Battles regarding the removal of long-standing confederate monuments have been making the rounds in the South as of late. Though this debate isn’t necessarily new, recently in Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia, folks have gone to absurd lengths to protect their beloved monuments. This has included intimidation and harassment, violence, death threats against public workers and contractors and the passage of laws that have made it almost impossible to make any changes to monuments. Louisiana even went so far as to pass a bill in the House requiring an actual election before any war memorial can be removed or altered. But surprisingly, the attachment to confederate memorials is not limited to Southern states. Arizona is now engaged in its own debate about removing six confederate memorials, the most recent of which was erected in 2010.
But Arizona's Confederate memorials don't date back to [the Civil War] era.
They tell another, even less well-known story: one of white Southerners who moved to Arizona in the post-World War II era and brought their fondness for intimidating black citizens with them. The state's oldest Confederate memorial was dedicated nearly 80 years after the Civil War ended, in 1943. The newest, shockingly, went up in 2010.
How truly ugly is this? Decades after Arizonians should clearly know better and be on the right side of history, their hatred and racism are on full display—literally, as monuments. Then again, it’s not all that surprising. This is the “show me your papers” state as well as the home of “English only” laws. So, the idea of intimidating black people being a pastime for some white folks in the state doesn’t exactly sound farfetched. And evidence of their anti-black racism could be seen well into the mid-and late twentieth century.
"As thousands of Southerners moved to a drier climate, they brought with them an identity grounded in the constant presence of Confederate symbols," [historian William Stoutamire writes]. "Confronted with Arizona's secessionist history, they felt the need to memorialize and commemorate the Confederacy's attempted extension into the Southwest."
By then, the civil rights movement was ramping up across the country. Not coincidentally, honoring the Confederacy suddenly became a popular pastime for white people with a tenuous connection to the Old South.
It was hardly a fringe movement: When the Civil War centennial rolled around in 1961, Arizona recognized the anniversary by flying the Confederate flag over the State Capitol. [...]
In the 1990s, however, the Arizona chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans experienced a resurgence, and once again began erecting monuments to the Confederacy.
What’s most interesting is that they’ve tried to repackage their brand of white supremacy as all-inclusive and welcoming. Arizona does not have the history of slavery like the Southern states and thus the confederate monument supporters in the state have tried to highlight diversity in its heritage—suggesting that the Civil War was not at all about slavery (hint: this is an alternative fact).
"What you see nationwide among Confederate heritage groups is this desire to espouse the supposedly multicultural heritage of the Confederacy," he explains. "They like to claim that African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans were part of the Confederacy, in an attempt to say it couldn’t have possibly been about slavery."
"It's this desire to make it look like the Confederacy was this welcoming society — when in fact it was founded on the basis of white supremacy."
Who knows what will actually happen here. Southerners at least had some legitimate claim to keeping the monuments on the actual soil where these battles took place, although there are many questions about how best to commemorate history and mark how atrocities such as enslavement have impacted marginalized groups and nations. But this is really disingenuous— a combination of Southern migration and white supremacy under the guise of heritage. And the attempt to make it palatable by suggesting it’s “multicultural” is laughable. These monuments are particularly offensive in their newness. The local NAACP is right to target them, they should definitely go.