MSU PLS PhD student wins grant to investigate links between Confederate memorial removals and voter behavior
September 8, 2025 - Karessa Weir
When Kelsey Osborne-Garth was an undergraduate at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, she worked toward the removal of a Confederate statue near campus and witnessed the months of protests both for and against the removal that followed.
The experience inspired her research as an MSU Political Science doctoral student and has garnered her a 2025 Dean’s Institutional Access grant. Osborne-Garth was awarded $5,000 for research on her dissertation chapter “The Link Between Confederate Memorial Removal and the Voting Behavior of Black Voters.”
“That protest inspired me to explore national symbols and what impact that has on voting participation and behavior,” Osborne-Garth said. “When the monuments are removed, there is a definite impact on how people interact with the political system.”
More broadly, Osborne-Garth is researching political symbols and how they serve as “political currency” for candidates and political parties.
In the case of the Tennessee monument, the city found that because it was on private land owned by the United Daughters of Confederacy, it could not remove the monument. It also fell under the jurisdiction of the state’s 2013 Heritage Act which specifically prohibits the removal of Confederate statues and monuments.
Monument removal is not new, Osborne-Garth said. The first removals started in the 1920s because of the deterioration of the statues. But after a white nationalist rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., communities across the south started calling for the removal of reminders of a time when Black people were enslaved and then facing discrimination and hatred in the Jim Crow era.
“These are statues that were erected in Jim Crow to threaten Black people. It was a reminder to keep your head down, focus on feeding your family. The presence of these monuments were reminders of their lower status,” Osborne-Garth said. “But there has been a shift in status and people aren’t afraid to use their voice now.”
In conversations with citizens and media reports, Osborne-Garth is finding that the push for removal comes from grass roots organizations. State and local governments also moved to pre-emptively remove monuments that were damaged, attacked or “don’t align with their current goals,” she found.
Osborne-Garth plans to interview more people about their experiences with monument removal with the help of the Institutional Access grant. “
Regarding removals, Osborne-Garth remarked, “it can go both ways in creating anger at wanting it removed but also the anger of the people who want it to stay . In many ways it is a race story as much as political story and not everyone wants to see it that way.”