JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A Jacksonville civil rights activist asked a federal judge Thursday for an order barring the city and state from spending any money to maintain or preserve any public tribute to Confederates, from statues to street signs.
“We want … to get the Confederacy off of welfare,” said Earl M. Johnson Jr., who campaigns to remove memorials to the Confederacy through the website TakeItDownNow.org.
The lawsuit argues that spending taxpayer money for tributes to the Confederacy violates the U.S. Constitution’s 13th and 14th Amendments, and says Johnson has “rights to be free of the badges, indicia and vestiges of slavery and to equal protection under the law.”
If the suit is successful, a finding like that would impact budgets of countless communities nationwide.
“Every jurisdiction in the country will have to pay attention to it,” said Johnson, a disbarred attorney who sued on his own behalf.
City officials didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
Johnson, a Black Jacksonville native whose ancestors were enslaved in the South, said that as a taxpayer he objects to his money being spent on symbols that honor the Confederacy.
His suit argues that “the Confederacy … caused the Civil War to preserve the enslavement of African Americans.” It cites a March 1861 speech by Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, who held that the Confederacy was “founded upon ... the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
Spending taxpayer money on tributes to Confederates, the suit argues, "amounts to an intentional governmental endorsement of white supremacy and the ideology that Black Americans are inferior, violating plaintiff's 13th and 14th Amendment protections."
Although the Confederacy lost the Civil War, many memorials, plaques and tributes to its members were erected – largely in the South – in the generations following the war. The activist Southern Poverty Law Center counts more than 2,000 sites nationwide that it says “valorize the Confederacy, a secessionist government that waged war to preserve white supremacy.”
Putnam County officials recently considered legislation to preserve a Confederate statue outside that county’s courthouse.
In addition to school names that the Duval County School Board is changing because of their namesakes’ Confederate pasts, Johnson said local examples of public tributes he wants addressed include:
- the towering pedestal remaining from a now-removed Confederate statue in James Weldon Johnson Park outside City Hall;
- a statue honoring the Confederacy's womanhood erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Springfield Park;
- and street signs including Confederate Street, Stonewall Street and Confederate Point Drive.
Plaques referencing the Civil War were removed from the former statue site outside City Hall, so the only markings remaining on the pedestal are the carved words "God Bless Our Country 1898." But Johnson said he sees the the pedestal as an ugly reminder of white supremacism.
"You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said.
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