The UDC shifted monuments from honoring the dead to marking living civic space.

Evidence

The UDC’s most visible accomplishment—and the one that may prove to be the most difficult to reverse—is the sheer number of Confederate monuments entrenched on public land. The organization was singlehandedly responsible for changing the cultural practices of Civil War remembrances, transforming them from memorials to Confederate soldiers placed largely among the dead, to monuments vindicating southern ideals placed prominently among the living. They sought to place Confederate monuments in well-traveled public places as proclamations of white supremacy that were intended to teach their own children about and remind African Americans of their proper places in the local community. Seen in this historical light, it is clear that the Confederate monument movement was primarily a means of marking white territory and resisting black equality and empowerment. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s existing material on how public commemorative space expresses and enforces hierarchy. — connects to: Confederate monument construction spikes track eras of white political reassertion. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 342; Confederate symbols’ white-supremacist function grows with distance from the cemetery. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 449