Madison to rethink Confederate memorial
Mayor Soglin seeks its removal in wake of Charlottesville unrest
The Madison Common Council will be asked to take up the future of a 1931 Confederate memorial in a city-owned cemetery, Mayor Paul Soglin said.
Soglin announced in mid-August that he had ordered the removal of two Confederate memorials from Forest Hill Cemetery. A total of 140 Confederate soldiers are buried in the cemetery, prisoners of war who died at Camp Randall in Madison during the spring of 1862.
The debate over Confederate monuments and flags escalated across the country after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., where white supremacists gathered to protest the city’s plans to remove a Robert E. Lee statue. Monuments have been removed and covered up in Baltimore and many other cities are considering similar actions.
President Donald Trump has continued to defend the Confederate monuments.
After Soglin made his announcement, a smaller ground-level plaque installed in 1981 was immediately removed.
The marker includes language that praises the “valiant Confederate soldiers” and calls them “unsung heroes.” Soglin suggested that it be donated to the State Historical Society.
The second marker, a 4-foot tall monument, will be more difficult to remove and its fate should be discussed by the Common Council, Soglin said in a recent news conference.
“As a city, we need to make a decision as to what to do with the larger one,” he said.
Soglin asked the city attorney’s office to draft a resolution regarding the future of the monument for the Common Council to consider at its meeting Tuesday.
The monument includes the names of the 140 Confederate soldiers who died at Camp Randall.
Soglin condemned the monument as a piece of racist propaganda aimed at rewriting the history of the Civil War.
“The larger monument at Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery is not a Civil War monument,” he said.
“It was installed over 60 years after the end of the war. It is a slab of propaganda paid for by a racist organization on public property when our city was inattentive to both the new form of slavery propagated by the donors with the Black Codes and to the meaning of that despicable fixture honoring slavery, sedition and oppression.”
The marker was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that raised money and installed monuments across the country.
Soglin said options include removing the monument, altering it or including a new plaque nearby that puts the monument in historical context.
The Daughters of the Confederacy was “a racist and bigoted organization” that installed monuments “as part of their national strategy of propaganda and determination to rewrite history providing a favorable interpretation of the Civil War,” Soglin said.
“The monument has no connection to the events at Camp Randall or the burial of the Confederate soldiers.”
Display of Confederate flags at the cemetery and the memorials have stirred considerable debate in Madison, including a 2016 city attorney’s opinion that said the city’s policies on flag displays were outdated. The display of flags has since ended.
“[The monument] is a slab of propaganda paid for by a racist organization on public property... ” PAUL SOGLIN MADISON MAYOR