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Friend, The City Council meeting on May 7 was the last straw for Camille Bennett. Three months later, that frustration materialized into a 10-by-22-foot billboard along the main boulevard running through Florence, a scenic city along the Tennessee River in the northwest corner of Alabama. The billboard depicts two council members with a message to the city’s 40,000 residents: “Florence deserves better.” Bennett, the founder and executive director of Project Say Something (PSS) — a grassroots organization known for confronting racial injustice in the state’s Shoals region — felt that the faith she had put in the city’s six-member council to do the right thing had been misplaced. That “thing” concerned a 20-foot-tall, 30,000-pound white marble statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Lauderdale County Courthouse. “On public property,” she emphasized. “It’s been three years of asking” the council to do something. Bennett and her supporters see the statue as a stain on the city, an offensive and racist symbol emblematic of the persevering myth of the Lost Cause — a monument that portrays the Confederate army as defeated heroes and antebellum slavery as benevolent and benign. Like hundreds of others across the Deep South, the monument was erected during the rise of the Jim Crow era, when Southern states were enacting laws to legalize segregation and disenfranchise Black people after decades of progress following the Civil War. Dedicated in 1903, it was moved to the county’s current courthouse in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, another period that prompted a surge in Confederate iconography. PSS is one of several groups that have received grant funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. The grants support grassroots advocates who are working to promote the removal, relocation and/or contextualization of Confederate monuments and other iconography in their communities. “This false Lost Cause narrative comes from white supremacists that wanted to win in American ideas what they lost on the battlefield,” said Rivka Maizlish, a historian and senior research analyst for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “Confederate leaders stated explicitly and constantly that they were fighting for slavery and white supremacy. Being able to have a real conversation about that past is incredibly important.”
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