State Rep. Dean Black will try again this year to get legislation passed establishing a procedure for removing public statues and monuments.
Black has attempted for the past four years to get the bill passed but it has stalled in the legislative process. The instigation was the sneaky midnight removal of the 59-foot Confederate Statue in Hemming Plaza by Lenny Curry when he was mayor.
Curry’s action took place during the 2020 Summer of Hate, when across the nation dozens of deaths, 10,000 arrests and an estimated $2 billion in damages took place as leftists protested the death of a violent criminal who was resisting arrest.
Black’s bill would set up a process intended to prevent arbitrary decisions by a single person, prohibiting removal except in special circumstances, requiring a 10-day notice before removal and that the statue or monument be put on display somewhere else.
But local activist Blake Harper sees Black’s bill as deficient.
Harper is head of the Unity Project. He says its purpose is to preserve history, not allow it to become a narrative based on one point of view.
Hemming Plaza was named after the Confederate veteran and former city councilman who donated the land to the city. It is just south of City Hall and for more than a century it had a statue commemorating Southern soldiers who died in the Civil War.
The statue Curry removed was a symbol of reconciliation between the North and South, Harper contends.
At the dedication, Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, the nephew of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, was in the reviewing stand, with the grandson of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant — illustrating the reconciliation aspect Harper mentioned.
Process is bypassed in Black’s bill, Harper said. Jacksonville’s current law requires a Certificate of appropriateness from the historical commission.
Harper said it also means anything can be put in the place of a statue that has been removed.
“There’s no pretense to maintaining historical context,” Haper said.
Those who objected to the removal of the Hemming statue also criticized Mayor Donna Deegan, Democrat, for removing the Mothers of the Southland monument from Springfield Park, formerly known as Confederate Park.
The historical context in that case is that the park was named Confederate Park and chosen as the site for the monument after a reunion of Confederates veterans was held in the park.
Feelings also were bruised when local schools named after Confederate generals were changed. Robert E. Lee High School had many distinguished graduates.
Removing all traces of the South’s participation in the Civil War will not change the fact that war took place or the outcome. Harper’s reasonable position is that accomplishments of people of all races should be observed, and honored.
Harper notes that Hemming Plaza now is called James Weldon Johnson Park, after a noted author and song writer.
But why not add Johnson without subtracting the Confederate soldier? Both are part of history.
Monday will be a holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., a great American with black skin. He once said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
