Confederate monument taken down in Jacksonville

A Confederate monument was taken down in Jacksonville, Fla., Wednesday following an order from the city’s mayor, as public officials around the U.S. continue to grapple with what to do with statutes commemorating the Confederacy.

Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan (D) ordered the removal of two statues from Springfield Park. Both were part of the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” monument, according to The New York Times.

“Symbols matter. They tell the world what we stand for and what we aspire to be. By removing the confederate monument from Springfield Park, we signal a belief in our shared humanity. That we are all created equal. The same flesh and bones. The same blood running through our veins. The same heart and soul,” Deegan said in a Wednesday statement.

“This is not in any way an attempt to erase history but to show that we’ve learned from it. That when we know better, we do better by and for each other. My prayer today is for our beautiful city to continue embracing unity and bending the arc of history towards justice,” she continued. “Let’s keep lifting as we climb.”

Deegan said the monument, which was put up in 1915, was part of an effort to intimidate Black people and promote discriminatory Jim Crow laws.

The statues were commissioned by Florida’s division of United Confederate Veterans, an organization headquartered in New Orleans that promoted the “lost cause” myth that the Civil War was a fight for states’ rights. A year before the monument was erected, nearly 8,000 former soldiers gathered in Jacksonville for an annual reunion held by the group.

On Wednesday morning, a construction crew used a crane to remove a statue of a woman wearing robes and bearing a Confederate flag from the roof of the gazebo where the monument was located, as well as a statue of a woman reading to two kids from the gazebo’s pedestal.

Discourse around the statues’ future began in 2020, after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and the ensuing protests against racial injustice and police brutality sparked renewed scrutiny of Confederate memorials across the country.

That summer, Jacksonville removed a statue of a Confederate soldier from the city’s Hemming Park ahead of a planned demonstration, and then-Mayor Lenny Curry (R) pledged that the other Confederate memorials in the city would also be taken down.

“The Confederate monument is gone. And the others in this city will be removed as well,” Curry said. “We hear your voices. We have heard your voices.”

Hundreds of other memorials to the Confederacy have since been removed or renamed nationwide.

The removal of the statues on Wednesday drew criticism from conservatives. Florida state Rep. Dean Black (R) characterized the move as a “stunning abuse of power” and a “cowardly act” by Deegan in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and called on the city council to seek “immediate” accountability.

“This action, undertaken in the middle of the night, during the holidays, without consultation of city leaders or a vote by the council, is another in a long line of woke Democrats obsession with Cancel Culture and tearing down history,” Black wrote in a post on Wednesday.

“Choosing to erase our history is not ‘brave’ – it is a cowardly act done by a lawless Mayor who hides under the cover of night!” he continued “We call on the City Council to seek immediate accountability – the people of Jacksonville expect no less.”

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