On August 12, 2017, a community organizer from North Carolina named Heather Redding drove to Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the white nationalist jamboree known as Unite the Right. Redding, then 39, was already involved in a push to remove Confederate imagery from her kids’ school district and supported city leaders who had voted to take a statue of Robert E. Lee out of a public park. She felt even more strongly that the white nationalists who were fighting to keep it needed to be shouted down, and she came with a sign that read, “I’d hate to see the world through your eyes.”
What Redding didn’t expect was that it would be so hard for her to tell the supremacists from the counter-demonstrators. It was as if they’d all shopped at the same outlet mall: “It was very unsettling not knowing who was who,” she says. At past rallies defenders of such monuments had typically been men draped in Confederate flags. This new class, well-scrubbed in their chinos, carried tiki torches and looked as if they’d just spilled out of a college sports bar, drunk on their own power.
After the white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black worshipers at a South Carolina church in 2015, the conversation about Confederate monuments, flags, and other symbols changed dramatically. Flags started coming down from state capitols, and by the time of the Unite the Right rally, 45 monuments to rebel leaders had been removed from public spaces, with several states pushing to relocate dozens more. But a year after the violence that left three dead and 35 injured—and as the same organizers have laid plans for an anniversary march in Washington, D.C.—Americans are more divided on this issue than ever: 61 percent of Southerners recently told NBC News that they favor keeping the tributes in place, even as a recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that nearly two thirds of African Americans support removal. Activists go even further, saying the monuments are crucibles of intimidation and a selective telling of history.
The group most responsible for cementing that history is also the one that appears the least threatening: the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The organization is filled with grandmothers who pose for photos in modest skirt suits framed by rebel sashes, smiling under Kentucky Derby–worthy hats. They insist their main job is education. But critics say that as soft power brokers they’ve done more to spread the secessionist gospel than all the skinheads who stole the spotlight in Charlottesville.
The UDC was formed in 1894 by widows who spent the post–Civil War years going door-to-door to collect money for cemetery stones to honor their loved ones. They had lost much—more than 30 percent of their men who served had been killed—and their economy was decimated. Who could turn down a kindly war widow collecting nickels or dimes?
The memorials were generally plain columns with modest inscriptions that gave family members a place to gather and grieve. But by the turn of the century, statues of Confederate soldiers began appearing in more elaborate war poses, recasting the conflict as a worthy, even necessary, battle for Southern values. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 1910 and 1911—about the time Jim Crow laws were sweeping the South—the UDC helped finance and build 85 monuments, most of which were put in the heart of public squares. More tributes went up over the years, particularly in the 1950s, part of the backlash against the civil rights movement. All in all, the UDC has been responsible for erecting more than 700 monuments and other memorials to the Confederacy. Its mission: “Honoring the memory of its Confederate ancestors; protecting, preserving, and marking the places made historic by Confederate valor; collecting and preserving the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States.”
The riots in Charlottesville, however, suggested a turning point. While the UDC, a group with about 20,000 members nationwide that is famously press shy, didn’t comment for nine days, it finally posted a statement on its website, saying, “We are grieved that certain hate groups have taken the Confederate flag and other symbols as their own,” adding that the organization “totally denounces any individual or group that promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy. And we call on these people to cease using Confederate symbols for their abhorrent and reprehensible purposes.”
Left unsaid was what purpose these monuments in particular still serve. Peggy Johnson, 74, who runs the UDC’s North Carolina division, argues that anyone who sees them as symbols of white privilege “lacks education” and “has no interest in history.” “They were never put there to intimidate anyone,” she says. “They were put there for grieving mourners. That’s why I don’t think it’s ever appropriate to remove one.” (She offers one concession: “Unless they have to widen a road and it’s in the way, and then it needs to be put in a place of equal prominence.”)
Her line in the sand has become a litmus test for Southern politicians, much like an NRA rating or their position on Planned Parenthood. In Alabama, for example, Kay Ivey is running for reelection as governor with commercials that tout a bill she signed last year, the Memorial Preservation Act. It bars the removal of any memorials, buildings, or street names that have been in place for more than 40 years.
