The Southern Poverty Law Center did some good original (I think) research to find information about Confederate memorial/statues. But the data fails to support their conclusions. There is a very large spike in monuments in 1911 and a smaller one about 1961. Anyone who knows anything about the Civil War would immediately recognize those dates as the 50th and 100th anniversary of the Civil War, and naturally there would be interest at those times in memorials. Yet the SPLC attributes the 1911 spike to Jim Crow laws (which spread from 1870 to about 1959) and the 1961 date to some nebulous push back against civil-rights laws. In my opinion, the credibility of the SPLC is toast.
