Confederate monuments from public squares around the nation are being removed, but new ones are being erected on private lands, in cemeteries and on historic battlefields according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
Violence at a rally of white nationalists seeking to preserve a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., in August spurred action by officials and residents who were determined to clear their cities of markers that praise the Confederacy.
But more than 30 Confederate monuments and symbols have been dedicated or rededicated since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and 20 have gone up in North Carolina alone since that time says W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In Orange, Texas, the group the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised money to build a memorial who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. “The Confederate Memorial of the Wind,” which will feature a walkway lined by the Confederate battle flag leading up to a circular monument comprised of 13 columns honoring each of the Confederate states, will be completed soon.
“We just want to honor our ancestors,” said Hank Van Slyke, a commander of a local Sons of Confederate Veterans brigade.
“Throughout history, whoever wins the war and conquers the nation, they get to write the history books,” he said. "We've always studied that we had a good cause and our ancestors fought for what they thought was right.”
Other monuments built this year include one in South Carolina dedicated to the “immortal spirit of the Confederate cause,” another in Alabama dedicated to a unknown Confederate soldiers and one in Georgia erected in memory of the county’s nearly 1,200 Confederate soldiers according to the Times.
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