Alabama high school alumni raising funds to remove Confederate memorial

Published 12:30 pm Thursday, June 4, 2020

ATHENS, Ala. – A group of Athens, Alabama High School graduates are raising funds in an attempt to show community residents are ready to remove a Confederate monument from the Limestone County Courthouse lawn.

The removal of Confederate monuments has been in the spotlight across the country. In Alabama, the 2017 Alabama Memorial Preservation Act made it a crime for monuments older than 40 years to be disturbed, with the city of Birmingham facing two $25,000 fines after a 115-year-old Confederate memorial in Charles Linn Park was removed.

In less than 23 hours, a GoFundMe page set up by White Clergy for Black Lives Matter raised $60,000 to cover the city’s fines. Now, a separate GoFundMe, this time set up by a group of Athens High graduates, is seeking to show Limestone County residents are willing to do the same.

“Athens always taught us to be leaders and not followers,” said Nicholas Pickett, who graduated in 2006. “If we think something is wrong, be a voice and stand up for what’s right.”

Pickett lives in Birmingham now, but he considers Athens his hometown and still has family in the area.

“Having them drive by (the monument) every day is just a stark reminder” of the area’s history of slavery and racism, he said.

“To have that monument there is like telling us black people to stay in our place and conform. I understand history and people’s argument that we need to see history to avoid repeating it, but I don’t think that history needs to be displayed downtown,” Pickett said.

Madeline Burkhardt, a white Athens High graduate who helped set up the GoFundMe, echoed the sentiment.

“There is no reason for a Confederate monument or memorial to be on the grounds where you conduct business and government,” she said. “They aren’t our government.”

The monument was originally placed in 1909, four years after the Linn Park monument in Birmingham. The first statue, however, featured a soldier with his head tilted downward, which many at the time said reminded them too much of the recent defeat.

That monument was moved to the city cemetery, where its lowered gaze could illustrate grief instead, and a new statue was ordered. That statue remains today on the northeast corner of the courthouse lawn with its head held high.

Burkhardt, who lives in Montgomery, said the statue is better suited for the Alabama Veterans Museum & Archives in Athens, where it can continue to represent Confederate veterans.

“We don’t need to erase our history at all, no matter how gruesome or upsetting it is,” Burkhardt said. “… It is a veteran of war and it’s meant to represent veterans of that war, so it would be a better place for that statue.”

Their goal is to approach the Limestone County Commission after the funds have been raised to show not only do people support the monument’s removal from the courthouse lawn, they are willing to cover any fine the county may face as a result. Supporters can visit https://bit.ly/2U7j7v8 to contribute.

Carl Jones, division commander for the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the statue should stay where it is. Where supporters have said the statue was placed during the Jim Crow era as a threat to black Americans, Jones, a white veteran from Cullman, said it was set up that far after the end of the Civil War because that’s when women who lost their husbands and sons in the war were able to raise the money needed to pay for the statue.

“What these monuments represented to them was memorials and literal headstones or gravestones for all those soldiers who never came back,” Jones said. He compared removing the statue to desecrating a family grave.

He said he that history should be preserved by keeping Confederate memorials where they are, not moving them to museums and risking a total erasure of that portion of Alabama history.

“I know there are people out there that don’t like aspects of our history, and I get that, I understand it,” Jones said, adding he would be just as against white supremacists calling for the removal of civil rights monuments. “I think (removing a monument is) wrong, because history is what it is, and we’ve got to respect it.”

Wilbert Woodruff, president of the Limestone County NAACP, said the chapter is “absolutely” in support of it being removed from the courthouse lawn and reckons state and national divisions would be equally in support.

“Historical relics have their places,” he said. “… People like me should not be reminded every time we come to The Square of how people fought to enslave my ancestors.”

Jessica Barnett is a reporter for The Athens News Courier. Email jessica@athensnews-courier.com.