HSOC Speaker Series

Confederate monument with Jefferson Davis on the Texas capitol grounds in Austin Texas on public land.

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Monday, Sept. 30, 4 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom

Karen L. Cox, professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, explains what Confederate statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning.

Her talk will highlight the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In recent years, monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back.

For more information, please contact Germán Vergara or Todd Michney.