Symbols of the Confederacy: By the Numbers

Confronting a racist past with hard data

The debate over Confederate monuments debate has largely been one focused on American history; on slavery, on the Civil War, on Reconstruction, and above all on the overarching, ongoing struggle against racial discrimination against Black people in the United States.

As it turns out, the case against symbols to the Confederacy extends beyond the history textbooks. In this analysis of the data surrounding symbols dedicated to the Confederacy, I will make the case that even the raw numbers and statistics describing these symbols show that across time and place, these symbols to the old Confederate States of America are deeply and directly tied to a legacy of discrimination against Black Americans.

To do this, I’ll focus largely on charts and images that are hopefully readable and accessible. You can read everything in-depth if you like, but glancing over the graphics alone should give you a sense for what’s going on. We’ll look at the characteristics that Confederate monuments have with regards to their history, their locations, and the kind of places where they tend to be built.

Without further ado, let’s get into the numbers.

Part 1: Erasing History

A common argument for the preservation of Confederate symbolism is that these symbols and monuments are “a part of history,” and that we risk erasing or censoring historical fact by removing them from public places.

With this in mind, we’ll start off by looking at how the Confederate symbols are distributed across time. That is, we’d like to know the years of post-Civil War history during which most of them went up. The SPLC dataset that I based this report on includes information on when most of these symbols were instated, so we can plot these in a histogram to track the creation of such symbols across history:

This plot groups symbols by their year of dedication, and shows how many symbols went up within each (approximately) 4-year span between the end of the Civil War and today. Clearly, the biggest spike in Confederate symbol creation happened between 1900–1920, followed by a second pronounced spike centered on the 1960s.

What was going on during these years? Well…

This plot represents something slightly different from the first one. Now, we’re looking at the relative proportion of symbols that belong to each 4-year period.

You’ll also notice that this plot includes some major historical events to put things into context. Historians generally associate the first wave (1900–1920) with a push to memorialize the Civil War as the last veterans began to pass away; the second wave (1950–1968) is generally associated with the Civil Rights Movement.

At any rate, these distributions show that the history of Confederate symbolism is much more closely associated with pushes for Black equality than to the Civil War itself. Major events tied to the Jim Crow era like Plessy v. Ferguson and the Civil Rights Movement directly coincide with peaks in symbol dedication.

My Take: Confederate symbolism, across history, is directly tied to major pushes for Black equality. The 1950–1968 spike is a clear response to the Civil Rights Movement pushing for the end of Jim Crow laws.

As for the early 1900s spike, we know that the extinction of Civil War veterans during that period re-inspired a lot of interest in the war. But we also know that this was an intensely racist period in history during which the infamous Jim Crow laws were first being put into place in the wake of Reconstruction amidst the backdrop of a Ku Klux Klan rising to power.

At this point it might be too early to definitively see a pattern, but we’ll revisit these facts in a minute.

Part 2: The Confederate States of America

Now, we’ll take a look at how Confederate symbols are distributed geographically. We’ll take a look at which parts of which states have the most monuments, and we’ll put this into historical context like in the last part.

First, here is a map of all of our symbols across the United States, colored by the type of symbol:

Right off the bat, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of Confederate symbols are concentrated in the former C.S.A, with some scattered across former border (Union slave) states.

We can also tell that most of the symbols covered in the dataset are monuments, and that more monuments specifically are concentrated in the Southeast relative to, say, Texas.

In fact, we can actually get the direct breakdown of how many symbols there are for each of the 5 major types:

Now, let’s get a better feel for where symbols are concentrated with a density plot, which basically shows us the relative concentration of symbols in a given area. The more symbols that come from a region, the darker that region will appear on the map.

Now we have a more precise sense for where symbols are concentrated. According to our map, the distribution of Confederate symbols is most focused on South Carolina and Georgia in one hotspot, and Northern Virginia in another.

