BCTalks - Asheville's Confederate Monuments

Filmed Feb. 3, 2018
Questions about how Confederate monuments’ proper places will be decided came to a cataclysm in Charlottesville, Va., last August, causing one death, multiple injuries and an acceleration of the evolving national debate. Locally, disputes over what to do with fixtures as prominent as Asheville’s Vance Monument have led to heated discussions and soul-searching about a path forward.

The focus of this program is to present when and where monuments were placed, who placed them, who paid for them, and a look at how they were presented to the public when they were placed. We also hope to shed light on the social and political times of Asheville, Buncombe County and North Carolina, during the time that they were erected.

Professor Fitzhugh Brundage, Chair of UNC Chapel Hill’s History Department, will headline a program on interpreting and dealing with Civil War monuments. The title of Professor Brundage’s talk will be, “A Vexing and Awkward Debate: The Legacy of a Confederate Landscape.”

The program will begin with two brief presentations by local historians. Roy Harris will survey Buncombe County’s Confederate monuments and Jon Elliston will review the history of the local white supremacy movement that undergirded the introduction of the monuments.