As more Southern cities remove their monuments to the Confederacy, Jacksonville's persistent avoidance of the issue makes it a battleground.
In the waning days of 2022, the juxtaposition of images from Jacksonville and Richmond was striking.a crew of workers wearing yellow vests gathered around a statueNot long after 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, they cut a bolt holding in place the bronze likeness of Confederate Gen. Ambrose P. Hill. Then, using a crane and yellow straps looped under the statue’s arms, they carefully lifted it off its base and laid it down on a flatbed truck.For Richmond, it was a monumental moment.
And while the images from Richmond were of city workers lifting a statue off its base and laying it in a flatbed truck headed for a storage facility, the most dramatic images from Jacksonville were of police pulling a 72-year-old local activist away from the City Council lectern and his nearby scooter. After Ben Frazier spent more than his allotted 65 seconds calling for the monuments to come down, he was removed from council chambers and placed in a cruiser headed to jail.
Decades later, particularly during Jim Crow era segregation and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, many cities put up monuments to the Confederacy. More than 150 years after the Civil War ended, with more and more Southern cities taking down monuments that went up after the war — often long after — Jacksonville is on a path to becoming a modern-day battleground.In recent years, even as Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry budgeted money for removals, the City Council’s response to everything related to monuments has been pretty much the same: nothing.
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