Madison’s Common Council unanimously approved an ordinance on Tuesday ordering the removal of two monuments honoring the Confederate soldiers buried in Forest Hill Cemetery on Madison’s west side.
The vote came after months of contentious debate over the monuments, starting in August 2017 when one of the two memorials was vandalized shortly after a deadly rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
The day after the vandalization, Mayor Paul Soglin ordered the monuments removed from the cemetery. Staff was able to remove the smaller of the two monuments, but the larger one was deemed too large for cemetery staff to remove. Soglin and city Parks Superintendent Eric Knepp decided at the time not to move forward with the removal of the larger monument without a better plan.
Several alders voiced their displeasure Tuesday with the presence of the monuments, with many of them labeling them as offensive to Madison’s African-American community. Ald. Barbara Harrington-McKinney, District 1, added no monuments existed to the slaves who had died.
“We can never wash away the history of what happened,” she said.
Additionally, Ald. Rebecca Kemble, District 18, highlighted the problems the Native American community had with the monument.
“[They] were appalled that we were considering the minutia of how to memorialize Confederate soldiers in a city that was built on the destruction of hundreds of burial mounds of their ancestors,” Kemble said.
Ald. Paul Skidmore, District 9, also mentioned that soldiers on both sides of the Civil War had been “hunting” Native Americans, who were not getting close to enough recognition for their suffering.
The Common Council’s decision to remove both monuments did not include a provision for adding a proposed additional display, which would function as an explanation for why the Confederate section of the cemetery exists, as well as a condemnation of the reasons for the existence of the monuments. An earlier vote to allow for this explanatory display failed by a vote of 13-5.
The larger monument was erected in 1906 by the Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that Soglin has called “racist and bigoted.” The monument lists the names of the 140 Confederate soldiers buried there, who had died as Union prisoners in Camp Randall. It also honors Alice Waterman, a southern woman who acted as a caretaker for the Confederate section of the cemetery for three decades.
The second, smaller monument was erected in 1981 and consists of a bronze plaque offering an explanation for the existence of the other monument. The second monument has been labeled by many as problematic for referring to the Confederate soldiers as “valiant” and “unsung heroes.” This phrasing is typical of the “Lost Cause” view of the Civil War which discounts slavery as one of the causes of the war, and instead glorifies the southern way of life.
During public hearing, Madison resident Kathleen Nichols spoke of her experiences visiting her family in Alabama, where most of the soldiers buried in Madison were from.
“The war ain’t over down there,” she said, adding that it was particularly important that the monuments be removed in 2018, the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. “I don’t care which museum you give them to.”
