Those numerous statues have not been standing over a hundred years. A little history for you:
The statues memorializing the Confederate dead or the leading Confederate military figures of that era are nowhere near 100 years old. The Civil War ended in 1865. Those monuments were erected predominantly in the early 1900s. The majority of those monuments were erected as part of the post-Reconstruction Southern initiative to suppress the gains achieved in the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, namely Amendments 13, 14, and 15, briefly described here:
| Thirteenth Amendment | 1865 | outlaws slavery |
| Fourteenth Amendment | 1868 | grants citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who were emancipated after the American Civil War |
| Fifteenth Amendment | 1870 | guarantees that the right to vote cannot be denied based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" |
That suppression took form in the era of Jim Crow, as Southern states established and harshly enforced practices of racial segregation and adopted patently unconstitutional stratagems to deny Black citizens their right to vote. It was during this time that so many memorials to the Confederacy proliferated as visible icons of these racist initiatives.