Georgia lawmaker wants to preserve Confederate monuments

ATLANTA -- Across Georgia, the view from many courthouses or other public buildings includes a soldier sculpted in metal or stone.

Some older monuments honor those who owned slaves, fought for the Confederacy or followed other causes long since condemned or abandoned.

And there are lawmakers who say it's important that those monuments don't disappear.

"This keeps monuments from being subjected to political correctness," state Rep. Tommie Benton, R-Jefferson, said of his House Bill 50, which says military monuments, including Confederate statues, cannot be taken down and stored out of the public eye.

If they need to be moved for some reason, such as expanding a building, they would need to be set back up in a place of equal prominence.

Benton does not want to see the monuments of one era taken down just because the subjects seem less than heroic to some people today.

"The political correctness can go all the way back to the Revolutionary War," Benton said. For example, he noted that Democrats in many states have dropped the names of slave owners Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson from traditional fundraising dinners.

"I don't know of anybody today who thinks slavery was the right thing to do, but it was legal back then," Benton said. "People leave behind something of their past or commemorate their past so that their history will not be forgotten."

One of his co-sponsors, state Rep. Debbie Buckner, D-Junction City, said although there are things not to like about some figures memorialized with a monument, removing them would leave gaps in the larger historical story.

"But there's nothing to keep us from adding to the story and telling the whole story over time, and that's what I would prefer rather than just removing them," she said.

But former Macon Mayor C. Jack Ellis disagrees.

He wants the Macon-Bibb County Commission to vote to remove Confederate memorials downtown, like the statue at Cotton Avenue and Second Street. He said Macon-Bibb needs to follow the example of New Orleans, where city leaders last year voted to remove four Confederate statues from a public square.

Such monuments are divisive, Ellis said, and do not belong in Macon-Bibb's prominent public places. He thinks they should be placed in museum settings, such as the antebellum Cannonball House grounds.

"We're not taking away history. We're just moving it somewhere. You can still preserve your history, you can still pay tribute to your great-grandfather, your great-great grandfather who served in the war, ... but we can also agree that they were fighting for a bad cause," Ellis said.

Last year, North Carolina's governor signed a bill that requires any monument, including controversial Confederate ones, that a city or county wants to move be reinstalled in an equally prominent place.

In that state, the Senate passed the bill easily, while in the House, it passed over mostly Democrat objections.

Back in Georgia, Benton's bill passed the House Committee on State Properties last year, though it needs to go back this year for procedural reasons. He said he expects the measure to pass again, and he predicts it could be scheduled as early as this week.

But it's not clear that it will go any further.

"This is the fourth year that I've been trying to get this bill passed," Benton said.

He also wants an amendment to the state Constitution barring anyone from ever removing the monumental carving of Confederate leaders from Stone Mountain, part of a park outside Atlanta.

Benton and several co-signers filed House Resolution 1179 that would set up a public referendum on that question. Benton also has four co-signers on House Bill 855 to set Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday and Confederate Memorial Day as state holidays. Those two dates, Jan. 19 and April 26, already are on Georgia's list of official state holidays this year, but they are listed simply as unspecified holidays.

To contact writer Maggie Lee, e-mail mlee@macon.com.

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 5:07 PM with the headline "Georgia lawmaker wants to preserve Confederate monuments ."