The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rep doesn’t want name on MLK monument
Lawmaker refuses to support MLK monument at Capitol.
“I felt like it’d be hypocritical to have my name on it after I voted against it,” Rep. Tommy Benton, R-Jefferson, said.
Despite calls from a legacy civil rights organization to reverse course, embattled state Rep. Tommy Benton, R-Jefferson, said he still won’t allow his name to be added to part of a monument to Martin Luther King Jr.
The monument and a plaque naming the legislators who helped get the statue on Capitol grounds is scheduled to be unveiled in August. A clay model of the statue depicts King striding with purpose, a book in one hand. It’s being shipped to be cast in bronze this week, said Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus.
Reached Tuesday, a day after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Benton would not allow his name on the plaque of legislative sponsors, Benton said he doesn’t regret his decision.
“I felt like it’d be hypocritical to have my name on it after I voted against it,” Benton said. “If they’d wanted to put it on Liberty Plaza, I would have voted for it.”
Liberty Plaza is a public park directly across the street from the Gold Dome.
Benton said statues on the Capitol grounds should only represent presidents, governors, senators and other elected officials from Georgia.
“That’s all that’s out there,” he said.
While a statue of President
Jimmy Carter is outside the Capitol, there is statuary inside the building representing non-elected officials — including James Oglethorpe, a founder of Georgia, and Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts.
Smyre, a member of the Georgia Arts Standards Commission and chair of the King Tribute Committee, said he had not spoken with Benton about his decision to remove his name. But Smyre pointed out that Benton was an opponent of putting the statue at the Capitol.
“At least there’s some consistency there,” Smyre said. “He’s holding on to his position.”
The new statue is based on a 1956 photo of King walking with Bayard Rustin, an architect of the civil rights movement, as the two leave the Montgomery County Courthouse after an arraignment during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In the photo King is wearing a fedora, but the King family requested that the hat not be depicted in the sculpture, Mack Cain, a landscape architect on the project, wrote in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On June 14, at the State Properties Commission board meeting, the Georgia Building Authority authorized a final $100,000 payment toward the completion of the statue.
Jen Talaber Ryan, deputy chief of staff for communications in the office of Gov. Nathan Deal, said because the $100,000 is coming from an authority, it is not classified as taxpayer money — keeping a promise that the public would not foot the bill for the $300,000 statue.
Additional funding came from: The Atlanta Apartment Association ($75,000); CocaCola ($100,000); and the Department of Community Affairs’ Martin Luther King Jr. Advisory Council ($25,000).
Earlier this month, Benton asked that his name be omitted completely from the statue after a request was made to everyone who was going to be included on the statue to double check the spelling of their names.
A member of the organization charged with keeping the memory of the Confederacy alive said Benton has every right to remove his name from a statue honoring King. He said the lawmaker probably felt betrayed by his colleagues.
Benton, who was a prominent member of the House leadership, has seen a spiraling demotion to backbencher status because of controversial headlines he has made lately.
Last week Benton forwarded an article titled “The Absurdity of Slavery as the Cause of the War Between the States,” to several members of the House, including House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge.
Last Friday Ralston stripped Benton of his leadership position as chairman of the House Committee on Human Relations and Aging.
Ralston also bounced Benton off a study committee on civics education in Georgia’s public schools. Ralston had appointed him to the committee earlier this month. The appointment was controversial, as Benton had spent the past two years making provocative comments about the Civil War, race relations and the Ku Klux Klan.
The demotions likely affected Benton’s decision, said Grady Vickery, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Dawsonville. Vickery does not personally know Benton, but he supports Benton’s statement that the Civil War was not started over slavery. He also supports Benton’s failed moves to protect Confederate iconography in Georgia.
“If you start taking down monuments to the Confederates, then before you know it you’re going to go after statues of Martin Luther King,” Vickery said. “How are we going to teach our young people if we don’t keep these benchmarks to show them what happened?”
In an interview with the AJC published in January 2016, Benton said the Klan “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order.”
“It made a lot of people straighten up,” he said. “I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”
Vickery said the issue of race is inescapable, especially when talking about Confederate monuments. Benton offered legislation that would have caused the names of streets that were renamed after King’s assassination to revert to names of Confederate generals and segregationists. “At every turn, we’re considered racist because we’re not black,” Vickery said. “But the left wing and the right wing both belong to the same bird. There’s got to be some type of balance.”
But Charles Steele, president and CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King founded in 1957, said Benton’s viewpoint “is not about him. It is about who he represents.”