Repeal Florida laws honoring Confederate flag, holidays : politics

“It shall also be unlawful for any person, firm, or corporation to mutilate, deface, defile, or contemptuously abuse the flag or emblem of Florida or the flag or emblem of the Confederate States by any act whatever.”

Unbelievable. Written in 1961, a century after the start of the Civil War and a few years before the Voting Act of 1964, this shows how the Confederate flag got more protection than the voting rights of Black people. And what is even more mind-twisting is

this statute is still on the books.

Also on the Florida books are the Confederate Memorial Day on April 26 and the birthdays of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In 2017, Democrat State Sen. Lauren Book (D-Plantation) filed SB 224, a bill that would end the recognition of these holidays. But the bill was indefinitely postponed and died in the committee.

In 1925, the United Daughters of the Confederacy gifted the Gamble Mansion and Plantation, near Sarasota, to the state of Florida in memory of Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. In 1970, this memorial, then as a state park, applied for historic space status at the National Registry.

…the idea that a former slave plantation, as a shrine, as a state park, is being used to memorialize the Confederacy, with taxpayers’ funds, with descendants of African slaves’ tax dollars, reflects a serious breach of moral accountability.