JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A statue glorifying the Civil War era in a Jacksonville park that celebrates the Confederacy has been vandalized.
The “Women of the Southland” statue, located at the south end of the Springfield park, is spattered with red paint and tagged with the letters BLM, an abbreviation of Black Lives Matter.
The statue was built in 1915, same year “Confederate Park” was named. It’s one of several monuments that activists have demanded be removed in recent years. The group Take 'Em Down Jax, an outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, has for years demanded the city take down the Confederate soldier statue in Hemming Park and the Andrew Jackson statue at the site of the former Jacksonville Landing.
Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Chris Conley specifically called out Jacksonville’s many tributes to the Confederacy at a Black Lives Matter protest march Friday.
"A Confederate monument sits a couple blocks from here. A block from where Ax Handle Saturday happened,” Conley said, mentioning the racist attack on Civil Rights protesters in Heming Park in 1960. “Revisionist history allows us to believe that systemic racism isn’t real …I challenge all of you to learn this country’s history, … to weaponize the voters in this city.”
He added, “This is only the beginning here in Jacksonville.”
The push to removed Confederate monuments gained traction locally in 2017 when then City Council President Anna Broche advocated moving the monuments to educational institutions and museums “where they can be respectfully preserved and historically contextualized,” an initiative that was eventually abandoned.
The statue on the “Women of the Southland” inscription reads, “Let this mute but eloquent structure speak to generations to come of a generation of the past. Let it repeat perpetually the imperishable story of our women of the ’60s, those noble women who sacrificed their all upon their country’s altar.”
The female depicted in the statue is considered the embodiment of the “Lost Cause” movement, which aims to portray the Confederacy as heroic and minimize the central role of slavery in the Civil War.
Tim Gilmore, whose blog JaxPsychoGeo explores Jacksonville’s uncomfortable histories, has written about the monument. Responding to the vandalism, he wrote:
“It’s a shame for public property to be vandalized. It’s also a shame so many people refuse (and it is a refusal) to understand how offensive a Confederate memorial is. The statue ‘In Memory of Our Women of the Southland’ was built at the height of the Lost Cause Movement, a time when racist Southern leaders tried to reinvent history. Though Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens had said in 1861 that the ‘cornerstone’ of the Confederacy ‘rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man’ and that ‘that slavery subordination to the superior race’ was the ‘natural and normal condition’ of black people, by the time this Confederate memorial was built, racist Southern leaders were pretending the Confederacy was all about valiancy and protecting women and children and defending independence from tyranny. It’s telling this ‘Lost Cause’ thinking coincided with the increase in Jim Crow laws and the time period that saw the biggest rise in Ku Klux Klan membership. So it’s a shame for public property to be vandalized and it’s a shame Jacksonville’s leaders have so long protected a monument to whitewashing slavery. I’ll take the first shame over the second.”
First Coast News has reached out to the city for comment.