Law Commons^™

The Persistence Of The Confederate Narrative, Peggy Cooper Davis, Anderson Francois, Colin Starger

All Faculty Scholarship

Ever since the United States was reconstituted after the Civil War, a Confederate narrative of states’ rights has undermined the Reconstruction Amendments’ design for the protection of civil rights. The Confederate narrative’s diminishment of civil rights has been regularly challenged, but it stubbornly persists. Today the narrative survives in imprecise and unquestioning odes to state sovereignty. We analyze the relationship, over time, between assertions of civil rights and calls for the protection of local autonomy and control. This analysis reveals a troubling sequence: the Confederate narrative was shamefully intertwined with the defense of American chattel slavery. It survived profound challenges …