Activists with the Northside Coalition and other civil rights groups implored the Jacksonville City Council Tuesday to remove the Confederate monument in Springfield Park, while a faction of speakers asked the Council to keep them up. Before the meeting, protests began in James Weldon Johnson Park when an organist played a few moments before 4 p.m. and Northside Coalition founder
A bullet appears to have been shot at Mayor Lenny Curry’s office window at City Hall this week. As the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office were investigating Tuesday morning, a charter plane pulled a Confederate flag and banner criticizing the mayor over Downtown, repeating a similar stunt before the Nov. 27 Jacksonville Jaguars game. The mayor’s office had no comment Tuesday on
Advocates for removing Jacksonville’s Confederate monuments are growing impatient, as two pots of money for addressing Confederate monuments on public land – half a million dollars in Jacksonville’s city budget, and a philanthropic offer to fund a facilitated community discussion – are sitting idle, and Jacksonville City Council stalls promised action on Confederate monuments. Over the past year, the Council
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s a line from William Faulkner, but it’s also an apt description of Jacksonville’s historical hangover, which was illustrated in stark relief last week. Mayor Lenny Curry and others kicked off the city’s bicentennial celebration with a press conference, but elsewhere there were strong indications that Jacksonville’s history isn’t exactly unifying.
The Jacksonville City Council is set for yet another of its masochistic explorations of what would, in a 21st Century city, be a simple question: Should a monument to a band of seditionist criminals, the legacy of whom looms over us like the shadow of a 500-foot statue of Jim Crow, be maintained for all to see? It seems so
