Hundreds of Southern towns and cities erected Confederate statues in the decades after the Civil War. Almost no statues or monuments marked the military service of 100,000 white Southern Union soldiers or the 180,000 Blacks serving in the United States Colored Troops. There were also few memorials to the Emancipation of slaves in Southern communities. There have been some efforts to rectify this. Earlier this year, a monument to Emancipation was erected in the small Virginia town of Palmyra, population 104.
The monument was six years in the making. It was the brainchild of the local Fluvanna County historical society, the NAACP, and the African American religious community.
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