Reviews in American History

When I was contacted for this review, Ari Kelman and I shared a virtual giggle that the authors of these two magnificent books and I have the name Cox in common. I can only hope that my own work is half as well argued as Karen L. Cox's No Common Ground or Heather Cox Richardson's How the South Won the Civil War. Besides their shared name, these authors both grapple with how the South's legacy of white supremacy continues to haunt our society. They demonstrate a need for each of us to invest in making diversity and representation priorities in the United States, because of the lingering impact of historical wrongs.

Karen Cox opens No Common Ground with her personal experiences working as a museum historian in Fayetteville, North Carolina and her interactions with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She provides a brief history of the organization, describing its "wide-ranging agenda" and how it allowed white southerners to "take pride in Confederate heritage and to defend that heritage—including white supremacy even in the face of a changing South" (p. 2). Cox segues next to a discussion of Confederate monuments, stating that "these monuments are part of a longer history that is also mired in racial inequality and modified by black resistance" (p. 2). Cox walks readers through the rise of white supremacy, the disfranchisement of Black men, and the forced submission through violence of Black communities by methods of mass incarceration and inequality.

Cox aptly reminds us that "Confederate monuments are not innocuous symbols" and that "removing a monument from the public square is no more an act of erasing history than removing" Jim Crow signs from public accommodations (p. 3). She also argues that "removing a monument does [End Page 300] not remove the systemic racism with which it has long been associated" but that "it is a symbolic act only, although it may also serve as an important first step" (p. 4). Cox connects monument removal with responses to the death of George Floyd and explains that "many monuments were covered in graffiti and some were ripped from their pedestals, because what protesters saw in George Floyd's death was what they saw symbolized by Confederate monuments—white supremacy and systemic racism" (p. 6).

Cox does a beautiful job connecting "the real story of Confederate monuments" as "flashpoints in the crusade for white supremacy" with how those statues represent "symbols of slavery and oppression" to generations of Black southerners, because many of these statues occupy the grounds of courthouses and state capitols, placing them "at the center of the ongoing fight for racial justice," leaving "no common ground." In this way, she provides clarity on the meaning of these monuments, because public spaces that should have been common ground were instead "dominated by statues whose very existence condemned black southerners to second-class citizenship" (pp. 8-9).

The goal of No Common Ground is to place "the subject of Confederate monuments in its proper historical context" and to explore "how those objects have been used by a variety of historical actors whose motivations also varied" because these statues' influence over the "southern landscape has affected the history of the South, the nation, and all Americans" (p. 11).

In Chapter One, Cox states that Confederate monuments were placed "by white southerners whose intentions were not to preserve history but to glorify a heritage that did not resemble historical facts" because erecting these statues allowed white southerners to uphold a "past in which the ideals of Confederate nationalism rest on metaphorical pedestals of heroism and sacrifice, while at the same time" negating slavery (p. 13). Throughout this chapter, Cox describes the history of the...