This statue of a Confederate solider in Forsyth, Georgia, is one of 700 Confederate monuments in the United States. (Photo by iStock/MichaelWarrenPix)
More than 700 Confederate monuments remain in public throughout the United States, often hiding in plain sight.
Symbols of hate have become a flashpoint for activism, from filmmaker Bree Newsome Bass climbing up a flagpole on the South Carolina statehouse grounds in 2015 to remove the Confederate flag in response to the mass shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church to protesters in downtown Chicago successfully pressuring officials to remove the city’s Christopher Columbus statue in 2020.
A new project, Invisible Hate, is broadening the scope of these efforts to examine the nature of white supremacist symbols across the United States. It pinpoints the locations of Confederate monuments and explains why they were built, so that the public can advocate for their removal. In so doing, it demonstrates how technology, historical education, and social advocacy can combine to make information readily available and provide people with tools to take action.
The project emerged from a personal epiphany about Confederate monuments, says Alex Lukacs, creative director at 22Squared and one of Invisible Hate’s team leaders. While walking in the Atlanta area with family, Lukacs noticed a white supremacist statue and was confused about why it was on public display more than 150 years after the US Civil War.
“I had no idea that it was a Confederate monument and had the privilege of not noticing it every time I walked by, because I was a white woman,” Lukacs explains. “When I started to dig into the history, like most Confederate monuments it wasn’t built during the Civil War [but] during Jim Crow, right after the Atlanta race riots, as a symbol to intimidate Black Americans.”
With her team at the creative agency, Lukacs enlisted the support of the Atlanta National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had built a reputation for opposing Confederate monuments. “We recognize that displays that celebrate white supremacy and racism are psychological instruments that reinforce and validate systemic oppression of descendants and American chattel slavery as an institution,” Atlanta NAACP president Richard Rose says. He cites Germany’s decision to outlaw symbols glorifying the Third Reich as an example of how the United States could take similar action.
The project launched in August 2020. The interactive national map on its website—InvisibleHate.org—was created through a mix of original research as well as data and information from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Whose Heritage?” reports, which document the number and locations of Confederate monuments in the United States. MarketSmiths, an independent content writing and research agency, wrote and fact-checked several of the entries, and production company m ss ng p eces built the platform.
Several Confederate monuments were funded by US taxpayer money, while others—such as the Peace Monument erected in Atlanta in 1911 by the militia group Gate City Guard—were sponsored by white supremacists and their sympathizers. During the nationwide backlash to the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesters damaged the monument and plastered it with graffiti, leading a city government committee in Atlanta to convene a discussion on how to best address the issue of similar monuments in the area.
However, the Georgia legislature passed a law forbidding the removal of Confederate monuments in the state, striking a blow to advocates who pushed for their removal. Although the city of Atlanta began placing signs next to monuments to provide historical context, nonprofits including the Atlanta NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center asserted that the signs didn’t go far enough. They argued that removal of Confederate monuments was the only option if the government sought to deliver a total rebuke of the country’s racist history.
Invisible Hate’s platform has been recently updated to encourage users to take action. “We want to tap into the social activism that had happened and continues to happen,”
Lukacs says. Through the interactive map, users can click on a specific Confederate monument to learn about its history and then click another tab to contact a local official. When users click on that tab, a pre-scripted message populates an email; all that is needed is a personalization. The platform also allows users to connect with the local NAACP chapter to collaborate further.
“If America is to repudiate racism, it must repudiate the symbolism by removing [the] government’s declarations of white supremacy,” Rose says. “These declarations continue to teach and glorify racism. ... Identifying and exposing the true meanings and intent is the only way forward.”
Read more stories by Derrick Clifton.