Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. The plywood was placed there on orders of former Birmingham Mayor William Bell after the state passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act in 2017 in response to calls for removal of Confederate monuments on public property. On Sunday, the obelisk — known formally as the Confederate Sailors and Soldiers Monument — was the site of a speech from Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, who … But this was a moment that took place outside the horse race of electoral politics. The Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument in Linn Park was commissioned by the Pelham Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and dedicated in 1905. You could say that it started with the killing of George Floyd. Johnson and other leaders of the group admonished the crowd against damaging any other property. Remember when Alabama lawmakers said porn was a public health emergency? In Birmingham, Confederate Memorial Day was first observed as a school holiday on April 26, 1905, the day the Confederate Monument was unveiled. Between the attempts, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin walked into the middle of the crowd, which had then grown by hundreds, with a bullhorn. Robert Walker poses for a photograph on the remains of a Confederate memorial that was removed overnight in Birmingham, Ala., on Tuesday, June … And the most important. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin defeated Bell in an election that fall, and he inherited the conundrum from his predecessor, just in time for the Alabama Legislature to pass a monuments law protecting the statue. Through all the struggles and triumphs of the civil rights era, it stood as a physical representation of bloody nineteenth-century efforts to try to keep slavery intact. In front of the Harbert Center, someone set fire to a flag. Alabama lawmakers seemed ready to amend the law to be even more punitive but that bill died when coronavirus pandemic cut the 2020 session short. Robert Walker poses for a photograph on the remains of a Confederate memorial that was removed overnight in Birmingham, Ala., on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Congrats, Twitter, you’ve been Jeff Session-ized, Alabama’s Black Belt is in trouble, again. Birmingham will be hit with a $25,000 fine. That was three months ago. Attorney General Steve Marshall filed a lawsuit against Birmingham. The monument was dismantled and removed in 2020. 1514856906 1590999392. I crossed paths with coworkers and colleagues from other media. The site operated from 1902-1939 as a haven for disabled or indigent veterans of the. The 52-foot-tall Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument towered over historic Linn Park for 115 years. But it is just the latest in a series of injustices that black people in Alabama and beyond are no longer willing to put up with, according to Mia Speights, a black Birmingham resident who came out to the park on Monday to show her support for the cause. By the end of the night, it would be a riot. The death of George Floyd, who was killed on video last month by a police officer in Minneapolis, shocked the nation and drove many thousands of Americans into streets from Alabama to Alaska. Protesters with a truck and chains try to topple a Confederate monument in Linn Park during a protest. Some booed him while others chanted, “Stand with us!”. On Jefferson Davis Day, no less. The odd thing about the protest in Linn Park was that through much of it, I felt perfectly safe. The doomed memorial stood high over Birmingham when black smoke from even taller steel plant smokestacks still choked people's lungs on hot summer days. Mo Brooks spouts nonsense, Ivey finds her nerve. And it will probably only raise his national political profile and stoke new suggestions that he run for state or national office. Protesters who gathered for a demonstration in Linn Park on Sunday night defaced monuments in the park and, as they left, smashed windows and vandalized buildings along downtown … The demonstration, which started out peacefully but ultimately devolved into violence and extensive property damage in downtown Birmingham, represented a cry for justice by a people fed up with the seemingly endless series of deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of U.S. law enforcement officers. History. As Andre McKoy, a black Birmingham resident who went to Linn Park Monday afternoon to show his support for the protest movement, put it: “Birmingham is 71% black but we’ve got a Confederate monument right downtown. ultimately devolved into violence and extensive property damage. It’s not right. Several dozen linked arms along the Park Place sidewalk in front of the Confederate monument, but hundreds of others began marching southward down 20th Street and through the heart of the city’s business district. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your California Privacy Rights (each updated 1/1/21). "I've been saying there was going to be a breaking point with police brutality," she said. The time to expand Medicaid is now. That decision, which results from violent protests that erupted in downtown … How about never? It survived for nearly three more years after Mayor William Bell had a plywood box built around its base and painted black in 2017. In its legal briefs, the city was blunt. The monument’s base had been placed in 1894, the same year in which the Newsletter July 2015 Photograph, 1905. Shortly after that, someone found the statue of Thomas Jefferson. The Confederate monument had to come down, he said. