Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Confederate statue to be taken down at West Palm cemetery
A monument honoring dead Confederate soldiers is no longer welcome at West Palm Beach’s Woodlawn Cemetery, the city said Monday.
The 1941 memorial — believed by local historians to be the last Confederate statue in Palm Beach County — will be removed from public display, said Mayor Jeri Muoio.
“I believe strongly they are symbols of hate and bigotry, and we don’t want that
here in our city,” Muoio said.
The city’s move comes after violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., over a decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A man plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters in Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, police said.
As the national debate intensified over the appropriateness of Confederate monuments, the memorial in West Palm Beach was vandalized multiple times in the past few weeks.
City officials plan to move the memorial within a week.
It is owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a key organizer behind the majority of the Confederate monuments across the country.
Muoio said the city’s attorney has been trying to get the group to remove the monument from the cemetery, which is public property.
“We have asked them to remove their monument. They have not done that, so we are going to remove it for them,” she said. “We will put in storage for them and they can take it and do whatever they wish, but it will not be on public property.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy raised money for the piece from 1936 through 1941 by hosting bridge games, bake sales and dinners, said historian Janet DeVries, who leads cemetery tours at Woodlawn.
It is the only one south of St. Augustine, likely the only Confederate statue in Palm Beach and Broward counties, she said.
A 2016 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that across the country, there are at least 1,503 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces, including monuments, statues, names of parks, roads and other locations.
More than 700 Confederate monuments and statues are on public property throughout the country, the majority in the South.
Debate in South Florida over the Civil War and the symbolism behind Confederate monuments and flags is not new in South Florida.
In 1994, a Confederate flag — along with the flags on Spain, England and France that once ruled Florida — were taken down from Young Circle in Hollywood.
Most recently, the city of Hollywood last month agreed to rename streets honoring three Civil War-era generals: Robert E. Lee, John Bell Hood and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Under the current Hollywood plan, which will get another vote Aug. 30, Lee Street will become Louisville, Hood Street will become Macon, and Forrest will change to Savannah.
Plans for the monument in West Palm Beach began in the mid-1930s, when the United Daughters of the Confederacy started a campaign drive to remember unidentified Confederate soldiers buried at Woodlawn.
The group felt they owed “a duty to the noble sons” who died.
“Too long have we neglected to honor these Southern men,” an organizer said in a 1936 news article published by The Palm Beach Post.
Graves remain at Woodlawn Cemetery of both Union and Confederate Civil War veterans, buried in close proximity to one another, DeVries said.
A spokesperson for the United Daughters of The Confederacy couldn’t be reached for comment Monday.
The latest vandalism — the monument was spray-painted, and part of it was broken off — happened Sunday. It also was vandalized about two weeks ago, said Sgt. David Lefont, spokesman for the West Palm Beach Police Department.
The vandalism is considered a felony because of the extent of the damage, he said.
West Palm Beach spokeswoman Kathleen Walter said the city cleaned up the monument’s graffiti Monday, “with the understanding that the owners, who don’t have the necessary supplies on hand, will clean up and maintain the monument in the future.”
“They are symbols of hate and bigotry.” Mayor Jeri Muoio