Update: June 27, 2017, 4:30 p.m. Mayor Lyda Krewson announced that the the city has reached a settlement agreement with the Missouri Civil War Museum. The museum will store the monument until a permanent location is found and says it will remove the monument from Forest Park by June 30.
U.S. Representative Lacy Clay wants the Confederate Memorial out of Forest Park, and he’s taking his case to Mayor Francis Slay.
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“Now is the time to replace the Confederate Memorial, as iconic as it is controversial, from its perch in Forest Park,” Clay wrote in the letter, delivered to Slay Monday. “Divisive, alienating, racially charged symbols do not accurately represent the goodness and fullness of the people of the city of St. Louis.”
The memorial has become a target for racial equality advocates since June 17, when a white gunman allegedly shot up one of America’s oldest black churches and killed nine people in Charleston, South Carolina. Activists placed “Black Lives Matter” signs on the 32-foot, stone memorial that weekend, and last week vandals covered the memorial in red paint, confetti and two spray-painted messages: “F–k the Confederacy,” and “Black lives matter.”
See also: Mayor Slay: It’s Time to Rethink Confederate Monument in Forest Park
Clay said that the massacre in Charleston has “accelerated” national interest in removing Confederate symbols, including the Confederate flag, from the spotlight. Memorials across the country have been vandalized since the shooting, and a woman was arrested Sunday for climbing a flagpole and taking down the Confederate flag from in front of South Carolina’s capitol building.
“As similar discussions take place across the country, let us lead and influence how we are perceived by the world—as a force for good and in solidarity with those advocating racial healing,” Clay wrote. “It is not only time for a reappraisal of all public symbols that reflect upon the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery, but also time for removal. Symbols associated with this country’s racist, oppressive past should not be elevated or displayed in public places.”
Slay announced in April plans to reconsider the monument’s placement in Forest Park. For now, the memorial stands on a road called Confederate Drive, near a statue honoring German immigrants who fought for the Union during the Civil War.
Slay has tasked Eddie Roth, director of human services, to research the monument and decide whether it “should be accompanied by a description of the reality and brutality of slavery, over which the war was waged, including in this city, and the bitter badges of slavery, Jim Crow and de facto discrimination and segregation, that are its continuing legacy.”
The American, St. Louis’ weekly black newspaper, has also called for the memorial’s removal, preferably to the Missouri History Museum, also in Forest Park.
“The evils of racism, dating back to slavery, have traumatized our people and remain an entrenched part of our present reality,” the paper wrote in an editorial last week. “That is why this monument belongs, at best, in a museum…Move it—or, at least, start moving it—there. Move it now.”
Not everyone is keen to see the memorial go. Noted historic preservationist Michael Allen says he wants the memorial to stay—albeit with an explanation of its troubling history.
“I think the proper redress is not to yank down and hide the history of the more problematic side of the Civil War but to mark and celebrate the black history we often ignore and obscure in St. Louis,” Allen told SLM.
Maggie Crane, Slay’s spokeswoman, says she expects a decision on the memorial’s fate this summer, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Here’s the full letter:
