As Donald Trump denounces the removal of Confederate statues at the heart of a US race relations row Professor Tim Lockley reviews the statues origins

"The really interesting thing about these statues is that most were erected long after the Civil War, often between 1890 and 1930 which is the height of the ‘Jim Crow’ era of segregation. There was another wave of them in the 1950s as a backlash against the civil rights movement.

"These were not put up immediately after the war, and generally not by veterans or those who fought, but by their descendants, harking back to a mythical golden age (the ‘lost cause’) when the white man was in complete control over the black slave. There’s an important historical dimension that is easy to overlook."

Professor Tim Lockley - Comparative American Studies.

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