Tamara Lush
After Confederate monument was taken down in Bradenton, a group that wants to preserve such monuments called Tuesday for it to be repaired and restored to its former place on the courthouse lawn.
Save Southern Heritage and other groups held a news conference in front of the Manatee County Courthouse to demand that the local government put the 93-year-old monument back on its pedestal in downtown Bradenton.
The county commission removed the monument Aug. 24, at a cost of $12,500, following an Aug. 21 protest that drew several hundred people who demanded its removal. The obelisk engraved with the names of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee is in storage until county leaders can figure out where to put it; some have recommended a local cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried. The monument was damaged during the removal.
This is the latest skirmish over Confederate monuments in Florida.
Orlando removed a monument and St. Petersburg removed a marker. In Jacksonville recently, people packed City Hall to discuss Confederate monuments during a public comment portion of a meeting. In Hollywood, a city in South Florida, leaders will vote Wednesday on whether to rename streets named after Confederate generals, including one named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Critics have called such monuments symbols of white supremacy and racism. Supporters of such monuments say they are reminders of Southern heritage.
“History can’t be broken, divided or reversed to accommodate anyone’s political agenda,” said Bradenton resident Barbara Hemingway. She’s with the group America First – Team Manatee, a pro-President Donald Trump group that has come out against moving such monuments, as has Trump himself.
Hemingway spoke during Tuesday’s news conference and said that the opposition groups – Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and “anarchists” – are out-of-towners trying to “bully” the community.
The group called for the resignation of county leaders who voted to remove the monument, and said all such monuments in Florida should be protected.
Southern Heritage has also been involved in fighting the removal of a statue in downtown Tampa. Commissioners there ruled that the Confederate monument in front of that county’s courthouse would be moved if the community raised $140,000 to help defray the cost. Within 24 hours and aided by the city’s three professional sports teams, the community did, and the monument is set to be relocated in coming weeks to a private cemetery.
Save Southern Heritage drew criticism recently for sending out a “report” and spreadsheet that included the personal information, photos and “affiliation” of more than 100 people who spoke in favor of moving the monument at the July 19 County Commission meeting.
The Tampa Bay Times reports the listed affiliations include specific groups or movements, such as “Democrat” and “Black Lives Matter,” and more general descriptions such as “anti-Trump,” ”LGBT,” ”Muslim” and “resentful black man.” One man was described as being “anti-law enforcement.”
Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
One comment
Christopher M. Kennard
August 29, 2017 at 11:05 pm
Florida Civil Rights Restoration Campaign Coalition
Floridians For Freedom, (FFF) is a non-partisan citizen’s advocacy campaign to approve the legalization of cannabis and end the 80-year prohibition of “marijuana” in the State of Florida. We would like to further the goal of increasing direct participatory democracy activities by voters in Florida, as the best means to elect good honest candidates to public office and to create good law.
We believe legalization of cannabis is both a unifying issue and a good rallying point to achieve higher voter turnout in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Cannabis touches many places within many different kinds of places. We are extending our reach out to voters to “touch” as many as we can.
The state constitutional ballot initiative process is how citizens can bypass errant or unresponsive politicians to create, approve and enact Florida state laws. The collection of petitions and the educational opportunities such direct contact with voters affords, provides us the opportunity to engage in productive community organizing efforts around issues enjoying broad voter support.
Like the legalization of cannabis, a growing movement within towns and cities, from county to county, day by day, week by week, one month to the next over the next year, or the next three years, if necessary . . . but we will be successful in the end.
A focus on legalizing cannabis while enlightening voters as to the underlying reasons and causes for the 80 year prohibition of cannabis may serve a better purpose and lead to more productive outcomes on related matters than protesting the continued presence of Confederate statues and monuments to force local authorities to move them to a museum or other appropriate locations.
The issue of legalizing cannabis brings far more people together, conversing with one another , than does a divisive issue like moving statues. It has a far more direct and immediate effect of changing people’s lives for the better and more. It could stop people from being arrested.
Cannabis arrests account for half of all drug arrests in Florida, and increases the high number of felons that Florida already has; one in ten people are felons in Florida who cannot vote for life. A far greater number of Black residents are arrested for cannabis violations than any other group; this must come to an end.
The Floridians For Freedom filed this ballot initiative petition, called RIGHT OF ADULTS TO CANNABIS (RAC) [Ballot Initiative # 15-20] with the State of Florida. Go to FloridiansForFreedom.com
Print out a copy to of the petition to read, and if you agree, sign one, make two more copies to give to two other registered Florida voters, then send it by mail to us.
Our proposed state constitutional law provides adults in Florida over the age of twenty-one the right to possess, use and grow their cannabis for medicinal purposes or personal use, to relax and enjoy on private property and within the safe sanctity your own home.
It stops the arrest of people before they can be convicted for cannabis related violations. Cannabis will be legal. No one can be arrested for private adult cannabis use on private property. Medicinal users can safely smoke at home.
We are citizens like many of you who no longer trust our state’s politicians to legalize cannabis, so we joined together in 2014 when the first Medical Marijuana Amendment failed and wrote our own law with the assistance of an attorney.
It is how we can conduct a people’s peaceful “political revolution” where we both change our state of Florida and influence our country by voting for good, sound, workable policies and laws under which we shall live and of which we approve.
We vote on these new laws in November of 2018 and two months later, our new RIGHT OF ADULTS TO CANNABIS law “self-actuates” to be effective on Tuesday, January 8, 2019 regarding personal use by adults in Florida to possess use and grow their own. Neither law will be delayed, derailed or denied, once Florida voters approve this new constitutional amendment law.
Print a copy from FloridiansForFreedom.com
Even if you signed one, please consider helping just a little more, and collect two more signed petitions to send in.! Now do the same with the Voting Restoration Amendment.
If you really like them, please make three copies; sign one, and pass two on to two other registered Florida voters to copy. Ask voters to sign one and pass two along to create a continuous cannabis and right to vote “daisy chain-reaction” of petitions being signed . . . a people’s peaceful path of three steps leading to a collection of a million signed petitions, drawn from every one of our 67 counties within Florida.
This would work! It is more proof that voters, themselves, can elect their own representatives on the local, state and national levels of government, and create our own laws under which we live, those laws which voters in Florida approved, without resorting to international corporate secret slush funds or any questionable mega-wealthy donor’s election campaign cash.
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