Decatur is Atlanta's Berkeley, home to trendy multicultural boutiques, "War is not the Answer" yard signs — and a three-story-high tribute to "the covenant keeping race" that formed the Confederate States of America.

There is no mention of slavery on the monument, but there also is not much doubt about what "race" Hooper Alexander Sr. had in mind when he wrote the inscription more than 100 years ago. The prominent Decatur lawyer later gave a speech honoring the efforts of the "dominant race" after emancipation and asserting that slavery helped African-Americans.

RENEE' HANNANS HENRY/AJC (ENLARGE)

Andrea Trammel of Decatur comes to Decatur Square often, but previously had not noticed the inscription on the memorial to Confederate war dead.

RENEE' HANNANS HENRY/AJC (ENLARGE)

The Rev. Pat Matthews of Total Grace Christian Center is – unlike most of the folks strolling the Decatur square on any given day – familiar with the dense inscription on the obelisk commemorating the Confederate war dead. Matthews says she thinks the statements are less than definitive and meant only for a select group. Plus, who determines what is strong or brave? she asks.

Alexander's carved-in-granite defense of white Confederates' political views sits smack in the middle of Decatur's colorful town square.

But apparently not many people stop to read the 2-inch-high lettering at eye level on the base supporting the obelisk. Certainly not Joseph Crespino, who lives near the square — and who happens to be an expert and published author on Southern history and an assistant professor at Emory University.

Crespino recalled a historical marker on the square about a cavalry encampment. But the inscription beneath the 30-foot carving?

"I don't remember it," Crespino confessed.

Once the inscription was pointed out to him, he called it a prime example of something historians are increasingly interested in: the shaping of the collective "memory." So if people happen to notice Confederate Memorial Day — the state holiday was April 28 this year — what exactly do they "remember," and is it true?

Monument mania

The truth didn't seem much in doubt when the obelisk in Decatur, the county seat, was dedicated on Confederate Memorial Day just over 100 years ago. After glowing previews in The Atlanta Constitution, 2,000 people turned out on April 25, 1908, for the ceremony.

The first decade of the 20th century was the peak of monument-building across the South. Several historians contacted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said many of those monuments, along with honoring the sacrifices of soldiers, express vaguely pro-Confederate political sentiments.

"The one in Decatur ... is much more bold about it. ... This one is very upfront," said attorney and Confederate symbols scholar Michael Martinez of Monroe.

He noted the monument's blunt reference to race.

"Another generation bears witness to the future that these men were of a covenant keeping race who held fast to the faith as it was given by the fathers of the Republic," the inscription says.

According to records maintained by the DeKalb History Center, the inscription was written by Alexander, a former federal judge. Five years later, Alexander gave a speech to the Southern Sociological Congress in which he repeatedly referred to the slaves freed after the war as "savages" in dire need of social and moral control by whites, the "dominant race."

That kind of thinking about moral superiority of whites, sometimes under the banner of "Anglo-Saxonism," actually was "what passed then as anthropology," said John M. Coski, historian and director of the library at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

"You could go around and talk about Anglo-Saxonism and race without anyone turning a head. And that was as true on the streets of New York," Coski said.

That kind of talk these days would turn a lot of heads in Decatur, but the monument sits unnoticed.

Mayor Bill Floyd said he had no idea what the inscription says, and "I've been by it 5 million times —at least 5 million.

"I've been on the [city] commission now 17 years, and I've never had somebody say anything to me about it," Floyd said.

Coski was not surprised. Around the country, monuments with political sentiments no longer in vogue are rarely challenged, said Coski, an author and expert on Confederate symbols, who said he was not speaking on behalf of his museum.

Exceptions occur when some change makes a monument a political flashpoint — such as when a university adopted a Memphis park named for Confederate and Ku Klux Klan hero Nathan Bedford Forrest — or when a governing body has to consider spending tax money to repair a monument.

Ready to move on

Martinez, the Monroe corporate attorney who has written and edited scholarly works on Confederate symbols, said battles like the one over Georgia's state flag have left the public weary of the subject. Without some kind of trigger controvery, he said, people likely would see new objections to monuments as needless political correctness.

"They're tired of it and want to move on," Martinez said.

Some academics favor adding markers — or even moving some monuments into museums — so modern-day viewers will understand the motivations of the original monument builders.

Coski favors less dramatic solutions when possible. He noted a controversy in Maryland over a statue at the Capitol honoring Chief Justice Roger Taney, native son and author of the pre-Civil War Dred Scott decision, which infamously declared slaves to be nothing more than property even when their owners carried them into free states. Ultimately, Taney's statue remained, but the state erected a statue of another Marylander, Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice.

"That strikes me as more appropriate, adding something rather than tearing something down," Coski said.

Decatur resident Crespino, who takes his "New South" history class at Emory on tours of historic sites, said he wouldn't want to uproot the monument on his hometown square. He thinks it would be helpful to add information to "contextualize the memory" of such monuments, "so these things are not just things you pass and say, 'I can't believe that's there.' "

"Rather than remove it ... have some kind of comment," Crespino said.