April 12, 1861: Fort Sumter is attacked by Confederate forces, officially beginning the U.S. Civil War. Since then, Fort Sumter itself has been the subject of much debate about Civil War public history and memory. For example, when just across the harbor a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, the National Park Service changed its policies on Confederate flags at Fort Sumter. Site officials replaced the flagpoles holding Confederate flags with smaller ones that made these flags much less visible from outside the fort itself, causing nationwide uproar. These events launched a renewed national debate about the Confederate flag in American social memory. As a result, recent context informed many interpretations of the viral photograph showing an insurrectionist carrying a Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As the federal agency in charge of national monuments and historic sites such as Fort Sumter, the National Park Service has a substantial role in shaping these conversations.
Citations: Olivia Williams Black, “The 150 Year War: The Struggle to Create and Control Civil War Memory at Fort Sumter National Monument,” The Public Historian 38, no. 4 (2016): 149-151, 165, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.4.149; Alma A. Pelot, “Confederate flag flying. Ft. Sumter after the evacuation of Maj. Anderson – interior,” photograph (Charleston, NC, April 16, 1861), https://lccn.loc.gov/2011645052.
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