Repost • @monument_lab “Among the top 50 individuals commemorated, Confederate leaders outperformed women by four to three. Half of this group of 50 owned enslaved people, and all but six of these were white men. The audit also discovered that American memorials reflect a national focus on violent events. Fully a third commemorate war. For example, while nearly 6,000 reference the Civil War, only nine mention the era of Reconstruction that followed. The study also found that memory of past violence is skewed: Not a single monument recalls any of the 34 massacres of Black Americans recorded during that tumultuous post-war period. The experience of African Americans is not the only thread of national history neglected in public spaces. The team counted nearly a thousand memorials erected after 1930 celebrating white pioneers but largely avoiding mention of the darker aspects of migration to the West, such as massacres, land grabs, and reneging on solemn treaties with Native Americans. ‘The story of the United States as told by our current monument landscape misrepresents our history,’ the report concludes. ‘Where inequalities and injustices exist, monuments often perpetuate them.” The #NationalMonumentAudit featured in @natgeo