The City Council meeting on May 7 was the last straw for Camille Bennett.
Three months later, that frustration materialized into a 10-by-22-foot billboard along the main boulevard running through Florence, a scenic city along the Tennessee River in the northwest corner of Alabama. The billboard depicts two council members with a message to the city’s 40,000 residents: “Florence deserves better.”
A billboard along Florence Boulevard in Florence, Alabama, pictures two City Council members who voted against a historical marker that would denounce the Confederate statue outside the Lauderdale County Courthouse. (Credit: Lee Murkey/Project Say Something)
Bennett, the founder and executive director of Project Say Something (PSS) – a grassroots organization known for confronting racial injustice in the state’s Shoals region – felt that the faith she had put in the city’s six-member council to do the right thing had been misplaced.
That “thing” concerned a 20-foot-tall, 30,000-pound white marble statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Lauderdale County Courthouse.
“On public property,” she emphasized. “It’s been three years of asking” the council to do something.
Bennett and her supporters see the statue as a stain on the city, an offensive and racist symbol emblematic of the persevering myth of the Lost Cause – a monument that portrays the Confederate army as defeated heroes and antebellum slavery as benevolent and benign.
Like hundreds of others across the Deep South, the monument was erected during the rise of the Jim Crow era, when Southern states were enacting laws to legalize segregation and disenfranchise Black people after decades of progress following the Civil War. Dedicated in 1903, it was moved to the county’s current courthouse in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, another period that prompted a surge in Confederate iconography.
PSS is one of several groups that have received grant funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. The grants support grassroots advocates who are working to promote the removal, relocation and/or contextualization of Confederate monuments and other iconography in their communities.
“This false Lost Cause narrative comes from white supremacists that wanted to win in American ideas what they lost on the battlefield,” said Rivka Maizlish, a historian and senior research analyst for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “Confederate leaders stated explicitly and constantly that they were fighting for slavery and white supremacy. Being able to have a real conversation about that past is incredibly important.”
Compromising on history
Bennett has certainly started a conversation in the community. Since 2020, bolstered by nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer, PSS has called attention to the statue’s history. Bennett cites its 1903 dedication ceremony, during which the keynote speaker denotes an “impassable barrier” between the “countrymen” of the North and South: “They look upon a Negro as a white man with a colored skin and believe education to be the one thing needful. We of the south know better. … [N]owhere here is he accorded social equality.”
At first, PSS urged city officials to remove the statue. In July 2020, the council voted unanimously to relocate it to a cemetery. But council members couldn’t agree on which political entity bore responsibility. Was it the city, to which it was donated? Or the county, on whose property it stood? When the city later asked the county for permission to move the statue, another problem arose. In 2017, the Alabama Legislature had passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which prohibits the removal or renaming of monuments or historically significant buildings more than 40 years old without state approval.
It’s a tactic that Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and other Southern states detailed in the SPLC’s Whose Heritage? report have employed since 2015. That year, a white supremacist gunman murdered nine worshippers at a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, prompting a nationwide movement to remove Confederate statues and other symbols from public property.
Despite the hurdles, Bennett had felt hopeful this past May.
In 2021, PSS and the city had come to a compromise. They would contextualize the memorial by installing a historical marker nearby that would give the public a better understanding of what wasn’t visible: the injustices suffered by enslaved Black people at the hands of Southerners seeking to preserve slavery.
A historical marker committee was formed, comprising Council Member Blake Edwards, then-Council President William Jordan and, later, Kaytrina Simmons, the council’s only Black member, along with Bennett and another PSS member. A city historian later joined and then left the group. Bennett said Mayor Andy Betterton, who had campaigned in 2020 on a promise to relocate the memorial, attended some meetings, as well as Council Member Michelle Rupe Eubanks. Council Member Jimmy Oliver said he attended several meetings when the group was first formed but attended only one this year– the very last meeting preceding the vote.
Back and forth
For several months, the committee proposed and deliberated the language of the marker. PSS suggested the inclusion of the phrase “the city of Florence denounces racism,” but somehow, Bennett said, that seemed controversial. There were calls to “soften” the wording in various drafts, with one council member taking issue, because his own relative, a great-great-uncle, had served in the Confederate army.
Bennett said that time and time again, council members would agree on a draft, then ask for more changes, further delaying the goal of putting the marker up for a vote.
But at the final meeting on April 30, PSS made further concessions to change the marker’s language and the group reached a consensus, Bennett said.
Yet, at a public meeting on May 7, council members Jordan, Oliver and Edwards voted against approving the marker. One council member, Bill Griffin, was not present for the vote. Only members Rupe Eubanks and Simmons voted in its favor.
“If you truly felt like that and we are sitting there all these months and continuing to work on this – if you were not satisfied with it, why didn’t you say so then?” Simmons said in an interview with the SPLC after the vote.
When reached for comment about his decision to vote no, Oliver said his choice was to avoid enflaming what was already a “divisive” issue.
“My vote of no was not a vote against the marker but a vote against the words on the marker which were forcing the citizens of Florence to accept and agree with the opinion of PSS regarding the Confederate statue,” he said. “I could not in good conscience vote to have something etched into a marker that wasn’t felt accurate by some citizens of Florence. There are those that agree with the opinions of PSS but there are those that see the statue as nothing more than a memorial to fallen soldiers and family members, some who may have been forced to fight in a war that they didn’t agree with and lost their lives. There’s another group of people that have no opinion at all about the statue. I cannot agree to force citizens to pay for and maintain a marker they don’t agree with.
“I will certainly entertain the city erecting a historical marker, such as we have throughout our city, somewhere acknowledging the history behind the statue and a denouncing of any form of racism and written by our city historian,” he said.
‘I’m hopeful’
More than 2,000 Confederate memorials, statues and other symbols can be found today across the U.S. Most are not what people would typically describe as monuments at all. More than 700 are the names of roadways, according to the Whose Heritage? report. About 200 are school names. More than 30 are parks, according to the report. Despite the different forms they take, most were put in place after Reconstruction and during Jim Crow with a purpose: to reaffirm a belief in white supremacy and to intimidate Black people.
Since the Charleston church massacre, activists have successfully renamed, relocated and removed 435 Confederate memorials, flags and other symbols across the country.
But many determined activists like Bennett continue to meet staunch resistance, demonstrating the lingering legacy of the Lost Cause myth and all it stands for.
This past spring, in fact, school board members in Shenandoah, Virginia, voted 5-1 to restore the names of two schools that previously honored Confederate veterans – just four years after those names were removed.
Bennett insists that PSS will not give up its efforts to rid Florence of this vestige of white supremacy. With the installation of the billboard at one of the community’s busiest throughfares, she has decided to do what she knows best: engage the community. She tried to get things done by working with the City Council. Now, it is time for a grassroots community action approach to build public pressure and get the statue back on the City Council’s agenda.
After the May vote, “the community was livid,” Bennett said.
“We were getting ‘blown up’ by people reaching out to us. They want to be involved. I’m hopeful. You can’t be an activist and not be hopeful. I don’t know where this road is going to take us, but I know that our fight around the monument has been a vehicle for exposing the racism that we live with within this community. And that has only made us stronger.”
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