INSTITUTE INDEX: The intensifying battle over removing Confederate monuments

Year that former Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote regarding a proposed Civil War memorial, "I think it wiser … not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered": 1869

Years after the Civil War ended that Charlottesville, Virginia, erected a 26-foot-tall monument to Lee, which embodied the "Lost Cause" interpretation used to justify racial segregation and Black disenfranchisement:  59

Year in which the words "Black Lives Matter" were graffitied on the Charlottesville monument following the murder of nine parishioners inside the Mother Emmanuel Church in South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof who posed for photos with a Confederate flag: 2015

Since the Charleston Massacre, number of Confederate monuments that have been taken down in Southern states: at least 60

Date on which the Charlottesville city council voted 3-2 in favor of removing the Lee monument, prompting the Virginia chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans to file a lawsuit seeking to block its removal: 2/6/2017

Number of months for which the statue removal process was halted under a temporary injunction issued by a judge in May: 6

Under the pretext of defending the Lee statue, number of far-right marchers who flooded Charlottesville streets and the University of Virginia campus as part of the "Unite the Right" rally on Friday, Aug. 11, carrying lit tiki torches and chanting slogans including "white lives matter"  and "Jews will not replace us": hundreds

Number of people who were injured the following day when Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields of Ohio drove his car through a crowd of anti-racist counter-protesters: 19

Number of counter-protesters who were killed: 1

Number of days after the Charlottesville killing that construction workers, after a year of public debate, finally removed a Confederate monument nicknamed "Old Joe" in Gainesville, Florida: 2

Number of days after the Charlottesville killing that protesters in Durham, North Carolina, pulled down a Confederate monument at the old county courthouse that was erected the same year the Charlottesville statue went up: 2

Number of activists who have been arrested so far on various misdemeanor and felony charges in connection with the Durham monument removal: 8

Year in which North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature passed a law forbidding local communities from taking down Confederate monuments without legislative approval: 2015

Number of other states with similar laws: 4*

Number of Confederate monuments that Baltimore removed without advance notice early Wednesday in what Mayor Catherine E. Pugh (D) said was an effort to avoid violence: 4

Number of Confederate monuments and statues that still exist on public property throughout the South and nation: over 700

Number of these that are in Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina alone: nearly 300

Decades in which most of these monuments were erected, during the depths of Jim Crow: 1910s and 1920s

Number that were dedicated or rededicated during the peak of the civil rights movement between the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision and the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King: more than 45

Date on which North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) called for the legislature to strike down its law protecting Confederate memorials and for all of the state's monuments to be moved to appropriate museums or historical sites "where they can be studied in context": 8/15/2017

Of Confederate monuments nationwide, number now being targeted for removal by grassroots movements: dozens and growing

* Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee

(Click on figure to go to source.)