In the aftermath of the violence committed by Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville and the President’s refusal to unequivocally condemn those responsible, there has been a renewed call to remove Confederate statues and other monuments across the United States. However, even now, the act to rid the country of these active reminders of ongoing oppression and bigotry, almost all of which were built long after the American Civil War as a way of intimidating black citizens who fought for equal rights, is being fought tooth and nail by white supremacists who wear titles such as Governor instead of polo shirts.
On August 16th 2017, the Alabama Attorney General announced he was suing the city of Birmingham for covering a Confederate monument in Birmingham’s very own park. A state law “protecting memorials,” passed only in May of this same year, is cited as the reason for the lawsuit. Proponents of this only very recently enacted law claim it’s about protecting state history “whether honorable or shameful,” but one of many pieces of history these people seem ignorant of is that Birmingham was founded in 1871, six years after the American Civil War ended.
There’s no history of the Confederacy itself in Birmingham, Alabama because there was no Birmingham during the civil war. Instead, there’s only a history of already defeated Confederates trying to leave their mark wherever they went, much like wandering old dogs that were never neutered. The base of this monument to “Confederate Soldiers & Sailors” was actually created for the 1894 Reunion of United Confederate Veterans, the fourth of what would be over sixty reunions in which former members of this defeated army would attend pity parades and marches where they were showered with affection from the white masses.
But as Birmingham didn’t even exist during the Confederacy, these Confederates marched on and forgot all about this relatively young city they had no connection to beyond being in the same state that served as the heart of the Confederacy. The base of the monument built for the reunion sat there for years as people occasionally debated what to do with it. In 1898, after the Spanish American War, a surplus artillery piece was placed on top of it, likely with all the importance of finding something decorative to set on an empty shelf you’ve noticed one too many times.
But while the veterans who fought and lost a war to preserve and expand the barbaric institution of slavery continued their search for more and more applause, other sects of the Confederacy remained hard at work rewriting history in the decades after the end of the American Civil War. On May 29th 1896, a mere eleven days after the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson decreed segregation would remain intact under the false promise of ‘separate but equal’, a chapter of The United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization responsible for 93% of the Confederate monuments built in the south, convened to decide how to complete the Confederate monument that had largely been a forgotten slab of rock sitting in a park in a still growing Birmingham at the time.
Money for the monument was raised in 1900, and the monument was completed on April 27, 1905, just one of a great many the ladies of the UDC had commissioned during the years of 1903 to 1912 for the fallen soldiers who fought to keep slavery, something that only felt worth memorializing a little over a week after the Supreme Court declared that black men and women would be given ‘separate but equal’ treatment to whites. I guess they slowed down in 1913 once Woodrow Wilson became President, whom Linn Park was renamed after for a short time. Even then, this monument was little more than a vanity project for Confederate apologists, and its movement or repositioning was suggested more than once in various city planning proposals in the following decades.
But in 2015, after the mass murder of nine black men and women at the hands of a white supremacist in their own church in Charleston, South Carolina, demands from activists caused the Birmingham Parks & Recreation Board to vote to relocate the monument. Less than two months later, “Save our South” filed a lawsuit to prevent the city from moving the monument. It was dismissed by a judge. In 2016, the Alabama Senate passed the “Alabama Heritage Protection Act,” a proposed law with the clear goal of protecting Confederate monuments, but it never came up for a vote in the House.
But in March of 2017, possibly emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, the state legislature introduced a newly rebranded “Alabama Memorial Preservation Act,” which became law two months later. This law prohibits the “relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance” of most anything on or is public property that’s over 40 years old and been deemed historically significant unless a city is given clear approval from a committee created for just this one law. Said committee is entirely appointed by the GOP controlled House, Senate and Governor’s office.
Not willing to be stopped by a law whose actual purpose is clearly to protect Confederate iconography across the state, Birmingham Council President, Johnathan Austin, urged Birmingham Mayor William Bell to remove the monument anyway. As a compromise, Bell tasked the city’s legal department with reviewing the law, and it was concluded constructing a plywood barrier around the monument was not a violation and would give the city more time to review their legal options.
Despite the extra step to avoid violating this law, the Alabama Attorney General is suing the city over this action and the Governor is threatening the city with a $25,000 fine for violating a law that’s yet to be determined was violated or not. Council President Austin’s response to the latter was to start a GoFundMe to raise money to cover the fine of outright destroying the monument while also assuring if, for any reason, the money can not be applied to that cause, it would instead be donated to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institution.