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your California Privacy Rights (each updated 1/1/21). by Jessica Leigh Hester June 5, 2020 How an Infamous Confederate Obelisk Finally Came Down A short while later, colleagues of mine were assaulted in front of the Alabama Power building. © 2021 Advance Local Media LLC. Source: Solomon Crenshaw Jr. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin has vowed to remove a controversial Confederate monument from Linn Park “as soon as possible.”. I spoke with a few people I knew. Late last year, Birmingham lost the court fight, but the Alabama Supreme Court said then that the worst the state could do to Birmingham was a $25,000 fine. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local. Local reports noted the Confederate statue memorializing Charles Linn, captain of the Confederate Navy, in Birmingham was, in fact, torn down using … BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) - Attorney General Steve Marshall has filed a new lawsuit against the City of Birmingham for its removal of the Confederate monument in Linn Park. The cohesion of the crowd was suddenly gone. RELATED: This is our history - how white supremacy still thrives in Alabama. All while, in the middle of it all, dozens of young men, and a few women, whacked at a sandstone obelisk. Marshall said taking the historic monument down is in violation of the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act. It remained through the salad days of the Ku Klux Klan and the largely forgotten founding of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, 100 miles to Birmingham's south. I can’t tell you where it all started. Tonight. Mayor Randall Woodfin had promised to remove the monument by Tuesday to stop any more of the violent reactions like those seen Sunday … Birmingham's 1905 Confederate monument coming down. Skip Navigation Share on Facebook Marshall said taking the historic monument down is in violation of the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act. The base of the Confederate monument in Linn Park. A few feet from me, two young women began hurling large chunks of sandstone, chipped from the monument, through windows at the Birmingham Board of Education headquarters. BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Workers in Alabama’s largest city began removing a Confederate monument Monday night after demonstrators failed to knock down the obelisk the night before. Johnson is a radio host and a comedian, but his speech to a handful of protesters in Linn Park was serious. For more than a century, a 52-foot obelisk has stood in the center of Birmingham, Ala., a monument to Confederate soldiers and sailors who fought in the Civil War.. For generations in this town, it was a constant reminder of the losing faction in a war that ended four decades before it was installed. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument was a commemorative obelisk that was erected in Linn Park, Birmingham, Alabama in 1905. There’s no other word to describe what happened and still be honest. A statue of Charles Linn, a blockade runner in the Confederate navy and an early Birmingham industrialist after whom the park is named, was an early casualty. The then-mayor of Birmingham Mel Drennen cosigned and said that his city’s new Confederate monument “memorialized … a cause that will ever remain fresh in the memories of our Southern people.” During his visit for the Olmsted Brothers' 1925 report and recommendations for "A Park System for Birmingham" landscape architect W. B. Marquis wrote that "The Confederate Monument located on the axis of 20th St. at the so… Two doughboy statues on either side of the Confederate monument were targets later. Birmingham, the crucible of America's long racial divide and the site of some of the most brutal examples of its enforcement, is now without its largest confederate memorial for the first time in over a century. Birmingham takes down Confederate monument after 115 ... - al All that’s left of the Confederate memorial in downtown Birmingham’s Linn Park is a graffiti-covered base. The Confederate memorial was scarred from hundreds of hammer blows and defaced with scribblings in spray paint. But that thing they all came to destroy was still there. But this night, Johnson pointed to that obelisk in the park and said it had to come down. I don’t know when or how it will end. As cities and states grapple with the future of Confederate monuments, the Alabama Supreme Court has … The fate of the state seemed frozen in place until the events of the last week made the obelisk again a rallying point. Although the monument had been damaged during Sunday night’s riots, Birmingham has been trying to take the statue down for years. The city took down the more than 50-foot-tall obelisk following protests over the police death … When I got there, a couple hundred protesters had gathered and a handful were already chipping with sledgehammers at the base of the century-old statue. Confederate Memorial Park is the site of Alabama's only Confederate Soldiers' Home. Or slavery. