Course Description

Instructor: Marilynne McKay
During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, many Confederate monuments were defaced, toppled, or removed as symbols of White supremacy. What provoked these acts? We’ll explore the attitudes and events in the North and South before and after the Civil War that contributed to racial animosities today. We’ll watch the promise of Reconstruction disintegrate into Jim Crow, the KKK, Black Codes, and Eugenics. We’ll meet the monument-raising United Daughters of the Confederacy, who also taught decades of schoolchildren the Lost Cause myth, and the Rebel flag-waving Sons of Confederate Veterans. We’ll mention music, art, books, and film as we track the Great Migration, learn about redlining, Green Books, and Civil Rights, and meet significant Black authors and activists along the way. And finally, we’ll decide how one might define an “ideal� memorial and discuss strategies for removing offensive ones.