Edith D. Pope

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Edith Drake Pope (1869–1947) was an American editor who supported the Confederate cause. She was the second editor of the Confederate Veteran, a magazine about Civil War veterans, from 1914 to 1932. She also led the Nashville No. 1 chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) from 1927 to 1930.

Pope was born in 1869 in Williamson County, Tennessee, into a family that had owned slaves. Her father, William Campbell Pope, fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. She had five siblings and graduated from the Tennessee Female College in Franklin in 1888. She began her career as secretary to Sumner Archibald Cunningham, the founder and editor of Confederate Veteran. After Cunningham died in 1913, Pope became editor and held the job until 1932. In 1927, her magazine corrected a false claim that he was a body servant to General Robert E. Lee.

She helped promote Confederate monuments and memory, including the Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument in Richmond and the Tennessee Confederate Women’s Monument in Nashville, and she contributed to Confederate Memorial Hall at Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University), ensuring a course on Southern history was taught. She was a member of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, which started the Museum of the Confederacy (now part of the American Civil War Museum).

Pope supported the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws. She also backed ideas to move African Americans to Africa and was nostalgic for parts of the American Colonization Society. She lived in Nashville near Centennial Park and Vanderbilt University. Edith Drake Pope died on January 27, 1947, in Burwood, Tennessee.