Bibliograph

Down along with that devil's bones, a reckoning with monuments, memory, and the legacy of white supremacy, Connor Towne O'Neill

Type

Label

Down along with that devil's bones, a reckoning with monuments, memory, and the legacy of white supremacy, Connor Towne O'Neill

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Down along with that devil's bones

Medium

electronic resource

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Connor Towne O'Neill

Sub title

a reckoning with monuments, memory, and the legacy of white supremacy

Summary

An unexpected, eye-opening account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville-and where we might go next-told in marble, bronze, and brick. In the spring of 2015, journalist Connor Towne O'Neill-visiting Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when black protesters were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge-stumbled upon a meeting of a neo-Confederate group calling themselves the Friends of Forrest. Their mission: to keep alive the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most effective, and vicious, Confederate generals and the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Just two months later, Dylann Roof killed nine black worshippers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in an attempt to start a new race war. The juxtaposition of these events sent O'Neill down a rabbit hole of exploration into the newly raging fights over Confederate monuments-the history these memorials tell and the history they obscure. In the course of Down Along with That Devil's Bones, O'Neill brings the reader along as he travels across Alabama and Tennessee to dive deeper into the story of Nathan Bedford Forrest, less known than Robert E. Lee, but to a segment of people he met still a white supremacist hero. Exploring local battles over statues and buildings dedicated to Forrest, talking to activists and academics alike, O'Neill uses Forrest as a lens through which to understand some of the racial upheavals of recent years, delivering a personal and soul-searching series of dispatches from the (increasingly bloody) battlefields of our country's symbolic landscape, tracing the memory of one of the Confederacy's most vicious defenders to reveal a cold Civil War that is, every day, smoldering back to life. And at the same time, O'Neill, a white northerner now living in Alabama, finds he has to revise the story he has believed about himself and his own privileged distance-he thought-from white supremacy

Target audience

adult

Classification