A Moral Debt: The Legacy of Slavery in the USA

Journalist James Gannon has inherited a controversial family legacy – that of a clear descendancy from General Robert E Lee, who led the Confederate Army against the Union during the American Civil war in the mid-19th century.

Gannon grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, where an 18-metre high statue of his ancestor dominates the landscape in Monument Avenue, the city’s grandest street.

For over 100 years, Richmond has honoured Lee as one of its greatest heroes. Until recently.

In 2015, 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Photographs of Roof draped in and posing with the Confederate flag emerged on a now defunct white supremacist website.

Soon after, the city council in New Orleans voted for their Confederate monuments to be removed. Public consultations over Confederate memorials took place in Virginia, which once had the largest enslaved population in the United States.

When a “Unite the Right” rally to protest against the removal of a Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville,  Virginia, turned into violent clashes in August 2017, it accelerated the national debate about what to do with the country’s more than 1,500 monuments and publically-installed symbols memorialising the American Civil War.

What happened that weekend in Charlottesville made Gannon consider the true legacy of his slave-owning ancestors.

On a journey into his family’s legacy, Gannon explores why people across the US are so divided on the subject of Confederate monuments and whether the oppression of enslaved people by his ancestors still has an effect on black lives in the US today.

Travelling across Virginia and Maryland to meet key actors in the ongoing moral dilemma the US finds itself in regards to the Civil War and glorification of Confederate monuments, Gannon finds himself face to face with the debate for justice, reparations and the fight to tear these statues down.