File #22: "Confederate Battle Flag before the "Battle Abbey of the South""

This artifact’s emphasis on the museum’s sign and Confederate battle flag further demonstrated how its intrinsic politicization through its creators’ Lost Cause narrative clashed with the Civil Rights Movement. Confederate veterans used the hall consistently as a meeting space during its early years, and politicians like Huey P. Long “took...personal interest in the matter, ‘so as to preserve to the Confederate Veterans the use [there]of’” [1]. That collaboration, and the battle flag’s presence in this photograph directly reflected Richmond, Virginia’s Confederate Museum president Waite Rawls’ assertion that “the Confederate flag was used as a symbol of white supremacy in the civil rights era” [2]. Through its publication in Tulane University’s 1969 yearbook, this artifact contributed to said “symbol[ic] use” and further institutionalized a White supremacist, Confederate paradigm in New Orleans. That process thereby continued the generational transferences the memorial hall’s creators intended for its visitors and stakeholders.

1. Samuel Wilson Jr. “The Howard Memorial Library and Memorial Hall,” in Louisiana History 28, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 241-42.
2. Mary Foster, “Civil War museums changing as views continue to evolve,” in The Charleston Gazette (June 30, 2006); Giacomo Bagarella, “To Whom Does One Pray At the Battle Abbey of the South?” in “The Envoy,” in Medium (Sept. 3, 2017).