stonewall Jackson]] · [[Jefferson Davis]] — the men most often cast in bronze - [[Glory (film)]] — the 1989 film that reproduced the Shaw Memorial's framing on screen - [[United States Colored Troops]] · [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] — what the Union commemoration record is about