Years of debate
A Confederate monument was taken down in Jacksonville, Fla., on Wednesday, after an order by the city’s mayor ended years of debate, as officials around the United States reckon with memorials on public property that commemorate the Confederacy.
Donna Deegan, the Democratic mayor of Jacksonville, ordered the removal of two statues that were part of the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” monument in Springfield Park.
Does Jacksonville need large heavy three-dimensional tributes to the women of the slave-owning Confedracy?
Ms. Deegan said in a statement on Wednesday that the monument had been erected as part of a campaign to promote discriminatory Jim Crow laws and intimidate Black people.
A campaign that lasted a century and more.
The memorial was commissioned by the Florida division of the United Confederate Veterans, a national organization that promoted the “lost cause” myth that the Civil War was a noble fight for states’ rights.
The statues were erected in 1915, a year after the United Confederate Veterans held an annual reunion in Jacksonville that was attended by about 8,000 former soldiers. Five months after the reunion, the city renamed the park Confederate Park. It was renamed Springfield Park in 2020.
1915. Why 1915? The premiere of The Birth of a Nation was on February 8 that year. Coincidence? Probably not.
Since 2020, hundreds of Confederate memorials have been renamed or removed from federal, state and municipal land. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for the removal of a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.
The removal of the Jacksonville memorial has attracted criticism from conservatives, including Dean Black, a Florida State representative, who filed legislation to block cities in the state from removing Confederate and other historical memorials.
I wonder why Germany isn’t full of memorials to the Third Reich. Italy has thousands of statues of Mussolini, right?
According to Google, Italy has about 21,000 gas stations. That’s good enough for me.
Well the Soviets and the Americans wouldn’t let them build memorials to the Third Reich, whereas what Sherman started was thwarted by Johnson and later softies… If we’d hanged every Confederate terrorist above the rank of sergeant and divided up the plantations you wouldn’t have ever had Trumpism…
Institutional slavery would have eventually been eliminated in the South regardless — this trend is observable in how the Western world developed. The Southerners who were opposed to slavery in the South is well documented — not all of them were pro-slavery, slave owning racists, or Confederate officers. Yes of course the war was fought to preserve the right to own slaves, but the issue of state autonomy from the federal government was also a major factor. The people of the Southern states wanted to preserve the right to decide for themselves.
Slavery in the US was also not confined to the Southern states, many people in the Northern colonies also participated. It was systematically outlawed in the North, state by state.
https://www.history.com/news/deeper-roots-of-northern-slavery-unearthed#
I’m not convinced that the roots of Trumpism can be reliably located in the antebellum South. I know it’s an easy division to make, North vs. South, but it’s not as crisp and clear as the Mason-Dixon line.
Tell Emmett Till that. Tell James Chaney that.
I wasn’t attempting to defend racism or slavery in the South, it was horrific by all accounts. I’m not sure why you would read it that way. I do think Trump is a racist, but I also think he’s a misogynist and a few other things as well, and I don’t think his appeal to the MAGA deplorables cleanly boils down to the savagery of the antebellum South. You know where I’ve seen racism? Just about everywhere.