No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781469662671)

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. 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, Karen L. 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 antimonument 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.

Author: Karen L. Cox
ISBN-10: 1469662671
ISBN-13: 9781469662671
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Language: English
Published: 04/12/2021
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.70h x 7.70w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2021 pg. 100
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2021
Choice 03/01/2022