File #8: "Library Entrance at the Confederate Memorial Park"

This artifact’s focus on the park’s library sign became representative of the State’s continual involvement with this memorial. Per that sign and contemporary newspaper articles, the library is under the S.C.V.’s “mainten[ance],” as sanctioned through “a formal agreement with the state,” wherein the former sells Confederate history and neo-Confederate ideological books [1]. While that is not unusual for former Confederate states and organizations, this memorial park’s peculiarity rests in its financing, i.e., earmarked from a small portion of a pension fund enshrined within the 1901 Alabama Constitution, an anomaly for which “[t]ax experts...know of no other state that still collects a tax so directly connected to the Civil War” [2]. A haunting echo of the post-Reconstruction Alabamian sentiment that “[t]he Confederate soldier and his descendants owe Captain Jefferson Falkner a debt of gratitude that can never be paid,” propositions of said tax’s removal since the early 2010s have thus far been unsuccessful due to the Legislature itself [3]. Rather than within the fund itself, the importance lies in its reinforcement of the State’s collaboration with this memorial and its stakeholders like the S.C.V. Such efforts thus allow the memorial to “live as a monument after all the old Confederates were gone” as its creators envisioned and, through it, advance the Lost Cause narrative.

1. Paula Horvath, “Alabama memorial brings racist history to forefront,” in the Florida Times Union (Feb. 3, 2019); Brian Palmer and Seth F. Wesser, “The Costs of the Confederacy,” in the Smithsonian 49, no. 8 (Dec. 2018).
   
2. Jay Reeves, “Alabama Still Collecting Tax For Confederate Vets,” in The Culvert Chronicles 6, no. 26 (July 21, 2011); Adam C. Estes, “Why Alabama Is Still Collecting Taxes for Confederate Veterans,” in The Atlantic (July 20, 2011); Phillip Tutor, “How the South pays (literally) for the Lost Cause,” in the TCA Regional News (Dec. 6, 2018).
3. John Purifoy, “Report of the Soldiers’ Home of This State,” in the Birmingham Age-Herald (Mar. 19, 1905), in the University of Alabama Libraries, in the Library of Congress Digital Archive; “Taxing history in Alabama,” in the Chattanooga Times Free Press (July 25, 2011); “Editorial: end special treatment,” in the Montgomery Advertiser (July 28, 2011); Tim Lockette, “Confederate history park unscathed in budget battle,” in McClatchy - Tribune Business News (Mar. 31, 2011).