Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Statue of ‘racist’ Broward gets boot
County namesake wrote of ‘negro shortcomings’
Segregationist Napoleon Bonaparte Broward — the man Broward County is named after — is no longer welcome in the county courthouse.
A statue of Broward will be removed from the downtown Fort Lauderdale courthouse soon, Broward Mayor Barbara Sharief said Tuesday. It’s the latest casualty of a nationwide debate about whether it’s proper to commemorate people who advocated slavery or held racist, segregationist views.
Could the county’s name be changed next? Not likely, Sharief says.
“I don’t even want to go down that road,” she said.
Napoleon Bonaparte Broward was governor from 1905 to 1908 and is best remembered for the draining of the Everglades, which helped spur development in South Florida. He also was a segregationist whose com-
ments from a century ago have drawn new scrutiny.
A document that Broward wrote during his term in office called on Congress “to purchase territory, either domestic or foreign, and provide means to purchase the property of the negroes at a reasonable price and to transport them to the territory purchased by the United States.”
The proposal for a new black nation didn’t seem altruistic. Broward said whites wouldn’t live in the new nation, and blacks wouldn’t return to live in the United States.
“The white people have no time to make excuses for the shortcomings of the negro,” he said.
That kind of thinking is enough for the county to take action, Sharief said, responding to people who were offended by the statue’s prominence in the courthouse.
But those critics never said the county’s name was an issue, and Sharief said she’s not looking to make it one.
“I think it would be very difficult to change the name of Broward County. We’re not considering that at this time,” Sharief said.
There would be plenty of challenges to carrying out a change, including replacing signs, letterheads and logos.
The county originally was going to be called Everglades County when it was formed in 1915, but the speaker of the Florida House pushed through a change to honor Broward, who had died just five years earlier.
In more recent years, there have been efforts by some business leaders to rename the county Lauderdale County or Fort Lauderdale County to improve its name recognition.
That’s what Miami-Dade County did back in 1997, when voters approved the switch from Dade County to create more international recognition of the county being home to the city of Miami.
Paul George, historian for the HistoryMiami Museum, said it might be a little more complicated for Broward to change its name. Unlike Dade County, which was a territorial county from the 1800s, Broward was created by an act of the Legislature, George said.
It might take some state approvals as well as a local vote to push something through, he said.
George said he wouldn’t be an advocate of a name change.
“I’m a flaming liberal, but I’m a historian. I don’t know where this movement nationwide is going to end to obliterate the nefarious part of our past. Every civilization has good and bad,” George said.
Similar movements to remove statues have gained increased national attention after protests in Charlottesville, Va., over efforts to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee there left a woman dead when a man plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
Hollywood commissioners are being sued over an August decision to rename three city streets that were named after Confederate commanders during the Civil War: Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Bell Hood and Lee. And West Palm Beach officials in August removed a monument honoring deceased Confederate soldiers from the city’s Woodlawn Cemetery.
Broward’s writings came to light last month when defense lawyer Bill Gelin, who runs JAABlog, a Broward courthouse news and gossip website, published excerpts, leading to the call for relocating the statue.
He found Broward’s statements in a collection of documents and speeches published by the University of Florida in 2011.
Since the statue controversy arose, people have had strong feelings on whether it should be banished.
Opponents of moving the statue said it was another politically correct attempt by liberals to sanitize history.
Attorney Michael Styles said Tuesday that the decision sounded like a backroom deal that did not give anyone the opportunity to put Gov. Broward’s views and legacy in their historical perspective.
“There should have been public input,” Styles said.
Chief Assistant Public Defender Gordon Weekes said moving the statue was the right thing to do.
“The best place for it is probably a museum, with a historical note as to his contributions to our state as well as his beliefs,” Weekes said.
Gelin said the decision sends the right message.
“A lot of people across the country feel the scales of justice are tilted against black people,” Gelin said. “To force them to parade past a monument to an outspoken, post-Reconstruction racist on the way to those very same criminal courts seems insensitive at best and possibly unjust.”
Sharief said she discussed the statue issue with county administrators, Chief Administrative Judge Jack Tuter, Public Defender Howard Finkelstein and members of the TJ Reddick Bar Association, a black lawyers group.
“It was a legitimate concern for those who work in the courthouse and who visit the courthouse every day,” Sharief said. “We felt like out of respect for their concern, we would go ahead and remove it.”
Broward County Commissioner Mark Bogen said based on what he’s heard of Broward’s writings, he also supports the statue’s removal.
“You honor those who have served our country and done good for our country and you don’t honor those who have not. It’s that simple,” Bogen said. “How do you teach your children to be fair, impartial and treat everyone equally when you are honoring people who have demonstrated the opposite.”
The statue was gifted to the county by Skip Wellever, who made it, and was placed in the courthouse in 1993. It is treated like other works of art in county buildings and doesn’t require commission approval to have it moved or removed, Sharief said.
Sharief said the statue will be placed in storage. She said she wasn’t sure what would happen to it after that, although it’s possible it could wind up in a museum.
“We will not be replacing it with anything,” Sharief said. “It will be removed fairly soon.”