Next battle: The Confederate monument bill that supposedly isn't about Confederate monuments
The statue is gone from Springfield Park, tucked away in storage.
End of story? Time to move onto 21st-century concerns? Hardly. In Florida, in 2024, we just enter the 164th year of the Civil War.
The Florida legislative session opens Tuesday. One of the bills that lawmakers will consider comes from Jacksonville’s Dean Black — HB395, the “Historical Monuments and Memorials Protection Act.”
His bill says that “any official, agent, or member of a local government who directs, permits, facilitates, or votes to remove or destroy a monument or memorial is subject to a civil penalty of up to $5,000, or the actual cost of the removal and replacement of the monument or memorial, including repairs …”
It would allow the Florida governor to remove officials from office, and for the state to withhold cultural funding from cities that don’t put monuments back up.
And while the bill, which was filed in November, wouldn’t take effect until July 1 — six months after Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan had a Confederate statue removed from Springfield Park — if this becomes Florida law, it will have a fairly remarkable piece to it.
It will be retroactive, going back 7 years — applying to “any monuments or memorials that have been removed, damaged or destroyed on or after January 1, 2017.”
This alone — saying something done years ago violated a law that didn’t exist at the time — will undoubtedly lead to legal challenges. But Black is ready to charge ahead.
He says this isn’t just about Confederate monuments. In fact, he and co-sponsors have bristled about headlines that call it a Confederate monument bill, saying it’s about all history and all memorials.
If this is the case, if this really is about all history and all memorials, and if we’re really going to do this retroactively, constitutional issues be damned, why stop at going back 7 years?
If we're going to go back in time ...
In the 179 years since Florida became a state, officials have destroyed all kinds of memorials, changed all kinds of names, and erased all kinds of history. In some instances, they’ve attempted to erase parts of history with monuments.
That was the case with many of the monuments that went up 50 years after the end of the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era. Some of those who put them up quite openly and publicly professed their belief in white supremacy, saying in speeches and editorials at the time that the negro should be grateful for slavery, and lamenting the loss of the glorious “Old South.”
That is some of the context of monuments to Southern women that went up circa 1915 (against the wishes of some prominent Southern women who felt the money could be used for better things). But in 2024, when we have presidential candidates who struggle to even say the Civil War was about slavery, it’s hard to fathom faithfully and honestly “contextualizing” what led to a monument in Jacksonville.
Ironic fact about that monument: The men who proposed it, pledging to raise money for it, fell short of their goal, leaving the state Legislature to have taxpayers pick up the balance.
Another fun fact: The woman who posed for it was a Yankee who in 1915 made history by appearing nude in a motion picture.
But that’s veering back into Confederate monuments. And, again, Rep. Black insists his bill absolutely is not a Confederate monument bill.
Some cynics have rolled their eyes at this. But let’s take him at his word. Let’s think in terms of all monuments and all history.
Florida full of bulldozed memorials
In Florida, we’ve paved over all kinds of memorials to put up roads, subdivisions, condos and strip malls.
Some of the most sacred monuments, put here by people who lived here for thousands of years before European settlers, weren’t statues made of bronze. They were burial mounds. And in the last century, there are plenty of examples of Florida cities and officials bulldozing mounds in the name of progress.
There are other more recent gravesites. During the Civil War, nearly half of Florida’s 140,000 residents were enslaved African-Americans. After they were freed, they didn’t build statues in town squares. But they did build neighborhoods, churches, businesses and cemeteries — many of which have been erased, along with their history.
When “60 Minutes” recently did a piece focused on hundreds of gravesites in Clearwater, now covered with concrete, the headline said: “This is not an isolated story.”
To this day, battles are being fought to preserve and protect African-American cemeteries from being, to borrow the words of a certain bill, damaged and destroyed.
There are other examples that raise the question: Will the current state Legislature fight to protect all history? Because if not, and if this bill that isn’t about Confederate monuments only ends up being used for Confederate monuments, one might draw some conclusions.
And speaking of all monuments, how about football ones? Remember when the University of Florida removed a granite plaque honoring Aaron Hernandez? Sure, it came down because the former player was charged with murder. But people keep saying monuments aren’t just about remembering the good parts of history, that we keep them up to remember the bad parts, too. So maybe UF needs to be told to bring back the Aaron Hernandez plaque?
What's in a name?
One of the questions frequently raised now: What’s next? Are we going to change the name of Jacksonville?
I wouldn’t advocate for that. But I would advocate for having every high school student in Jacksonville read Andrew Jackson’s speech to Congress about Indian Removal, study that part of American history and think about how we have changed plenty of names over time — from the St. Johns River (once known as Welaka, the Seminole-Creek’s river of lakes) to the park where a statue of a 20th-century Yankee woman, posing as a 19th-century Southern matriarch, used to sit.
When Confederate Park became Springfield Park in 2020, some said it was a travesty, that we shouldn’t be changing park names. But, in this case, we already had. It originally was known as Dignan Park — a tribute to Peter A. Dignan, a Springfield resident and the city’s first director of public works.
In 1903, a story in the Jacksonville Journal ended with this sentence: “He is personally one of the most popular citizens in Jacksonville, and his work on the Board of Public Works will not soon be forgotten by the people of this city.”
His work was soon forgotten.
The stories of the day show that some had a problem with Dignan, particularly his faith. He was a Catholic, and as such was publicly vilified by an anti-Catholic group called Guardians of Liberty. And in 1914, months after thousands of Confederate veterans reunion gathered in Dignan Park, a city councilman proposed renaming it Confederate Park.
“Dixie,” a weekly newspaper, included quite the opinion of that idea.
“Mr. Dignan more than any man in Jacksonville is responsible for the extension of the park system,” it said. “It is deplorable that the city council, which costs taxpayers $180.00 every time it meets, must waste its time in silly, foolish propositions of this kind.”
The city did go ahead and change the name to Confederate Park, then a year later — the same year “The Birth of the Nation” was playing in movie theaters, glorifying and fueling the violent revival of the KKK, sparking a wave of Confederate monuments 50 years after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox — put a statue in the park, not far from a neighborhood where the descendants of free slaves had settled.
Dean Black says his bill is about much more than making people pay for using private money to take down that statue. It’s about preserving “accurate history” and making people pay for all the monuments that have come down in the past.
Well, the recent past. And not really all the monuments, or all the history.
It’s 2024. And in Florida, the post-Civil War rages on.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
(904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida bill that supposedly isn't about Confederate monuments
