A.G. Gancarski
Jacksonville is putting some distance between itself and Confederate iconography, with two legislative votes to rename parks in a move to leave behind the city’s Jim Crow past lauded Wednesday by the city’s Republican Mayor.
Mayor Lenny Curry told media he was “proud of the accomplishment last night and looks forward to signing the bill.” New signage regarding the renaming of Hemming Park, he added, will be on the administration’s “priority list.”
While there have been times the Mayor and City Council have clashed, this is an example where they seem linked in the path forward.
By a vote of 18-0 on Tuesday, the Jacksonville City Council voted to rename Springfield’s Confederate Park to the less loaded “Springfield Park.”
Hours later, Council members voted 16-2 to rename Hemming Park after James Weldon Johnson, the long-term NAACP leader, author, and activist. Johnson may be best known for his composition of the iconic “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”
That 16-2 vote had totemic significance, a legislative repudiation of a legacy all too often a third-rail topic for handwringing city leaders.
Sixty years ago this month, Hemming Park, named after a Confederate Civil War veteran, was the scene for Ax Handle Saturday, one of the most brutal acts in city history.
White people, attempting to defend the prerogatives and structures of segregation, attacked Blacks who had been engaged in sit-in protests against segregation at nearby restaurants.
Even that renaming didn’t come without controversy, in the form of a push to name a plaza in the park after military veterans, which some on Council framed as an attempt to put an asterisk on a clean bill and a clean renaming process.
The veterans’ plaza proposal ultimately fell short on the floor, clearing the way for a more linear renaming, though not without objection.
Republican Danny Becton, who was down on the bill, said the renaming could represent a “slippery slope.” And his Republican colleague Randy White, who also voted no, lamented “when this whole world starting turning upside down and we started changing things.”
What will soon be the former Hemming Park has been the stage for controversies in the city, past, present, and likely future, despite the change in name.
One controversial element in the space was resolved earlier this year.
A Confederate monument that was in the park for decades was removed in June under the cover of night by Mayor Lenny Curry, a move that seemed inconceivable until protesters flooded the streets in support of Black Lives Matter and real reform of the relationship between law enforcement and citizens.
“I’ve heard people … I’ve evolved,” the Mayor said at the time. “The others in the city will be removed as well.”
That removal has been slow thus far.
For Jacksonville, still struggling with institutional racism and structures that flourished under it, these are nonetheless symbolic moves that show progress — both in the city and nationally — is incremental up to the point where it all seems to happen at once.
Whether these names lead to actual changes in decades of discriminatory policies is still a very open question, though.
6 comments
You Ignorant fools
August 12, 2020 at 9:23 am
This does nothing but to divide Jacksonville based on race even more. Bad enough that the cowards bow down to black lives matter, a terrorist organization, but to make things even worse name the park after another individual. So, lets get rid of a name of a white man and replace with a black man, bad move. Lets see, since the confederate statue in Hemming Park has come down, the murder rate has gone up,,, I thought that would solve all the problems in Jacksonville, wrong, it solves absolutely nothing, all it does is to divert attention away , temporarily from the disfunctional black family, that is the real problem. 99% of all the murders are committed by blacks in Jacksonville, why dont you Ben Frazier and Wells Todd, concentrate on that problem, but you are to stupid, and want to say oh, the Confederacy is causing all of our problems, 155 years after the War, you stupid ignorant fools. The black community is pathetic. And those weak, white guilt filled politicians on the city council are just as bad as the black community.
Ocean Joe
August 12, 2020 at 9:34 am
Hey, check the calendar…it’s not 1958 anymore.
Sonja Fitch
August 12, 2020 at 9:55 am
This has been a long time in coming! Sometimes these acts seem small! But “one small step” is the beginning ! When Jacksonville becomes Cowford will be the big step’
rude awakening
August 12, 2020 at 12:41 pm
You are right , it is 2020, and black lives matter and antifa, have made race relations the worse they have been since 1958. white people are coming together, finally, and standing up, all of you are in for a rude awakening, we out number you and we are mad!!!!!!!
Mary Stevens
August 12, 2020 at 1:49 pm
What a stupid remark.
FloridaHistorianIII
August 12, 2020 at 2:49 pm
Hemming donated that park. Now the city is biting the hand that fed it.
Rampant Confederophobia does no one any good.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child.
Make no mistake, Jacksonville is being very childish in this whole matter.
BLM is just a bunch of Big Loud Mouths.
PS. Would have been better to name it Dr. Alexander Darnes Park. At least he and General Kirby Smith were friends and respected each other; and he was a mentor to J.W.Johnson – a much better “high road” connection that would have been less aggressively hostile, and a transitional link between generations with at least a nod to the origins of Hemming Park and its monument.
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