Since the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, Americans have grappled with how the Civil War will be remembered. President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th rioters brings that memory into the present, as insurrectionists become patriots, “states rights” a rallying call, and the president a living monument to the lost cause of the Confederacy.
On the day of the second inauguration of Barack Obama, I settled in my house, located in middle Georgia, to celebrate both the inauguration and the observance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. As I looked through my front windows, my gaze snagged on the prominent, Southern porch-sized Confederate flag that dressed the front of my neighbor’s house across the street. Incredulous, I flew out of my front door to find other houses on my street with American flags hung upside down in protest to President Obama’s installation. It was this memory that came to mind when I witnessed Kevin Seefried carrying the Confederate flag through the Capitol Rotunda on January 6, 2021. Seefried was among those pardoned by President Trump on Jan. 20, 2025, after serving his time.
For many, the recent MLK Day was a time to honor the man and the sacrifices he made for freedom, equity and the beloved community. As the day has shared space both with presidential inaugurations and confederate generals, its conflicting meanings are illustrative of our nation’s equivocation about the sites — real, figurative, intentional, and accidental — of ongoing racial violence and the monuments we build there in service or resistance roof.
The resistance to MLK Day was swift, beginning in 1968 with John Conyers’ introduction of the bill to create it. Although the bill gained national momentum in 1979, it did not pass until 1983, and the holiday was not observed until 1986. Speaking on the floor of the US Senate on October 18, 1983 in support of the bill, Republican Sen. Charles Mathias from Maryland expressed King’s life as an American monument.
“What we are memorializing is the achievement of Martin Luther King in bringing about a reconciliation of the races in America,” Mathias said at the time. “The guns at Appomattox ended the fighting in the war between the States, but did not bring peace to America. Appomattox was soon followed by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by the tragedy of the Reconstruction era, by the rise of Ku Klux Klan, by the invasion of the carpetbaggers, by all of the tragedies that overtook America and which persisted for a century after Appomattox . I think it was not until Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said, ‘I have a dream of Black and white Americans living together in peace,’ that we finally ended the Civil War.”
Mathias’ optimism may have been overblown. The culture wars persist.
The vision of a multiracial democracy advanced by the gains of the Civil Rights era continues to be blurred by the renderings of other monuments, namely those honoring Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Lee’s birthday, four days and 122 years before King’s, was first observed as a holiday by Lee’s state of Virginia in 1889. The observance of Robert E. Lee Day was enshrined by statute in Virginia (until 2020), and remains so in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, where it is celebrated by each state in tandem with the federal observance of King’s birthday. An observance of Jackson’s life was combined with Lee’s in Virginia beginning in 1907.
Together, both men have statues, roads, schools, buildings, counties, ships, colleges and universities commemorating them throughout the states that included the Confederacy, states that became the theater of the war to tear down Confederate monuments after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and states that overwhelmingly voted to elect Trump as the 47th President of the United States.
It seems that strange tableau of insurrection painted in shades of red, white and blue on white bodies carrying Trump, Confederate and American flags and crawling over the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, stopped being art imitating life. It is now just life; it is now our material reality. The inauguration of Donald J. Trump marks the building of a new Confederate monument that commemorates our disunity, our fractured rights to education, healthcare abortion access, and citizenship protections across the 50 states of our country.
But we also have the power to build a pluralistic society that stands as an alternate monument, fulfills the promise of our Constitution, and honors the bloodshed of those who fought and died to will our nationhood into existence.
In these meanings the inauguration became a site of resistance, most notably when former First Lady Michelle Obama informed the world that she would not be in attendance. Of the first Trump swearing in she opined “(to) sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display, there was no diversity, there was no color on that stage. There was no reflection of the broader sense of America.”
For those of us who feel the same, may we work together once more to tear down the symbols and monuments that purport to stand for us, but inure to our collective destruction.
HASbout the Author: Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb is a Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
