As the desire for Confederate monument removal continues to gain traction, a dilemma arises: Could cities be punished by their state governments for doing so?
Robert Harris’ parents were sharecroppers who attended civil rights meetings and registered to vote. For that, their landlord plowed up their yard.
On June 29, the five-member county commission unanimously voted to remove the monument, erected sometime before 1940. Dickson Farrior, a commissioner who is white, put the motion forward. It’s a decision local governments throughout the South are increasingly trying to make even as state legislatures have simultaneously worked to forbid them from doing so.Lowndes County Commissioner Robert Harris stands near the spot where a Confederate monument once stood in Hayneville, Ala., on July 17, 2020.
A message seeking comment from the Alabama attorney general's office about the Lowndes County Commission's decision was not returned. Harris said commissioners had some conversations about fundraising if the state tries to punish the county"There haven’t been any in-depth discussions about that," he said. "But I know there may be a possibility that the fine will be raised by outside sources.
All of the obstacles were worth it, Strickland said, to remove monuments that were not reflective of Memphis, a city that is roughly 65% black. “Most have not been toppled down by protesters,” said Hillary Green, a professor at the University of Alabama who studies the Civil War, Reconstruction and 19th-century history. “The majority that are coming down are the ones in front of courthouses.”Most Confederate monuments erected before 1890 tended to be memorials to dead soldiers, erected in cemeteries.
“These monuments were about making sure the younger generation that didn’t experience the war, didn’t experience Reconstruction in the 1870s, that they never forget what their parents and grandparents fought for,” Levin said. “That the cause of white supremacy was their cause moving forward into the 20th century.”
Monument erection slowed down after the 1920s, due in part to saturation, but rose again during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. “I discount anything when they say they want to put it in a museum or a cemetery,” he said. “I discount that. If you compromise and do that, they’re going to be coming at you later to move it from that spot.”
But as a movement to confront symbols of racism sweeps the nation, efforts to remove the obelisk are starting. Bolivar Mayor Julian McTizic, who in 2017 became the city’s youngest mayor at age 30 and the first African American to hold the office, does not have a fire under his feet to call for removal. Since he took office, he has not had a resident approach him about the monument, McTizic said.
There are other reminders of the county's past on the lawn outside the courthouse. A monument to fallen law enforcement officers sits on one end. On another is a brick column dedicated to Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a white seminarian and civil rights activist killed shortly after his release from jail in 1965.
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