Reckoning with Battlefield Violence: Hauntings, Historical Places, and Protest

The May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer prompted a nationwide series of Black Lives Matter protests on police brutality. Floyd’s death, one of a series of such deaths, precipitated confrontations between Black Lives Matter protestors, and far-right, white supremacist groups who opposed them. On July 4, 2020, the far-right flocked to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in response to a series of Facebook posts claiming “Antifa” and BLM protesters planned to burn American flags at the historic Gettysburg Civil War battlefield site. Hundreds of armed militia groups descended on the National Military Park and Cemetery. These groups carried guns, Confederate flags, signs, chanted white supremacist slogans, and threatened violence against any “Antifa” who attempted to desecrate the American flag. Heavily armed men and women staged at entrances and monuments throughout the park. Despite the police publicly stating the social media posts were hoaxes, with no sight of antifa protestors, the militia persisted in occupying the National Park Site.

Photos of white supremacists waving Confederate flags, displaying signs with violent, anti-Black statements, proclaiming Gettysburg as a site of white power, demonstrates the contested nature of historic locations. Places like Gettysburg haunt the present as powerful sites of memory able to be marshalled for ideological purposes in the present. That the unknown individual who posted the false social media posts calling for violent action against anti-American “Antifa” agents chose Gettysburg, a site of emotional collective trauma as the location for a racial confrontation, illuminates the legacy of lingering conflict over the position of Black Americans in the U.S. This paper questions the utility of appropriating a national battlefield as a site of racial protest. What does it mean for the living, and what does it mean for the dead who are unable to contest such occupation?