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local. On Monday, crews went … But with that flame at Jefferson’s feet, there had been an escalation. Two doughboy statues … He asked the protesters to go home and give him a day to tear that statue down instead. When will Alabama? And on Instagram. The protesters looped one end of the rope about a third of the way up the obelisk and hitched the other end to the back of a red GMC pickup truck. The monument in Birmingham, Alabama, became a flashpoint in the fight for racial justice. Johnson told the crowd they should give the mayor a chance to follow through on his promise, but as some in the crowd cussed and jeered at the idea, he said it was up to them if they wanted to keep trying. Easily the most visible legacy of the young mayor's tenure to date is his decision to defy the state and bring a construction crew in to dismantle the monument and take it down piece by piece with a crane bearing a massive hook, the long chunks carted away on the back of a flatbed truck. But further down the street, more glass shattered. BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) - Attorney General Steve Marshall has filed a new lawsuit against the City of Birmingham for its removal of the Confederate monument in Linn Park. George Wallace, who personified state-sanctioned racism in the U.S. Following the removal of the Confederate monument in Birmingham's Linn Park Monday night, Attorney General Steve Marshall announced another lawsuit against the City Tuesday afternoon. Alabama’s secret prison plan puts public information into quarantine, It’s not the Alabama State House that needs replacing, As cases there lead state, Mobile mayor wants to reopen. This was not a new demand, either, and Johnson was not the first person to make it. And it didn't come down all through the Occupy protests nearly a decade ago and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of more recent years. "It started with Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, but George Floyd is the breaking point.". © 2021 Advance Local Media LLC. On Monday night, the city of Birmingham commenced the removal of one of Alabama’s most prominent physical memorials to its racist history. The cornerstone of the Monument plinth was laid during the 1894 Reunion of United Confederate Veterans on Confederate Decoration Day, April 26. Confederate Memorial Barrier Illegal, Alabama Supreme Court Says - Birmingham, AL - A barrier around a Confederate monument in Birmingham's Linn Park has been ruled illegal by … Only a few dozen protestors and interested folks showed up in the park on Monday afternoon and evening, but the force and scale of Sunday's events were enough to drive Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin to commit to bringing the memorial down by noon Tuesday. The obelisk was there through the entire tenure of Gov. It was a disaster. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin has made good on his promise by ordering the removal of one of Alabama’s most prominent Confederate monuments. As the sun set, more people trickled into the park. A statue of Charles Linn, a blockade runner in the Confederate navy and an early Birmingham industrialist after whom the park is named, was an early casualty. Tom Gordon/BirminghamWatch. Birmingham Age-Herald, April 27, 1905, p. 5. When it happened, the shift in the crowd was something I felt before I saw. If this town was 71% Jewish, we wouldn’t have a statue of Adolf Hitler.”. Our governor is better than your governor. The Linn Park statue honors the legacy of those who enslaved, tortured and murdered the ancestors of African-Americans, and it does so in a majority African American city that does not want it there, the city argued. Someone had set a fire at the statue’s feet. Someone shouted that they were going to Five Points, but the mass of people began to fracture a block or two away from the park and take detours down the city’s east/west avenues. For the last three years, the city and state have been in a legal battle over the monument in court, with state Attorney General Steve Marshall fighting to preserve it. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has demanded that the city of Birmingham pay a $25,000 fine for removing a Confederate statue in violation of … Somebody change the channel. And on Twitter. About halfway there, I saw the orange light reflecting off the county courthouse wall. A tall man with a baseball cap over his dreadlocks beat the base of the statue with a blunt side of an ax. City council members wanted Bell to tear the bleak statue down, but Bell sought to buy time and avoid attracting another hoard of neo-Confederates to Birmingham. Hundreds of onlookers abandoned their places around the Confederate monument and swarmed. The majority of veterans served in Alabama outfits, while others moved to Alabama after the war. Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall filed an anticipated lawsuit against the city of Birmingham over the city's removal of a Confederate monument. But I can tell you where it turned — the fire someone set at Thomas Jefferson’s feet. The possibility of removing the monument was implicit in the 1919 proposal by architects Frank Hartley Anderson, William Warren and Eugene Knight for a Memorial Civic Center that would serve as a comprehensive memorial with an emphasis on the recently-ended "Great War". Confederate army, their wives, and widows. Sunday evening my wife and I had just put our children to bed, and I was about to go on an evening grocery run when something seemed to be happening in Birmingham. As a black mayor running a major city in which over 70 percent of residents are African-American, Woodfin probably didn’t hurt his local political future much by presiding over this historic moment. 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