Karen Cox, No Common Ground, 1st ed, with Signed Bookplate

Description

In No Common Ground, Karen L. Cox examines the history of Confederate monuments.

There is little or no common ground when discussing Confederate monuments today. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century–but they’ve never been as intense as they are today.

In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows 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.

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.

Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals. 

Cox, Karen L. NO COMMON GROUND CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS AND THE ONGOING FIGHT FOR RACIAL JUSTICE. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 224p., d.j., as new. 

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