<P> In the wake of the Charleston church shooting in June 2015, several municipalities in the United States removed monuments and memorials dedicated to the Confederate States of America . The momentum accelerated in August 2017 after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia . The removals were driven by the belief that the monuments glorify white supremacy and memorialize a government whose founding principle was the perpetuation and expansion of slavery . Many of those who object to the removals claim that the artifacts are part of the cultural heritage of the United States . </P> <P> The vast majority of these Confederate monuments were built during the Jim Crow Era (1877 - 1954) and the African - American Civil Rights Movement (1954--1968) era as a means of intimidating African Americans and reaffirming white supremacy . The monuments have thus become highly politicized; according to Eleanor Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a scholar of Civil War history: "If white nationalists and neo-Nazis are now claiming this as part of their heritage, they have essentially co-opted those images and those statues beyond any capacity to neutralize them again". According to Stan Deaton, senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society, "These laws are the Old South imposing its moral and its political views on us forever more . This is what led to the Civil War, and it still divides us as a country . We have competing visions not only about the future but about the past ." </P>

When did the first confederate monument come down