Activist History of Confederate Monuments

Meet Karen Cox, Activist at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her biography reads “Professor” and “Historian” but those descriptions don’t apply.

Cox is the personification of the current historical profession. She has no integrity, makes up straw man fallacies to suit her political positions, and cherry picks information to defend her predetermined narratives.

In other words, she isn’t an historian.

Historians seek to understand, to tell a story about a people and a place absent presentism. We may not agree with our subjects–or we might–but the historian is there to let them speak for themselves with verifiable evidence.

Cox doesn’t have any for her most outrageous claims. For example, she argues that Confederate monuments were placed at courthouses to intimidate black voters. Her evidence? Nothing. Not one source. She also argues that they were all built during the Jim Crow era because white Southerners wanted to make black Southerners uncomfortable and bow to the legal racial stratification. Her evidence? Nothing. Not one source.

Unless, that is, you consider her idiotic political biases as a source.

As this Twitter account correctly points out, Union monuments were also placed at courthouses. I guess they wanted to subjugate black Americans as well.

She has made a name denouncing the “Lost Cause” and Confederate Monuments, and in her words has “wrangled” for years with the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Historians don’t “wrangle” with their subjects unless they are engaging in premeditated historical murder.

That is exactly what Cox calls history.

And typical for modern activist historians, she has more hubris than she should. She calls her latest book, No Common Ground, the history book on Confederate Monuments while labeling herself the “OG Monument Scholar.” 

Stupid.

Gaines Foster and Charles Wilson both wrote fair books on Confederate monuments and the lost cause decades ago, long before “Dr. Karen L. Cox” had even sniffed her Ph.D.

They found race wasn’t the determining factor in erecting those monuments. That’s doesn’t fit with Cox’s narrative, so she has to pretend like those books don’t exist.

Regardless, her thinly veiled and poorly researched polemic made great podcast fodder. I destroy her book on Episode 574 of The Brion McClanahan Show.