On a recent trip, I stopped for coffee in Monticello, Georgia, a small town with a population of around 2,500 about 60 miles southeast of Atlanta. As with many older, small towns, everything centered around the town square, a space with the courthouse, shops, an inn, and other businesses. The middle of the square, where the old courthouse once stood, had become a small park in the early 1900s with a large Confederate monument reaching towards the heavens in the middle of the green space. The Monticello chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) started raising the $2,800 for the monument in 1907 and unveiled it in 1910.

On Wednesday April 6, 1910, a crowd gathered in Monticello to witness the dedication of the monument that, according to The Monticello News, is “one of the grandest tokens of love and esteem in the beautiful hammered granite monument that could be erected or dedicated to the brave and valiant soldiers of the Confederacy.” The article continues by detailing the monument’s role as a reminder “to the beloved veterans” and a proclamation “to the coming generations as nothing else could [to] the manly and courageous part taken by those who wore the gray — of their loyalty and sacrifices that this glorious Southland might live on in the even tenor of its way.” These statements don’t come as a shock because the erection of monuments such as the one in Monticello served to perpetuate the Lost Cause and intimidate Black residents.

The words permanently engraved in granite on the monument reinforce these roles. Addressed to “the Confederate Soldiers of Jasper County,” the inscription lauds their “sublime self-sacrifice and undying devotion to duty” in defense “of their country.” It ends of in a poem that oozes with Lost Cause rhetoric before referring to the solders as “comrades,” a word that rings with fealty and kinship to the soldiers. The monument and these words stand in the center of a town that, as of the 2020 census, has 1,266 Black citizens. That is 49.82 percent of the population. On top of this, the monument stands in the shadow of the courthouse, a space where justice is supposed to be blind but where it historically, during Jim Crow and later, removed the blindfold and issued “justice” based not on impartiality but on white supremacy.

When I stopped in Monticello, I wasn’t in any way shocked to see the monument. I see similar monuments in all of the small towns that I drive through because the UDC put them up in public spaces in order to transmit, as Karen Cox puts it, “Confederate ideals to white southern children, because they were vivid symbols of the lessons the Daughters vehemently believed should be learned,” lessons rooted in white supremacy and intimidation. While the monument didn’t shock me, I noticed a flyer as I walked out of the coffee shop, gazing directly at the town square. The flyer advertised Monticello’s second annual Juneteenth celebration the next day.

The flyer caught me because of the juxtaposition it presented with the monument. It reminded me of standing on the corner of Dexter Avenue and S. Decatur Street in Montgomery. When I was there, I stood in front of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church where Martin Luther King, Jr. served early in his career, and read the historical marker. I walked across the street, seeing the Alabama State Capital building a block away and passing a large rock marker as I crossed the street. The marker, placed there by the UDC in 1942, commemorates Jefferson Davis’ inaugural parade to the state capital “when he took the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America.”

These juxtapositions in Monticello, in Montgomery, and elsewhere detail the ways that history functions within our public spaces and collective memories. The shaping of history has power, and the UDC sought to wield that power to glorify the Confederacy, a treasonous operation that sought to, as their vice president Alexander Stephens put it in Savannah in March 1861, maintain slavery because “African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” He continued by noting that slavery “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” The UDC worked to maintain white supremacy even after the war, playing up the Lost Cause narrative of happy enslaved individuals, benevolent enslavers, and virile young men going off to fight for freedom and valor. While the UDC monuments support the Lost Cause, the historical marker at Dexter Avenue and the Juneteenth celebration in Monticello provide counter narratives, ones based in history that the UDC worked to erase from the collective memories of its constituents and those it sought to oppress.

We all know about the perniciousness of the Lost Cause myth through public monuments and mass media, specifically films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939). However, these ideas seeped into the conscious in other films as well, including Buster Keaton’s landmark silent film The General (1926). Based on William Pittenger’s The Great Locomotive Chase (1889), Keaton’s film focuses on Johnnie Gray, a man who seeks to enlist for the Confederacy to woo Annabelle Lee. The Confederates reject his application because they view his skills as a train engineer as more useful to the war effort. Union soldiers steal a train and the film follows Johnnie as he chases after them, eventually catching up with them and returning the train to the Confederacy, thus becoming a hero.

Kendra Leonard points out that Keaton’s film, unlike D.W. Griffin’s The Birth of A Nation, doesn’t “rally white supremacists”; however, she continues, “Keaton retains a number of tropes previously established by ‘Lost Cause’ movies, such as beginning the film with the shelling of Fort Sumter; the stoic hero completely engrossed in his mission to help save his town from a Northern attack; and a complete lack of references to slavery.” These moves stemmed from a way to make the “film both ‘historic’ and palatable to audiences across the United States” and played on nostalgia as a selling point.

Even though it doesn’t “rally white supremacists,” the innocuous use of Lost Cause tropes in The General mirrors in many ways the seemingly innocuous nature of the monument in Monticello, something that is there, in the space, in the community, that has always been and may always be. People pass by it everyday, maybe reading it, maybe looking at. They notice it and move on through the square. Yet, the monument exists as a rallying cry, as a symbol of intimidation whereas The General works on a more subtle level. Yet, the Juneteenth celebration takes place in the monument’s shadow, looking up at it and reveling in the defiance of the shaft raised to heaven in memory of Johnnie and his comrades.