The Southern belle is a warped form of 19th century fact that originated as part of the lost cause narrative. 

(The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the American Civil War(1861–1865) that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and social uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the "Old South" and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process. For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of slavery. Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South. The Lost Cause has lost much of its academic support but continues to be an important part of how the Civil War is commemorated in the South and remembered in American popular culture.)

This was part of a much larger class and racial hierarchy that maintained a white hegemony in the years following Reconstruction and justifying the calculated terrorization of black citizens. However, the Southern belle has been kept alive in polite society — by allowing the brutality that created her to be disguised in exaggerated femininity.

She is a wife, a daughter, a mother, but never an individual of her own. It is easy to forget how easily racism and sexism are mixed — how the obsessive glorification of southern white women’s beauty and chastity was used to justify the lynchings of black men and sexual abuse of black women for centuries. Even into the modern era, the ways in which society so often views black men as inherently criminal and black women as inherently sexual originate with these Antebellum ideas. If we are to demand that statues come down, that flags be retired, that the Confederacy be remembered as the violent act of treason that it was, then we must include the Southern belle in that attack. 

Often, defenders of the Southern belle claim that to erase her is to erase Southern history. However, there is a chasm between understanding history and romanticizing it. When we understand our history, we see it as multi-faceted — we learn of the horrific conditions of the enslaved and the myriad of ways they resisted their dehumanization. We learn of the exorbitant wealth and power of slave owners and the ways they enacted a reign of terror upon black people in a post-Reconstruction south.

In learning this, we also understand how the Southern belle was reimagined in the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan reemerged and began erecting most of the Confederate statues at the center of modern controversies. Fabricated history creates a romanticism we must fight — a story that leads us to believe that the Civil War was fought for state rights, that the Confederacy was noble, that Southern women are best remembered as passive, doll-like creatures emblematic of a more chivalrous, righteous time. Such a narrative is deeply harmful, and deeply false. 

A 50 year tradition in the Cape Fear is coming to an end. The Cape Fear Garden Club has decided to end the Azalea Belles. However, there is a growing number of residents in wilmington that want to keep this warped southern tradition.

 We are asking if you support the band of the southern Belles to please sign this petition.

Thank you