The United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, was created by women to oversee burials for Confederate soldiers, hold ceremonies to remember those lost to the war, and to erect these monuments as a way to remember the cause of the Confederacy, the Lost Cause. They are still active today and have recently been embroiled in the current debate regarding what should be done with Confederate monuments. Although the United Daughters of the Confederacy has released a statement saying they do not support nor condone white supremacy, I believe the history, ideologies, and actions of the UDC say otherwise.
After their creation, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC, started to steadily promote their ideologies around the country through many mediums, the most famous being Confederate Monuments. After the murder of Trayvon Martin as well as the shooting of nine churchgoers in Charleston, many people felt an urgency to take down Confederate monuments because they celebrate the
United Daughters of the Confederacy President http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2017/08/united-daughters-of-confederacy.html
Confederacy. The Confederacy enslaved millions of African Americans creating a climate of racial injustice our nation has struggled with for over a century. Ultimately, for many, the monuments have become a symbol for White Supremacy. After the protests and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia over the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson monuments, the United Daughters of the Confederacy issued a statement that they did not support the views that hate groups, such as the KKK, uphold. The president of the UDC, Mrs. George W. Bryson, said, “The United Daughters of the Confederacy denounces any individual or group that promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy. And we call on these people to cease using Confederate symbols for their abhorrent and reprehensible purposes. (Bryson)” Interestingly, though this statement was made, it is the actions of the group that is more important in understanding what they stand for.
The UDC is devoted to telling what they believe is the “truthful history of the war,” as they lay out in the constitution of their organization. This devotion was evident in their attempts to influence what textbooks were used in the South in the 20th century. The Daughters of the Confederacy “challenged” and worked to sway southern states to tell the “fair and impartial” truth of the Confederacy, as they believe it. They funded the purchase of many textbooks for Southern schools that portrayed slavery in a more positive light. For example, in a textbook used in Georgia, there was a quote that read “The masters often had a barbecue or had a picnic for his slave. Then they had a great frolic. Even while working in the cotton fields they sang songs.” By providing a benevolent account of slavery, the UDC was trying to promote the Confederacy and its Lost Cause by teaching children that slavery was not an issue in the South, but a good thing.
Some argue that Confederate monuments and other paraphernalia may cause extremists, such as Dylann Roof, to think that because monuments still stand, that Americans still hold these values today which can lead to racial violence. In my last post, I briefly talked about how the UDC was suing the cities of San Antonio and Caddo Parish for removing the monuments in their cities. Check that post out here! Because the monuments were on public lands, the cities had a right to remove the monuments.
Vanderbilt Confederate Memorial Hallhttp://www.thefacultylounge.org/2009/12/confederate-memorial-hall.html
Likewise, Vanderbilt University believed it was essential to remove the word ‘Confederate’ from one of their buildings, but the Tennessee division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy sued the University arguing that they couldn’t remove the word because the UDC donated the funds for the building and, at the time, the university agreed to the name. The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s claim was supported in court. In each of these cases, the UDC went very much out of their way to stop the removal of these Confederacy monuments. I am most shocked by the Vanderbilt University case. The university wanted to remove the word Confederate from the building ‘Confederate Memorial Hall’ (which people refer to as Memorial Hall) because, as the Chancellor, Nicholas Zeppos, says, it promotes an “exclusion and a divisive contradiction of our hopes and dreams of being a great and inclusive university (Jaschik/Zeppos).” If the Daughters of the Confederacy do not believe in promoting racial divisiveness as Mrs. Bryson claimed, then why use these cities or Vanderbilt? If they want to preserve the Confederate history but not encourage divisiveness or hatred, I wonder how they could have used those funds for litigation to approach the situation differently and work with the university to find a compromise?
Some people have different views on this topic. Those don’t see the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a group who promotes white supremacy and the divisiveness of races, but rather a group which acknowledges and celebrates the South circa the Confederacy. Back when the United Daughters of the Confederacy were first created, the group was a “good organization for young women to be involved in because they could put their education to use,” as said by Karen Cox. This reason caused many to believe they were a group created for solely remembering those who had died for the Confederate cause. In peoples’ minds that are favorable toward the UDC, the Daughters erected the Confederate monuments as a way to celebrate the lives of those lost fighting for the Confederacy. People who have fought the removal of the monuments, like the Daughters of the Confederacy did in the examples above, say that the monuments are to preserve the history of the Civil War, not to promote racial divide.
The United Daughter of the Confederacy has drawn a lot of media attention for having been involved in the recent debate over what to do with Confederate monuments. While they shared words denouncing White Supremacy and racial divisiveness, they have been unwilling to see these controversial words and monuments taken down. They have spent money in costly litigation to protect these symbols even as they watch the turmoil they are causing. Again, might that money have been used to create options for preserving the Confederate history while respecting those whom these monuments reinforce the ideals of injustice and inequality.
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