| Abstract | History and its social legacy have been argued to play an important role in understanding the (re)production of contemporary racial inequalities. Despite empirical evidence consistent with this argument, particularly when considering the contemporary impact of slavery on black-white inequalities, we have a limited understanding of how such a legacy has been maintained over time. In this paper I draw on ideas about the creation and persistence of collective memory to elucidate the processes involved in perpetuating the legacy of slavery. In this innovative analysis, I employ a new dataset that indicates the location of Confederate monuments. I link this information to census data on county-level black-white poverty disparities and previously developed historical slave concentration data to assess the extent to which the presence of monuments dedicated to memorializing the Confederacy and its causes help explain the perpetuation of a legacy of slavery. In addition, I assess arguments regarding the contingency of any legacy of slavery by examining the extent to which slave concentration is only positively related to black economic disadvantage in counties that subsequently constructed Confederate monuments. Advancing our theoretical development of historical legacies and their relationship with public symbols is particularly timely if we are to contribute to debates regarding Confederate symbols and their relationship to race and racial inequality in the United States.
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