In the last decade, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate memorials and sites that perpetuate racist ideology. With @SmithsonianMag: ow.ly/rF3K30mN2PV 1/
Beauvoir, a site in Biloxi, Mississippi, received more than $21 million in taxpayer funds in recent years. A tour guide claimed slavery "was good for the people that didn’t know how to take care of themselves, and they needed a job." 2/ 
For our investigation, we submitted 175 open records requests to the states of the former Confederacy, plus Missouri and Kentucky, and to federal, county and municipal authorities. We also combed through scores of nonprofit tax filings and public reports. 4/
“The state is giving the stamp of approval to these Lost Cause ideas, and the money is a symbol of that approval,” Karen Cox, a historian of the American South, said. “What does that say to black citizens of the state, or other citizens, or to younger generations?” 5/
The public funding of Confederate iconography is also troubling because sites serve as shrines for white supremacists. Dylann Roof spent a day touring former plantations and a Confederate museum before killing nine African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina. 6/
Our reporters went on many tours of the homes of the Confederacy’s staunchest ideologues, and without exception they were told that the owners were good and the slaves were happy. 8/
Stephani Brazzle, a 39-year-old African-American Mississippian, accompanied her daughter on a field trip to Beauvoir. She never heard any mention of slavery. “It was like we were not even there,” she said, as if slavery “never happened.” 9/
Read our full investigation here: theinvestigativefund.org/investigation/…
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