United Daughters of The Confederacy - Recent Issues

Recent Issues

Critics have attacked their emphasis on preserving "Southern heritage" as a subterfuge for a nostalgia for the days of white supremacy. For example in informal comments in 1999, Princeton University historian James M. McPherson, a scholar of the Civil War, associated the (UDC) with the neo-Confederate movement and described board members of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia as "undoubtedly neo-Confederate". He said that the UDC and their male counterparts, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), have "white supremacy" as their "thinly veiled agendas."

Some members of the UDC and the SCV were outraged and said that the two organizations do not have a racist agenda. Some SCV and UDC chapters urged their members to boycott McPherson's books and engage in letter-writing campaigns of protest. McPherson responded that he did not mean to imply that all SCV or UDC chapters, or everyone who belongs to them, promote the agenda. He further stated that (only) "some of these people have a hidden agenda they might not even recognize they're involved in."

In 2003 Essie Mae Washington-Williams announced that she was the natural daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond (which his family confirmed), born in 1925 when he was 22 and her mother Carrie Butler was 16 and a housekeeper at his parents' house. In 2004 Washington-Williams announced her intention to join the UDC. Thurmond had completed the documentation and long been a member of the corresponding Sons of Confederate Veterans. She encouraged other African Americans to participate as well, to learn more about their heritage and add to the full story of American history.

The UDC sued Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville, Tennessee over its 2002 plan to change the name of Confederate Memorial Hall, a student dormitory. In September 2002, the university announced its intention to remove "Confederate" from the pediment of the building in recognition of changed times. The UDC sued, as it had funded one third of the cost in 1935 when the building was constructed by Peabody College, which merged with Vanderbilt in 1979. Its condition was that the building would be named Confederate Memorial Hall and have two floors reserved for women descendants of Confederate veterans.

After a lengthy legal process that went to appeal, the Tennessee State Appeals Court ruled on May 3, 2005, that Vanderbilt University would be forced to pay a sizable sum to the UDC if it removed "Confederate" from the building. Due to the court ruling, the university decided against formally changing the name. In its press and college materials, the university refers to the building simply as Memorial House.