Last Thursday Duke University officials reported that a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Duke Chapel had been defaced. After the photo surfaced of a stone face of Lee with his nose broken off and his forehead and eye chipped away and punctured, Duke’s president ordered that the statue be hauled away.
Before the national controversy surrounding these Confederate memorials culminated in a deadly protest in Charlottesville, Dr. Mark Anthony Neal—the chair of Duke’s African and African American Studies Department—had no idea this statue even existed. His office sits less than two miles from the chapel.
“If we had already been talking about it, it wouldn’t be used as such a spectacle,” said Neal. “The fact that they decided not to openly discuss those issues creates the kinds of situations we’re in now.”
The defacement of Lee’s statue, which had been standing at the portal of Duke Chapel since 1935, is in some ways the culmination of attitudes that have been brewing for the past two years. However, the recent events are only one chapter in the story. Each phase of life for a Confederate memorial—the building, the tearing down, and the replacing—is fraught with political agendas and subsequent resistance. According to historians and scholars, the power behind these symbols is more than symbolic.
Most of the statues celebrating Confederate leaders were created after the Civil War. The statues emerged primarily in the 1890s and the early 20th century and others surfaced during the turbulent civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.
Several U.S. cities, including Baltimore and New Orleans have taken down memorials in recent months.
Kevin Levin, a public historian and educator, said that the statues were built as most Confederate veterans were dying off, and communities wanted to memorialize those who fought for the South.
