The Southern Poverty Law Center is speaking out against new executive orders from President Donald Trump aimed at restoring Confederate monuments and reshaping how U.S. history is taught.
SPLC Chief Strategy Officer Seth Levi called the orders an effort to rewrite history and obscure the real reasons these memorials were built.
“We have these debates about what’s the actual accurate history,” said Levi, “And in this case, with these Confederate monuments, we have the data and information that shows why and when they went up.”
Levi says the majority of Confederate monuments were not built shortly after the Civil War, but much later during the Jim Crow era to reinforce racial oppression.
The SPLC is preparing to release a new edition of its “Whose Heritage” report, which tallies the number of Confederate monuments around the country.