Alabama was the latest of seven Southern states to enact laws like that, even though as recently as 2016 Ivey’s predecessor, Republican Robert Bentley, took four Confederate flags off the statehouse in Montgomery. Bill Britt, editor-in-chief of the Alabama Political Reporter, believes UDC nudged Ivey to the right. “Their influence, while not overt, is the kind that comes from social settings, and from people she’s known for years,” he says. “They pushed her on this.”
Now Ivey’s administration is suing the city of Birmingham to prevent them from covering a UDC monument that was put up near City Hall in 1905. On the campaign trail, Ivey was in lockstep with the UDC when she told reporters, “We can’t and shouldn’t even try to change or erase or tear down our history.”
While the Daughters prefer to work behind the scenes—“We’re not political,” Johnson insists—they haven’t been bashful about asking the courts to advance their agenda. When Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, tried renaming a dorm called Confederate Memorial Hall back in 2002, the organization sued to enforce an agreement that dated all the way back to 1935. The deal stipulated that if the building’s name was ever changed, the Daughters could get a full refund of its $50,000 investment. A federal judge agreed, and in 2016 the chapter was paid $1.2 million, the current value, so the university could get rid of the name.
After the riots in Charlottesville, the head of the UDC branch in Shreveport, Louisiana, Jackie Nichols, 67, filed suit to stop her parish from removing a statue in front of the local courthouse. Nichols was one of several volunteers selected to sit on a citizen’s advisory panel that was tasked with deciding what to do with the statue, which includes the military trinity of the Confederacy: Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and P.G.T. Beauregard. After nearly a year she signed on to a compromise in which the monument would remain beside new signage that would express different points of view and two new statues, one to the civil rights movement and one to reconstruction. Parish commissioners, however, felt that didn’t go far enough and voted seven to five to relocate the statue. “That made a lot of people mad, even little old ladies,” Nichols says. “The commission seemed to think we would buckle.” Instead she launched the lawsuit, which claims the land beneath the monument was deeded to the Daughters long ago and is theirs to do with what they want. At press time, a decision about whether the case would go to trial was still pending.
President Donald Trump has tweeted that taking down the tributes is “sad” and “so foolish,” breathing new life into organizations like the UDC. “The appeal of these groups is how America used to be and used to look, and when the President says he wants to make America great again, he makes such groups current again,” says Melissa Deckman, a professor at Maryland’s Washington College who has researched women in the Tea Party. Says Nichols: “We are getting members in their thirties and forties who are interested in joining because they decided it’s time for them to step forward and get their views out there.”
Nichols is unapologetic about the UDC’s monuments being called divisive. “Divisive isn’t too bad a word if it makes one curious about the history of events,” she says. Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Ph.D., a professor of early African American literature at Clemson University in South Carolina who has researched the UDC, also believes a curiosity about history is important—so long as it’s clear-eyed. “These are monuments to a government that was based on slavery,” she says. “You can’t say this is about your heritage when your heritage is about owning blacks. If this is really about heritage, why aren’t we putting up monuments to Frederick Douglass or African American women?” For the UDC, Thomas says, “There’s no narrative that says what this is really about: the oppression of black people.”
Indeed there is little about the black experience in the information the group disseminates. Membership newsletters, for example, celebrate holidays like Confederate Memorial Day and feature articles like Peggy’s Reading List, in which Johnson, a former teacher, reviews books about “the War Between the States [that] will help our members learn more about our glorious heritage, and share with our detractors.”
In fact, the group’s biggest success may not be the war over its monuments but its battle to influence generations of school kids. The UDC awards prizes to students who write essays about Confederate history. And for years the group has taught the Confederate Catechism, a series of call-and-response questions like, “What did the South fight for in the Civil War?” with answers about states’ rights and self-government that mostly deny slavery was the cause of secession. “[UDC] members elbowed their way onto school committees that gave them a chance to influence what kids read and wrote about,” says Karen Cox, author of a history of the UDC called Dixie’s Daughters. All that set the stage for a remarkable law in Texas. Since 2014 the Texas Board of Education has minimized the role of slavery in the Civil War in district textbooks by ranking it as the third cause of the fighting, behind separatism and states’ rights. As Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it: “The Daughters have done more with monuments, textbooks, and other propaganda to bolster the image of the Confederacy than any other organization.”
