Confederate monument controversy roils Jacksonville City Council meeting

Should Jacksonville remove its Confederate monuments?

It was the hot-button question that animated public comment at a Jacksonville City Council meeting Tuesday night.

The monument debate, saved for the main event of the evening, roiled Council for hours.

Though Council President Anna Brosche walked back her proposal to remove the monuments, in light of “alternative suggestions,” those on both sides of the issue functioned as if the choice was between taking down the monuments and keeping them intact and in place.

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The first of 123 speaker cards on Confederate monuments was heard shortly after 8 p.m.

The discourse started off with heat, with Council leadership struggling to maintain order in the room.

The first speaker wanted monuments gone: “if you do not change, the same thing that happened in Charlottesville will happen here.”

Soon after, local Confederacy enthusiast Seber Newsome III produced a poll in favor of retaining these monuments, saying that voters also wanted Brosche out of office.

“The people! Let us vote,” Newsome said, saying opponents were “communists … Antifa … Black Lives Matter.”

Councilwoman Katrina Brown noted that some of the feedback, especially that with scatological racial slurs, was offensive.

Newsome was incredulous. He had to be talked down before relinquishing the mike.

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Much of the discussion came down to history, with proponents of statue removal saying that Confederate history could be gleaned from books, and with opponents saying history itself has been eliminated from the public discourse.

Proponents of removal painted the statues as symbols of oppression; opponents noted that slavery was not just a southern thing, and those being memorialized were simply soldiers.

But just as discussion settled down, a speaker heated it up again — animating these tensions.

One speaker — a 62-year-old Jacksonville native — noted that “Jacksonville is a racist town,” but the “monuments mean a lot to” him because his ancestors fought in the wars.

“People didn’t have a lot of money. So they spent their money buying people to do work for them. They were ignorant … but this has got to quit. We’re going to see another state’s war if this doesn’t quit.”

Decorum broke down after that, with gasps from the crowd, and a speaker refusing to submit his address, as his house had already been bombed twice.

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Order resumed, despite a speaker equating monument defenders to Nazis, calling the cenotaphs “cheaply made McMonuments.”

Then a memorial defender, a female veteran with a quavering voice, illustrating the “slippery slope” by saying that the Springfield neighborhood makes her feel unsafe, so maybe it should be burned down.

Then, Connell Crooms spoke up against the monuments and new cops, passionately making the linkage between the monuments and white supremacy.

Crooms, who was one of five people arrested at a protest in Hemming Park this year after the interference in the action by a counter-protester named Gary Snow, was not the only passionate speaker.

Sydney Eastman noted the unprecedented police presence outside as proof of the passion on the issue, noting that the statues were little more than Jim Crow props.

“This oppressive garbage has no place in our public spaces,” Eastman said.

Eastman mentioned to us that she is being doxxed by the alt-right.

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Another speaker, who opposed the “indoctrination factories” of public schools, noted that women and blacks should be grateful for Confederate monuments.

An otherwise impassive African-American police officer briefly registered a “can you believe this $h!t” expression on his face.

Soon after that, Isaiah Rumlin — head of the local NAACP — weighed in in support of the removal of all Confederate monuments from public property, to put them in museums.

“Florida ranks second,” Rumlin said, “in the country in hate groups.”

Rumlin equated monument defenders with “evil forces,” intent on sowing discord and disorder.

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“We do not have a monument to Oklahoma City. We do not have a monument to the Unabomber … and we should not have a monument to Confederate soldiers or the Confederacy that tried to break down the United States.”

These words: from a speaker who had multiple ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and in the American Revolution (on the winning side in that case).

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This debate in Jacksonville is not dissimilar to that in other cities. Pitched, heated discourse — polemics intended to obliterate the other side, because the other side cannot be convinced.

In this sense, America still reaps its bitter harvest: of slavery, of Jim Crow, of “the city’s horrible legacy of white supremacy,” as Ben Frazier of the Northside Coalition asserted.

“Do you stand for one Jacksonville or not? Or do you stand for the Confederacy and hypocrisy? I suggest to you … a compromise. Let’s make Jacksonville the city that’s too busy to hate.”

One speaker, an African-American garbageman, noted that Jacksonville is not in fact too busy to hate.

He noted that he was accosted by four self-identified white supremacists, who menaced him on Monday as a reaction to Charlottesville.

For those discussing heritage, those arguments go in one ear and out the other. As more than one speaker noted, any discussion of removing these cenotaphs is nothing short of caving to perfidious Communist influence.

For those who equate the lionization of Confederates with a tapestry of oppression and dehumanization, those arguments are every bit as weighty as the physical statues themselves — depictions of warriors defending a doomed cause, yet a cause that people cling to for identity and self-definition.

And for Council President Brosche, who took a strong position and received a week of threats for her trouble, this is an issue — a moment — that could make or break her presidency.

Brosche is realistic about the schism in the community on this issue, as evidenced by her cautious approach.

“I’m not sure that we’ll ever reach consensus,” Brosche said after the meeting on the monument issue.

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Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry, meanwhile, said Wednesday that removal of the monuments is “not a priority” for his administration, even as “dark days in history ought to be acknowledged.”

Curry also noted a public safety concern, saying that there was “chatter” last week from Confederate enthusiasts/white nationalists that concerned the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

That said, Curry added that “last night the Sheriff did a good job” maintaining order in an often-fractious room.