Sons and Daughters groups buy land, raise money and run ads pushing back against statue removals.
Across the South, more than 20 new monuments, ranging from small plaques to massive Confederate battle flags placed near major interstate highways for maximum visibility, have been installed on private property in the past few years, said Larry McCluney Jr., commander in chief of the Sons group.
Most of the removals, whether by vote of local government or by activists taking matters into their own hands, have occurred in midsized or large cities. Protests against monuments took place this spring in dozens of small towns, but few of those structures have come down. But in some places, the Confederate groups offer elected officials a relatively easy way to dispose of — or to protect — their monument. In Parksley, Va., a town of 800 on the Eastern Shore, council members voted last month to sellAn inscription on the monument reads: “They fought for conscience sake and died for right.”
“We use our legal resources to defend the monuments as long as we can, and our fallback is to keep the monument in the state where it stood, on private property where it’s visible to the public,” Kennedy said. “We are not going to have some secret repository deep in the South where all the monuments will be hidden.
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