While others remove Confederate monuments, Lake County wants one

Two conservative Florida cities have removed Confederate monuments following protests over George Floyd’s killing, and the underlying racism his death represents.

In Jacksonville, city crews working before dawn Tuesday took down a statue dedicated to a Confederate infantry unit. In downtown Fort Myers last week, the Sons of Confederate Veterans removed a bust of Robert E. Lee.

Meanwhile, over in Lake County, a government-supported museum is forging ahead with plans to import an enormous bronze statue of a Confederate commander who was a stranger to the county.

If there was ever a time to reconsider this hateful idea it’s now. If there was ever a time for Lake County to finally atone for its racist past, it’s now. Let the state find another home for Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, maybe in some North Florida Civil War battlefield.

Hardly anyone wanted the statue after the state Legislature decided to evict Smith from the U.S. Capitol and — appropriately — replace him with the likeness of Mary McLeod Bethune, the famed African-American educator.

Except the Lake County Historical Museum, which wanted it bad. Two years ago, curator Bob Grenier stood before a state committee in charge of selecting a new home for the statue, gushing that Lake would spare no expense to place the likeness of Smith in the old courthouse that now houses the museum.

“A lot of history took place in the Lake County Courthouse as well,” he proudly told committee members.

Yes, like that time the young black men who became known as the Groveland

Four were chained and tortured in the courthouse basement by the county’s sadistic sheriff, Willis McCall, to extract confessions for crimes thet didn’t commit.

If there’s a more racially tone deaf city or county in the state of Florida, we’d like to hear about it.

At a moment when cities and counties are rethinking, removing or relocating longtime public monuments honoring those who fought to preserve slavery, Lake County is bringing to its courthouse the statue of a Confederate general who probably never stepped foot in the county.

Smith was born in St. Augustine and left Florida about the time he was reaching puberty.

He fought on the wrong side of the Civil War, fled to Cuba afterward and settled in Tennessee, where he’s buried. He was a fleeting Floridian by chance of birth, and that’s it.

None of that stopped the state from erecting a statue of Smith in the National Statuary Hall in Washington in 1922, a period when Jim Crow laws were thriving and the South was churning out monument after monument celebrating the confederacy while silently reminding African-Americans of their place in society, and the danger of stepping out of line.

That’s why many places have relocated monuments to more appropriate settings, as when Orlando moved its Johnny Reb statue from Lake Eola to a cemetery three years ago.

A historic Florida courthouse, where a racist sheriff once orchestrated a campaign of terror against Central Florida’s African-American population, hardly qualifies as a more appropriate setting for a second-hand statue of a Confederate general.

The statue’s move to Lake was helped along by the County Commission, which offered its blessing in September with a 3-2 vote, overruling the objections of the public and eight cities that passed resolutions urging them not to do it.

But the times, they are changing. Jacksonville’s Lenny Curry — die-hard Republican, former chairman of the state party and mayor of a city with its own unsavory racial history — said Tuesday the city will remove all of its Confederate monuments, not just one the one that city crews took down that morning.

“The Confederate monument is gone, and the others in this city will be removed as well,” Curry said. “We hear your voices. We have heard your voices.”

Your turn, Lake County. Your turn to hear the voices.

And if doing the right thing still doesn’t have much appeal, try to imagine how loud and powerful those voices will be outside the old courthouse when an unwanted, 9-foot statue of a Confederate general takes up residence.

Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.