Proposed bill would raise penalty for removing Confederate monuments

It’s been six years since the Alabama Legislature passed a bill intended to protect Confederate monuments and other symbols recognizing that era in the state’s history.

But Alabama cities, counties, school boards, and universities have moved statues and renamed streets, schools and buildings despite the prohibitions in the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act.

With a new legislative session about to begin, Alabama lawmakers are being asked to increase the penalty for violating the preservation law. Last month, an email went out to legislators asking for sponsors, co-sponsors, and support for a proposed bill to strengthen the law.

The draft bill proposes to raise the fine for moving a monument or changing the name of a memorial street or building. The fine is now $25,000. The bill would raise that to $10,000 per day for every day that a government entity failed to restore what it moved or changed.

A first-year Democratic lawmaker from Montgomery who got the email said he would prefer to go in the opposite direction and repeal the 2017 law.

“I think it should be up to individual cities, counties, communities, to decide what’s best for them and what they want to name things and what they want to keep up or not,” said Rep. Phillip Ensler, who defeated a Republican incumbent in November. ”If there’s a decision to want to take something down or change it, we shouldn’t have the big, top-down government from the State House telling communities what they feel is best for them.”

That was one of the main arguments Black lawmakers made when the Memorial Preservation Act passed in 2017 with strong support from the Republican majority that controls the Legislature and opposition from Democrats.

The email seeking support for a stronger memorial preservation law was from Roger Broxton, who included a link to a website for the Confederate Heritage Fund. Broxton did not return calls and emails seeking comment for this story.

The idea of raising the fine in the Memorial Preservation Act is not new. Two years ago, former Rep. Mike Holmes, R-Wetumpka, proposed a bill to increase the fine to $10,000 a day. A public hearing on Holmes’ bill drew a packed audience for a heated debate. The House committee that held the hearing never voted on the bill and it died.

Holmes, who did not run for reelection last year, noted at the time that his bill would have protected all monuments and memorials, not just Confederate ones. He said it was about preserving state and local history.

Also in 2021, Rep. Juandalynn Givan, D-Birmingham, proposed a bill to increase the authority for cities and counties to move monuments. It would have set up a process for local governments to move monuments from taxpayer-owned property to cemeteries, parks, or other communities under agreements to preserve and publicly display them. The bill died in committee.

So far, no bill has been filed this year, according to the Legislature’s website. Plenty of time remains for that to happen. The session starts Tuesday and lasts 15 weeks.

Senate President Pro Tem Greg Reed, R-Jasper, said the idea of changing the Memorial Preservation law has not been a hot topic among senators as the new session nears.

“I know that passing the Preservation Act originally was something that was very important to the Legislature,” Reed said. “But I’ve not heard a lot of discussion about modifying that legislation.”

Ensler said he was not surprised by the request to increase the fine to protect Confederate monuments. But he said he was taken aback by part of the argument for doing so, an assertion that slavery was not the central issue of the Civil War. Broxton attached a set of talking points to his email making that argument, a presentation called “Lincoln’s Tax War” that includes quotations from President Lincoln.

“To just completely ignore the suffering and pain and what the war was about is deeply offensive to many Alabamians and certainly residents of my district,” Ensler said. “So I think just telling the truth about it is important for historical purposes so that we don’t repeat things that happened and that we can learn from it, but also for the purposes of healing and reconciliation for members of our state and community.”

Ensler, who is Jewish, said he sometimes thinks about the disagreements over Confederate symbols in the context of the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe during World War II.

“Preserving historical sites where battles happened, slaves were sold, that’s one thing,” Ensler said. “But again, I think about how traumatizing and horrible it would be if there were statues of Hitler or Nazis or schools or entities named after them in Germany.

“And then the second part of that, if someone were going around and saying, ‘Well, the Holocaust and World War II weren’t about Hitler wanting to wipe out Jews and other minority groups and it was really about economic conditions,’ that would be on a personal level incredibly offensive and also troubling because it means we’re not learning the history of it.”

Joshua Rothman, chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama, said the Civil War was “unambiguously about slavery.”

“Secessionists were convinced that a Lincoln administration would lead to the destruction of slavery and so they decided to try and form their own slaveholders’ republic before that could happen,” Rothman said in an email. “And we know that that’s why they seceded because they told the entire world, quite confidently and proudly, that that’s why they seceded.”

For example, Rothman points to the Ordinance of Session Alabama adopted in 1861:

“Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and menacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security.”

“By ‘domestic institutions,’ they mean slavery,” Rothman said. “There’s nothing in the ordinance at all about taxes.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which supports removal of Confederate memorials, maintains a “Whose Heritage” database of Confederate monuments and symbols and those that have been removed. It lists 15 removals and changes in Alabama.

Birmingham, Mobile, and Madison County are among the local governments that have moved Confederate monuments since passage of the Memorial Preservation Act.

In February, the American Bar Association passed a resolution urging state and local governments to remove Confederate memorials from courthouses.