So far, all we’ve been able to learn is that most of these symbols are concentrated in former Confederate states, but (importantly) almost all of the rest are concentrated in slaveholding states that remained in the Union. So what do these monument-heavy regions look like in terms of demographics?

My Take: Confederate symbols pretty definitively follow former CSA borders — but there are also a great number in border states considering that a great majority of men in those states fought for the Union.

It might be more accurate to say that Confederate symbols follow the borders of legalized slavery, which further ties the cause of the Confederacy directly to the practice of forced enslavement of Black people.

Part 3: The Target

Now that we’ve seen where Confederate symbols tend to be, we can go a step further and investigate what the areas with the most symbols tend to look like demographically. To do this, I imported data from the 2017 U.S. Census, which among other things breaks down the ethnicity of the population of every county in the United States.

We can use this county-level information to take a deeper dive into the demographics of monument-heavy regions. In particular, we’re interested in which counties have a high population percentage of Black people vs a high population percentage of white people.

First, a disclaimer: For demographic data, I chose to focus entirely on the population percentages of white and Black people. Many counties also have a large percentage of people who belong to other racial categories, but I chose specifically to focus on these two groups given the wider context.

First we can directly plot county population percentages on a map which shows, by color, the relative percentage of the population that belongs to each racial group:

These maps show us which counties have a higher Black and white population proportion, respectively. What might be even more interesting, though, is to see which counties have a larger white majority, which have a larger black majority, and which have a roughly even split.

We can do this by combining the two maps above into a single map, which shows colors based on the Black population percentage minus the white population percentage — in other words, the difference or gap between each proportion of the population.

Finally, we can overlay our plot of concentration from before on top of this map to see how symbol concentration relates to the gap in population percentages.

What can we take from this? Well, while distributed across most of the South, Confederate symbols also seem to be heavily concentrated (with some exceptions) in areas where Black people make up at least a significant part of the population.

While it’s nice to get an idea of how demographics and monument density interact geographically, we should also try to get a more exact idea of how the gap in population percentages relates to the amount of Confederate symbolism in an area.

In fact, we can go even further and see how the concentration of Confederate symbolism in a county compares to the overall median for the region. This will tell us the characteristics of those counties that have a monument density that’s higher than the rest of the pack.

Another disclaimer: In this section, I chose to focus entirely on counties from the former C.S.A. and border states. I did this because this is where virtually all monuments are concentrated, and including other regions drops the median to near-zero.

This scatterplot shows us the difference in county population percentage from before vs the density of Confederate symbols in each county. Each point represents a single county.

From this plot we can see that while white-majority counties tend to have a pretty even spread of monument densities, almost all of the Black-majority counties have an above-median density of Confederate symbol. To be exact, 87 (70.16%) of Black majority counties have an above-median concentration of symbols, while 37 (29.84%) have a below-median concentration. This is compared to 47.54% of white majority communities that are above the median.

Additionally, we can notice a big gap of empty space right below the median line for counties with a slight white majority. This suggests that, in general, counties with both a large Black and white presence have an above-average concentration of Confederate symbolism.

Statistically, the probability of this being due to random chance is virtually zero. This is definitely a statistically significant difference.

The main takeaway from this part is that while white majority counties tend to be spread pretty evenly around the median, most Black majority counties have a greater concentration of Confederate monuments.

My Take: At this point, the evidence is pretty damning. With each part in isolation, you could make the case that the demographics or distribution of monuments are tied to the remaining legacy of the Civil War more than anything or other similar arguments.

Of course, these things have a major effect on the status of Confederate symbolism now. But when we consider that monuments are often built during times when Black people push for equality, combined with the fact that regions with a higher Black majority tend to have a very high number of them, the picture is clear.

Confederate symbolism goes beyond the C.S.A.’s Civil War cause — it’s directly tied to systematic, reactionary discrimination against Black people in the wake of Reconstruction. Whether it’s to intimidate or hearken back to a racist past, Confederate symbols go up when Black people push for civil rights, in places where Black people can see them.

