Down Along with That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

I appreciative book as it highlights the statues and memorials to Nathan Bedford Forest, slave trader, Lt. general in the Confederacy, first grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, and their relationship to white supremacy and the culture that surrounds it. The book takes place during a movement to eliminate the Confederate statues and iconography prevalent in the South, amidst a time of national racial reconciliation. These memorials to the Confederacy are portrayed as symbols of white supremacy. It also illustrates how some of the current white supremacists are both tied to a past we need to reconcile to escape and a present based upon fear. The book forces white people, all white people, born in the north or south to hold themselves accountable to a culture and country built on a premise of white superiority providing undeniable advantages to white Americans. It underscores that the overwhelming influence of capitalism in the motivations for the Civil War and to Jim Crow, mass incarceration, an unequal justice system, and vast racial economic disparity. While this is good reading and a worthy read, it could go further in tying together the premise of the Forest statues/Confederate memorials, located so close to Civil Rights landmarks, to our present racial unrest. Yet O\’Neill clearly demonstrates that that Confederate and Forest memorials are only symbolic representations of white supremacy and the ability too move forward to a future of true reconciliation will require deep and profound shifts in our lives and culture. It will take more than removing a statue to achieve a country ruled by equality and justice. However, it is a first step.

As a South African, I have watched us deal with monuments and statues to apartheid prime ministers and colonialists over the past three decades. Initially the focus was on renaming streets and removing some of the most egregious statues. Some remained and became the focus of student protests in 2015 at which stage the remaining ones were mostly moved into storage, private collections or into museums accompanied by similar discussions on the preservation of history versus human dignity as recounted in this book. It\’s an ongoing process – my mother\’s former high school named after the late architect of apartheid, H.F Verwoerd, renamed itself quietly last year. So it was the context to the protests we have seen unfold from afar that made this a fascinating read. The arguments for and against are familiar, but my knowledge of the US Civil War and the subsequent politics of segregation limited. Key concepts and events were referenced succinctly and the format of focusing on four specific monuments which represented these worked well. The author does not shy away from self-reflection which is required from all of us as we contemplate the events which these monuments represent and the actions needed to move forward. Highly recommend this book.

Full of journalism and history, Connor Towne O’Neill’s book manages to give us a detailed look at the life of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and an account of efforts to get four Southern cities to stop lionizing him with statues (at least one of which is astonishingly ugly). O’Neill understands that the building of Confederate monuments and statues (most of which went up in the Jim Crow era, long after the Civil War ended) was never over “preserving history,” but instead was an attempt to rewrite the bloody, racist history of the Confederacy. “If we have no idea who we’ve been,” O’Neill writes near the end, “then we have no idea who we are.” This book is timely, readable and an outstanding example of how white people can and should be writing about whiteness.

O\’Neill\’s work is immediate and essential. As beautifully written as it is rigorously researched, Down Along with That Devil\’s Bones cuts through a fog of mythology and provides a clarion call to action against monuments that, to this day, continue to physically incarnate the terror of white supremacy. As a citizen of a changing Alabama and an alumnus, like O\’Neill, of the University of Alabama, I am heartened and challenged by this work. There is so much work to be done, but with the moral clarity that works of scholarship like this can afford us, I am confident of our path forward. Thank you, Connor, for the inestimable service that your work here represents.

This is a must read if you are confused about the issue of removing monuments in the United States. This author has done a great amount of research, reading and interviewing to help clarify why this is an issue. There is a distinction between monuments and memorials. Anyone of non-African descent needs to be able to acknowledge that systemic racism, a system built to protect privilege and fortune, still survives. There is so much work to be done in this country, and we are just beginning. Photo: Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama

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