Three Madison city commissions, joined by Mayor Paul Soglin, will meet Tuesday to decide what to do about two Confederate monuments at Forest Hill Cemetery that have drawn criticism and dispute.
The monuments, located at a part of the cemetery called Confederate’s Rest, were erected at different times, the first and larger of the two in 1906 and the second in 1981.
The larger monument was created in part by fundraising efforts by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization founded in 1894 that works to retain historical monuments of the Confederacy.
One of their goals from their website is, “to honor the memory of those who served and those who fell in the service of the Confederate States of America.”
But last August the monuments were vandalized with the words, “Good Night White Pride” spray-painted across the front of the monument.
In the wake of the incident, Soglin asked for both monuments to be removed. Cemetery staff were able to remove the smaller monument quickly but didn’t have the equipment to move the larger monument immediately.
Soglin and Parks Commissioner Eric Knepp decided it wasn’t prudent to remove the larger monument without a complete plan.
Days after the vandalism, Soglin condemned the monument and provided context in a press release.
“The larger monument at Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery is not a Civil War monument,” he wrote. “It was installed over sixty years after the end of the war. It is 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 city had previously updated its policy regarding the flying of the Confederate flag in the park, barring service members from flying the flag on Memorial and Veterans Day.
In 2016, in a short summary at the request of Ald. Marsha Rummel, District 6, city attorney Michael P. May said the city should in fact update its policies regarding Confederate monuments.
“The policies are inconsistent and out of date in light of legal rulings on government property and the First Amendment,” he wrote.
City officials followed through with the suggestion disallowing the flying of the Confederate flag at the cemetery which had been permitted for service members on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Officials also clarified rules regarding the size of flags on individual gravestones and acceptable decorations.
Scrutiny over Confederate monuments has heightened over the last year after protests in Charlottesville over a statue of Robert E. Lee boiled over, resulting in one death.
On Tuesday, the commissions will consider three options for the two statues:
1. Whether to take down and permanently remove the two Lost Cause monuments.
2. Whether to leave the monuments in place but alter the messages contained therein.
3. Whether to leave one or both of the Lost Cause monuments in the Cemetery but erect a new monument providing detail of the false narrative of the Lost Cause and the role these monuments play in that effort.
