Confederate statue will move to Lake County
Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith’s last stand will be in Tavares.
The plan to bring the Florida-born military leader back to his home state excited Bobby Grenier, curator of the general’s landing spot, the Lake County Historical Museum.
“For us, it’s like getting King Tut,” he said.
But black leaders in Lake County, where an ugly history of racial injustice includes the notoriously racist reign of the late Sheriff Willis McCall, said Friday they are “appalled” the tax-aided museum in downtown Tavares bid to care for a Civil War figure they see as a symbol of slavery and oppres-
sion.
“I don’t want one damn dime of my tax money paying for that statue,” said Carla Mitchell, 74, who is black and the author of a book about segregation in Lake County.
Grenier, whose proposal for the statue beat out two others Thursday in Tallahassee, including one from a foundation in St. Augustine, the general’s birthplace, considered the award of the Smith statue to be a triumph.
“This is big. This is wonderful. This is historical preservation at its finest,” he said of the bronze statue, which has stood in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., since 1922. “It’s art. It’s sculpture. It’s all of those things.”
But he politely ended a telephone conversation when asked about ill feelings the statue might stir in black leaders.
“We are a museum,” Grenier said. “Our job is to preserve artifacts.”
The statue, depicting the bearded general in Confederate uniform, sword at his side, is being removed from its U.S. Capitol home in 2020 and replaced with a statue of civil-rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of what is now known as Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. Members of the Florida Council on Arts and Cullast
ture and Florida Historical Commission were appointed to choose the statue’s future home.
Grenier’s pitch for the figure noted that Tavares, the seat of Lake County government, sits in the center of the state, providing “fair and easy accessibility to ALL the citizens of Florida.”
He proposed to house the general’s statue in the museum’s military veterans gallery, the most popular area of the museum in the county’s historic courthouse, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He said the planned exhibit will tell the life stories of both the general and the statue’s sculptor, C. Adrian Pillars, and will be designed by an artist who worked on the “Frozen” attraction at Epcot’s Norway pavilion at Walt Disney World.
Grenier, who is also a Tavares City Council member, estimated it could cost up to $10,000 to remove the Smith statue from the statuary hall, transport it to Florida and set it up inside the museum.
Before he joined the Confederate Army, Smith was a career U.S Army officer who fought in the MexicanAmerican War.
Later in life, he served as a professor and had botany reports published by the Smithsonian Institute.
Many communities have removed Confederate statues from public parks and mothballed them or moved them to cemeteries. Orlando year moved the 107-year-old “Johnny Reb” Confederate memorial from its longtime home at Lake Eola Park to a spot deemed more suitable, Greenwood Cemetery.
Former Eustis City Commissioner Anthony Sabatini, now a Republican candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, praised the museum for winning the statue.
A year ago, he created a stir when he proposed Eustis welcome Confederate monuments that were being taken down around the country.
“We’ve got to preserve our state’s history. Good, bad or ugly,” he said Friday. “Lake County had plenty of Confederate soldiers that had a role in its founding and early days etcetera [and] to scrutinize the decision to accept the statue is ridiculous, politically correct nonsense … It’s Florida history. We need more history, not less.”
Longtime Leesburg City Commissioner John Christian, who is black, questioned the relevance of the general to Lake County.
“His connection is with St. Augustine,” he said. “Maybe we should put a statue of Ray Charles in there, too.”
The legendary soul pioneer was black, blind and attended school at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine from 1937 to 1945.
Grenier said the museum, which features displays on the citrus industry, a centuryold dugout cypress canoe and a giant alligator skull, plans an exhibit on the Groveland Four, four black men who were wrongfully accused of kidnapping and raping a 17-year-old white housewife.
She later recanted the testimony that led to their convictions. McCall, who loomed large from 1945 to 1975, was a central figure in the case, killing one of the men, though he insisted it was in self-defense. The museum’s office desk had been McCall’s.
Author Gilbert King weighed in on the controversy Friday, first praising the National Statuary Hall’s choice to replace the general with Bethune.
His Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” documented racial injustices meted out in Lake County by McCall and others.
“As far as bringing a statue of a Confederate general to Lake County, a museum seems like a sensible place for these relics of the past,” King said of the Smith statue. “And perhaps there’s no better place for museum visitors to contemplate America’s racial history than in the hallways where Sheriff Willis McCall once roamed.”