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Friend,
In Mayor Steven Reed’s vision for Montgomery, Alabama, the city will be seen as a progressive, welcoming community. That’s why he established a committee last year to assess the numerous monuments, memorials and other reminders of its place as the first capital of the Confederacy in 1861.
“I want to make sure that the city of Montgomery is one that is forward-thinking and is broad and inclusive of everyone,” said Reed, the first Black mayor of the city that was incorporated in 1819. “I think when I initiated that survey, along with others that are in play, it was with that in mind. We want to make sure people think of this city as an active community that they would like to work, live and play in – not a hostile community that is holding on to myths and stories that were grounded in one of the worst chapters of our nation’s history.”
One of Reed’s first steps toward that vision was to rename Jefferson Davis Avenue for civil rights attorney Fred D. Gray, who in the 1950s defended Rosa Parks and was called the “chief counsel for the protest movement” by Martin Luther King Jr. The move last year drew accolades from many as a change long overdue.
But renaming the street that honored the first president of the Confederacy came with a cost: It brought a $25,000 fine from the state of Alabama. And, if the state’s legislature has its way, that amount could rise dramatically for other municipalities in the future.
The state is one of six across the South that have enacted laws to protect memorials to those who fought for the “Lost Cause” from being removed, renamed or destroyed. The 2017 Alabama law applies not only to statues and buildings but also street names.
Despite the backlash from legislatures in those states, the movement to remove Confederate memorials continues to progress.
In the third edition of its Whose Heritage? report, released this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 377 Confederate memorials that have been removed since 2015, when a white supremacist murdered nine Black people at the historic “Mother Emanuel” AME church in Charleston, South Carolina.
A flurry of removals, including the Confederate Soldier and Sailors Monument in Birmingham’s Linn Park, occurred after the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
And more than half of the 377 have come down in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020.
But – as in Montgomery and in Madison County, Alabama, where a memorial to an unknown Confederate soldier was removed last year – the city of Birmingham was fined for its removal of the Linn Park obelisk.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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