The UDC’s 33 state DIVISIONS are tightly controlled by a national leadership that is easy to caricature as out of touch. Its current president, Patricia Bryson, is 78 and pictured on the UDC’s website under the name Mrs. George W. Bryson, her own name relegated to a parenthetical: (Patricia M.). In some ways the organization is like popular ancestry websites and (for a fee) provides research services to anyone who wants to prove their link to the Confederacy. “We’re mostly a genealogy society,” Nichols insists. But the UDC clings to rules that are, at best, limiting and, at worst, racist. To be accepted as members, applicants are required to prove they are blood descendants of “men and women who served honorably” for the South or gave “material aid to the cause.”
Heidi Christensen, a veterans caregiver who joined the Washington State chapter in 2004, left eight years later in disgust over those rules and what she calls “the death grip of the ruling oligarchy.” Christensen’s tenure coincided with a troubled time in her life, including two failed marriages, one to a man who belonged to a white nationalist group. She rose quickly through the UDC’s ranks, first making care packages for troops in Iraq, then getting named to head its national monument commission, where she collected reports from local chapters about what they’d done to beautify the statues in their area.
Her feelings began to change when she read a memoir by Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the biracial daughter of the late pro-segregationist and senator Strom Thurmond and Carrie Butler, who had been a family servant. Washington-Williams wanted to open the UDC to women of color, and applied herself. Christensen championed Washington-Williams’ cause, only to watch in frustration when she died in 2013 without getting her wish, because, Christensen says, her father’s name wasn’t on her birth certificate. Even after Christensen resigned her UDC membership, she continued pushing for Washington-Williams to be admitted posthumously. If the UDC is truly about genealogy, she says, “We’re ignoring people, or cutting them out of their family history.”
For her efforts, the 47-year-old received a cease-and-desist letter from an attorney representing the UDC, warning, “If you continue these activities, my client will have no alternative than to consider legal action to protect its rights, including litigation against you.” Says Christensen: “I prize that more than my master’s degree.”
Christensen didn’t give up. In March she appeared before the Seattle city council to support moving a Confederate monument from a cemetery, where it was being vandalized, to a private camp in Portland, Oregon. “The problem with the UDC is its mission is supposed to be ‘historical, educational, benevolent, memorial, and patriotic,’ ” she says. It’s the historical message that is a “sticky wicket,” she says. “The Daughters I know in California and Arizona are spending their time donating to veterans’ hospitals. If there’s redeeming value in what the UDC still stands for, it’s there, in that ideal. Not in statues. We don’t need to be dancing around in hoop skirts anymore.”
Heather Redding, the community organizer, tried to make the same point to Peggy Johnson two months after the Unite the Right rally at a UDC convention in Durham, North Carolina. Redding, who is Asian American, brought with her Maya Little, 25, an African American doctoral student who’d later get arrested for throwing a mix of red ink and blood on a Confederate monument in Chapel Hill known as Silent Sam. Johnson says Little screamed at and harassed her, but that’s not how Little recalls it. Little says she was firm but respectful, saying, “We’d like to talk to you about moving Sam,” and handing her a letter making the case. Little believes the UDC’s work to keep statues like Sam is racial bullying: “Their refusal to remove their monuments is at the expense of black lives and our dignity.”
The meeting did not end on friendly terms. Redding isn’t deterred and says she’ll keep supporting the larger movement to remove Confederate imagery from classrooms and public spaces. “I want to be able to look my kids in the eyes and tell them that when our nation’s leaders were eroding the safety and freedom of marginalized communities, I didn’t stay quiet,” she says. But Redding recognizes what a tough adversary Johnson is. To that end, Johnson says she is resolved to defend her history. “People think we’re a bunch of prejudiced, narrow-minded women,” she says. “But we’ve always been about taking care of veterans and widows, and educating the children left behind. We haven’t changed since we started.”
