Shows that the Black press has a tradition of challenging Confederate monuments, flags, and other memorials spanning all the way back to Reconstruction.

Although controversies around Confederate monuments, flags, and other memorials are often claimed to be a recent development, this book turns to the Black press to shed light on a tradition of critical reactions to Confederate commemoration going back over 150 years. Already during the first years of Reconstruction, Black journalists were developing a sophisticated analysis of how Confederate public memory fit into the American landscape of race, politics, violence, and material culture.

This book surveys critical voices from the Black press speaking out against Confederate public memory. A century and a half before the Black Lives Matter movement, Black journalists articulated profound critiques of the restoration of the racial hierarchies that had been defeated at great cost in the Civil War—and the role of Confederate commemoration in their rebirth. Drawing on a database of more than 2000 articles from over 150 Black publications spanning from the early years of Reconstruction to the twenty-first century, this book tells the story of the Black press as a vehicle through which Black journalists advanced their own memory of the Confederacy and the antebellum period. Through truth-based journalism, sophisticated rhetorical technique, and virtuosic literary style, Black journalists counterattacked against Lost Cause propaganda about the Civil War and built the Black republic of letters.