Nate Monroe: Good riddance to Jacksonville's last major confederate monument

COMMENTARY | Under cover of darkness early Wednesday morning, and on orders from Mayor Donna Deegan, city contractors began dismantling Jacksonville's last prominent confederate monument, work that by the crisp daybreak had culminated: Finally, belatedly, blessedly, the damned deed is done.

The work was a closely guarded secret, but the intention was not: Deegan campaigned on a promise to remove the Women of the Southland statue from Springfield Park. She, of course, won that election, and what she did was make good on a campaign promise. Public opinion had turned in favor of taking it down. And years of craven inaction by the 19-member City Council did not make the issue go away, as some of its members seemed to hope. Even a series of racist murders just months ago did not move the council off its silence. There it was, a monument the council neither endorsed nor opposed, smack dab in a park surrounded by a majority-Black neighborhood. Shameful.

Let's dispense with a bit of nonsense upfront: Taking down the Women of the Southland monument was not about "erasing history," as critics of such removals often suggest. Jacksonville was not a consequential theater in the Civil War. The only battle of any significance took place an hour west in Baker County. As a port city, Jacksonville was a magnet for pro-Union merchants who were nearly successful in attaining political power just before the war, and ultimately the city spent most of it under a series of four Union occupations. The confederates valued the place so much they sacked it on their way out.

Like the other local confederate symbols that had lingered into the 21st century — monuments, but also the names of schools and parks — there was simply no historical underpinning for the presence of the Women of the Southland statue. Viewed through the lens of history, Jacksonville had no claim to high schools and parks and roads named after characters like Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest, with whom the city shared no connection. Jacksonville was, however, home to an impressive list of civil rights heroes, an actual history decades of city leaders chose to effectively erase. Only recently has Jacksonville begun to reclaim that identity.

All of Jacksonville's confederate regalia came during waves of historical revisionism that swept across the Deep South. The Women of the Southland statue was no different. It was not, as some council members amusingly tried to claim, a general tribute to women and children who suffer in war time. This was never complicated or unclear: Only gaslighting could have justified any of it.

“Symbols matter," Deegan said in a statement. "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."

Deegan's removal order was hardly the work of a tyrant, but, predictably, within a few hours of the work beginning, local Republican Party apparatchiks crowed of a "stunning abuse of power" in Deegan's unilateral move, either forgetting or deliberately omitting that Deegan's predecessor — Lenny Curry, who was not only a Republican but a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida — removed a similar monument a few years ago also under cover of darkness and without a vote from the council. Then, as now, this was about basic human decency.

Curry was never able to move the council off its collective, cowardly arse to take down the Women of the Southland monument in Springfield Park, which, because of its vast size, could not be removed cheaply enough for a unilateral mayoral decree to pass legal muster.

It's worth dwelling for a moment on the legalese Deegan engineered to take the monument down: She relied on about $187,000 in private funds provided by the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund that had been anonymously donated to 904WARD, a nonprofit that aims to end racism in the city. Not for the first time in its recent history, Jacksonville's private citizens had to step up when its political leaders failed. Fortunately, this time, they had an ally in the mayor.

"We hope this is truly the end for that hateful monstrosity in Springfield Park that glorifies the Confederacy," said Kelly Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, whose late father, Ben, was a tireless advocate for removal of these symbols but did not live to see all the work done. "When it is gone, there will be another ray of hope for a brand new day in Jacksonville."

If confederate fanboys think they can force a favorable vote on the council to reverse this work or that they can convince some hayseed judge to order Deegan to put the monument back up, then by all means try. Confederates were never good at accepting defeat anyway. But let the record show the mayor, who campaigned explicitly to do this, and who has public opinion on her side, took it down. For once I get to say this with some real conviction: That monument isn't who we are.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Nate Monroe: Good riddance to Jacksonville's last major confederate monument