On Wednesday, the Hillsborough County Commission voted to bar the removal of Memoria en Aeterna, a statue installed in downtown Tampa in 1911 during the Jim Crow era — unless advocates for its removal can raise more than $130,000 to cover part of the costs for its removal within 30 days.
Adding insult to injury for civil rights advocates, a later vote designated pro-Confederate activist David McCallister to a council that supposedly aims to promote diversity.
Passage of the measures — which Commissioners Pat Kemp and Les Miller opposed (Al Higginbotham, who joined them in past votes, was absent) — followed a tense discussion.
Miller, who first brought the issue to the commission in June, expressed skepticism about the motive behind the motion. He suggested it was a back-door way to keep the statue in place.
"Hillsborough County, the progressive county we are, will let a Confederate monument stay while everyone else is taking theirs down. I will be highly surprised if we are able to raise those dollars in 30 days. I don't think we will. I think that monument will stay," Miller said, according to Fox 13.
There are multiple GoFundMe accounts that aim to raise the money, and this one has raised the most.
Commissioner Victor Crist, who proposed the motion to ask the private sector to raise enough money to cover half its removal, expressed confidence that citizens would step up. Crist had previously been on the fence about the monument's removal. In June, he voted to keep the monument in place, albeit with a work of art celebrating diversity in the background. He later said he supported its removal, but was out of town for the July vote in which four commissioners supported its removal.
In response to Wednesday's actions, civil rights advocates are planning a press conference to lay out their response to the latest reversal, calling Wednesday's vote "an act of cowardice and pandering to the very white supremacist, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate extremists condemned in recent days by a broad, bipartisan spectrum of Americans."
They compared the actions of Commissioners Crist, Ken Hagan, Sandy Murman and Stacy White to those of the white supremacists whose gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia led to violence and even death last weekend, people whose actions and beliefs are objectively wrong and destructive.
This article appears in Aug 10-17, 2017.