Part 4: History, Revisited

In this fourth and final part, we’ll revisit the argument that Confederate monuments are a party of history. Although we showed before that Confederate symbols mostly went up decades after the Civil War, it might also be worth seeing if their geographic location might be tied also to the history of the war itself instead of merely to slavery or Jim Crow.

In particular, we might be interested in seeing if Confederate symbols tend to be clustered around areas which saw a lot of major battles, or areas where prominent Confederate leaders were born.

We can do the first by simply revisiting our first density plot from Part 2, and plotting locations where major battles were fought over it. Doing this gives us the following map:

We can see that there are some battles which were fought in the high-density regions of Virginia and South Carolina/Georgia, but that there are also major clusters of battles in places like Missouri and Oklahoma that don’t coincide with a high concentration of symbols. Overall, the biggest cluster of battles is in northern Virginia, which we know was a major center of the war in many ways.

Overall, there doesn’t seem to be a very strong relationship between battle and symbol location.

Finally, we can plot the birthplaces of various major Confederate leaders instead:

Again, there doesn’t seem to be a major relationship between birthplace and symbol density here. It’s worth noting that two Confederate generals were born right in the epicenter of symbol-rich zones (James Longstreet in South Carolina and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee). Longstreet, however, was branded a failure and a traitor to the Confederacy by the Lost Cause movement in the wake of the Civil War, while Forrest was an extreme racist even by the standards of his time who massacred Black soldiers and became the first Grand Wizard of the KKK.

Here, too, the majority of birthplaces don’t really coincide with a higher density of Confederate symbolism.

My Take: In exploring the argument that Confederate symbols are portrayals of history, it seems we’ve actually shown almost the opposite: Confederate symbols don’t really seem to be tied to the Civil War history of the regions they’re in at all.

It might be interesting to take this a step further and see if monuments tend to be related to the battles/birthplaces they’re clustered around, but I felt that was a little beyond the scope of this analysis.

The Interpretation

Data and the analysis of them can often be tricky and complicated, with no conclusive interpretations even after hours of searching.

In this case, however, the data are clear. Confederate symbols are deeply ingrained in the history of enslavement and discrimination against Black people. These symbols were — and continue to be — tools of intimidation and hate in an ongoing struggle for civil rights. Remember, these aren’t monuments from history that passively remain in place; they actively continue to be supported and maintained by tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

As local communities have been demanding for generations (despite opposition that usually comes from the state level), these monuments to racism must come down. You, too, can take action by holding your state legislature accountable — with the power of the vote and protest, many monuments have already been removed despite opposition from state governors and legislatures.

We’ve spent enough time and money preserving these symbols of cruelty. Let’s leave them behind once and for all, and build in their place an America dedicated to all of us.

Afterword: The Data

In this section I’ll briefly go over where the data I used were obtained and make a few notes about how I handled them.

The primary dataset covering Confederate symbols themselves came from the illustrious Southern Poverty Law Center, which holds a large-scale dataset that tracks information about active and inactive Confederate monuments all over the nation. That dataset is free and open-source for anyone to use, and can be found here. I mentioned that the dataset tracks both monuments which are active (still publicly supported) and inactive (removed). For the purposes of this analysis, I focused only on those which were still active, as I wanted to avoid any arguments that inactive monuments might be irrelevant.

For the state and county maps, I drew from the 2018 US Census data on state/county lines. For county-level demographics data, I drew from the 2017 US Census. These were the most recent data I could find.

I obtained the data on Civil War battles from Wikipedia, which keeps a compiled list of all major battles of the Civil War and their locations. Finally, data on Confederate leader birthplaces was generated using an Excel table and my own personal, good old-fashioned research.

For my fellow nerds, feel free to check my math at https://github.com/c1rowe/confederate-symbols. All of my code (JupyterNB)/data/analyses/plots are contained therein.