Confederate daughters ride to Ducey’s rescue

The United Daughters of the Confederacy have come riding to the rescue of Gov. Doug Ducey.

The Confederate daughters have asked for their monuments back, sparing Arizona’s governor from having to actually make a decision to remove them from state property.

Let’s just be realistic here and acknowledge the fact that the governor was never going to order the removal of the state’s Civil War monuments.

Just as he punted to mayors to decide whether we should wear masks given the COVID-19 threat to public health, he punted to some nonexistent “public process” to decide whether the Confederate monument at Wesley Bolin Plaza poses an insult to Black Arizonans.

A process that he and the Legislature eliminated in 2018, by the way, when they dissolved the Governmental Mall Commission, which oversaw monuments at Wesley Bolin Plaza.

Leaving the issue squarely in Ducey’s trembling hands.

It’s a given that the monument to a vanquished and shameful cause needed to be removed from Wesley Bolin Plaza. That should have been done years ago.

As for Jefferson Davis Highway marker, there was a move to get rid of it several years ago but Ducey wasn’t interested.

“It’s important,” he said at the

time, “that people know our history. I don’t think we should try to hide our history.”

Even if it’s, you know, not our history. It’s worth noting that there’s no actual highway associated with the “Jefferson Davis Highway,” Only a monument in the state’s right-of-way along U.S. 60 in Gold Canyon. The Confederate daughters dreamed of a coast-to-coast highway honoring the president of the

Confederacy but it was wisely never built.

It has always confounded me why we have a monument to a war that ended 57 years before Arizona became a state, erected to a man who, as far as I know, never set foot in the state, marking a highway that doesn’t exist.

At least Wesley Bolin Plaza monument honoring Confederate soldiers commemorates an actual Civil War battle in Arizona, the Battle of Picacho Pass.

The Confederate daughters will presumably now move the monuments to private land, which is exactly where they belong. In a cemetery, perhaps, or a museum or a Civil War battlefield.

As for whether such a thing belongs at the state Captol, that’s not even a close call. Or it shouldn’t have been.

It’s worth noting that the Confederate daughters waited 100 years to honor their dead. The monuments were erected in 1961, on the 100th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

What statement were the Confederate daughters making, I wonder, by waiting 100 years to put up a monument to honor Confederate soldiers at the height of the civil rights movement?

In a way, it’s sad that Ducey couldn’t bring himself to make a statement of his own.

Those monuments should have come down not because Black Arizonans demanded it or because protesters defaced them.

They should have come down because our governor stood tall in the belief that memorials honoring a war fought to preserve slavery have no place in the public square.

Instead, it is left not to our governor but to the Confederate daughters to do the right thing.