December 10, 2020
Cities across the United States, particularly in the South, are struggling with the legacies of their Confederate past, including monuments that have sparked renewed protest and calls for removal in recent years—most recently after the nationwide protests sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor this spring.
But how mayors deal with monuments that represent past injustice can be politically challenging and controversial.
A new teaching case, “Reckoning with History: Confederate Monuments in American Cities,” focuses on how mayors in three cities—Baltimore, Maryland; Lexington, Kentucky; and Charleston, South Carolina—grappled with the removal of Confederate monuments and flags in their public parks and plazas in the aftermath of hate crimes in Charleston in 2015 and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.