Justice
The South's Love for Confederate Street Names, Mapped
A new project tallies the streets named after Confederate leaders alongside those named after civil rights personalities.
In America, public memory is skewed in favor of “those who were allowed to hold power,” Rebecca Solnit writes in the New Yorker. The country’s landscape is dotted with tributes to dead white men—many of whom fought to subjugate those with skins darker than theirs.
The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates 1,500 monuments, public buildings, and military bases around the country invoke the Confederacy—largely erected during spurts of racial progress and thus, in direct opposition to it. Meanwhile, the spaces where enslaved people and their descendants were tortured and killed largely go unmarked. And public monuments to their resilience and struggle for justice are too few and far between—particularly in the South.