Monument battles move to cemeteries

Opponents target Confederate tombs

MADISON, Wis. — One by one, Confederate monuments are coming down from their perches in front of courthouses, in public squares, along city boulevards.

Now opponents to the memorials are looking through cemetery gates for more.

Local officials and residents, outraged by the violence in Charlottesville, Va., last month and determined to clear their cities of markers that glorify the confederacy, are pushing for the removal of Confederate monuments that have adorned the graves of soldiers for decades.

In the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, a 6-foot granite monument with a bronze plaque dating to 1925 was covered with a tarp and whisked away in the middle of the night after activists called for its removal and spray-painted the word “No” on its back.

The mayor of West Palm Beach, Fla., ordered a Confederate memorial taken out of a city operated cemetery in August. In Columbus, Ohio, vandals recently decapitated a statue of a Confederate soldier in a cemetery, leaving city officials scrambling to respond.

Days after the protests in Charlottesville, Paul Soglin, mayor of Madison, directed that a plaque honoring the confederacy inside Forest Hill Cemetery, a city-owned property near the University of Wisconsin campus, be removed. The City Council will soon consider whether to take out another, larger memorial in the cemetery that is dedicated to Confederate soldiers.

But even in this liberal college town, the push to remove the memorial has spurred some to ask if the movement has gone too far.

“I’ve gotten a few emails saying, ‘Leave it alone,’ ” said Marsha Rummel, president of the City Council. “The soldiers are there, and they did live lives.”

The calls to remove the monument in Madison, and other monuments like it, have given rise to questions of the place of Confederate memorials and cemeteries in daily life: Is a monument in a cemetery really on public display? Though most people rarely enter cemeteries, are their contents — statues, monuments and plaques — subject to scrutiny by people in the community? While a Confederate statue in a busy town square honors the dead, does a monument in a tranquil, little-trafficked cemetery have the same effect?

“These are markers to a person’s grave,” said David Sloane, a historian at the University of Southern California who has written two books on cemeteries. “Cemetery memorials do have a different meaning than a symbolic public memorial on the highways and byways of the city or in a public park.”

The monument targeted for removal, boxy and carved from a smooth gray granite, is engraved with the names of dozens of soldiers, mostly men who were imprisoned and died at nearby Camp Randall during the Civil War. It stands prominently in front of the men’s graves, their names chiseled on their headstones in simple block letters — C.A. Hollingsworth, H. Faulks and L. Galloway among them — alongside their regiments and home states, frequently Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi. (Those who favor removing the monument say they have no intention of altering the gravestones.)

Three City Council committees intend to study the memorial, which was installed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy around 1931 and also honors a local woman who regularly tended the graves, and make recommendations on what to do with it — whether to alter the structure, remove it entirely or append more information to it to give visitors greater context. Rummel said she favored its removal, reasoning that the cemetery “is not a town square, but it is a public space.”

On a quiet, tree-lined street of houses that borders Forest Hill Cemetery, residents said they had been mulling the issue.

Standing in the backyard of a two-story Tudor where he has lived for 30 years, Rod McKenzie, a retired engineer, pointed over his fence to the grassy lawn of Forest Hill, lined with small grave markers.

“My backyard neighbors are the Union soldiers,” he said, adding that only steps away from the remains of Union soldiers is the granite monument honoring the Confederate soldiers.

“I’m happy to see it go,” McKenzie, 68, said.

The Madison City Council is expected to decide the Confederate memorial’s fate in the coming weeks.