Florence City Council Votes to Suppress the Truth About Their Confederate Statue

By: Kevin M. Levin

Published: Jan. 21, 2026

The issue at hand for the Florence (Alabama) City Council this week was not whether their Confederate statue would be removed. That question had essentially been settled by the state when it passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017, which which restricts removal or relocation of monuments older than 40 years without state approval and imposes penalties for unauthorized alteration.

Rather, the question for the city council was whether a historical marker or plaque providing context would be placed on site to help residents and visitors better understand its history.

The push for the historical marker was largely the work of activists in Project Say Something, who for years called for the statue to be removed.

The vote against the measure demonstrates a conscious attempt on the part of city council members to cover up the statue’s history and purpose. It’s a reminder that white Alabamians were more honest about why they had gathered on the courthouse grounds in 1903 to dedicate the statue than their descendants, who claim to defend them.

Discussion about creating a Confederate memorial in Florence began in 1876, more than a decade after the end of the Civil War. Local women’s groups such as the Ladies Memorial Association took the lead in fundraising efforts to honor Confederate soldiers from Lauderdale County who had died during the war.

For many years the project faltered due to financial difficulties. By the early 1880s only the base of the monument had been completed. Community newspapers critiqued the unfinished stone as a poor representation of the community’s respect for its war dead.

Fundraising continued sporadically through the following two decades. By the late 1890s, local chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy joined the effort and helped to finish the work. Finally, nearly thirty years after it began, the statue was completed and installed.

It depicted a Confederate private with his rifle lowered, symbolizing the return of peace, and stood atop a pedestal carved with inscriptions honoring the Confederate dead, including the Latin motto “Deo Vindice” (“With God as our defender”). The statue was officially unveiled on April 25, 1903—Confederate Memorial Day—at a large ceremony attended by thousands of residents, featuring speeches, music, and reenactments.

Here is the proposed text for the marker:

Front: Following the devastating human losses incurred during the Civil War, communities across the nation sought ways to honor their dead. In the decades immediately after the war, monuments were often funerary and located in spaces set aside for mourning, such as cemeteries. The majority of Confederate monuments, however, were erected later, in the years between the 1890s and the 1930s, coinciding with the end of Reconstruction and the spread of white supremacist policies known as Jim Crow laws. In Alabama, Jim Crow laws were codified when the state constitution was rewritten in 1901 to disenfranchise Black citizens. These later Confederate monuments were often strategically placed at public sites, such as in front of courthouses or capitol buildings, to convey the permanence and prevailing power of white supremacy.

Nothing here is historically controversial or problematic.

Back: The Confederate Monument that stands in front of the Lauderdale County Courthouse used to stand on the southwest corner of Court and Tennessee Streets, where the first two courthouse buildings stood. The Ladies Memorial Association and the Florence chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy funded the statue. On April 26, 1903, Dr. H.A. Moody of Mobile, Alabama, delivered the dedication speech for the Confederate monument in Lauderdale County. Addressing a crowd of an estimated 5,000 people, he said that the monument stood to memorialize “the Confederate soldier” and “all that soldier stood for.” He then said, “And yet another message has that pure white figure for us, a message more wonderful and of higher import than all the rest. In this our southland flows the purest Anglo-Saxon blood that pulses in any human veins,” and “nowhere here [are Black people] accorded social equality.” The monument was moved to its current location in front of the third Lauderdale County Courthouse when it was constructed in 1965.

Moody also referenced national racial politics in his address, criticizing a White House dinner where President Theodore Roosevelt included Booker T. Washington as a social equal—saying that such interactions “digs a gulf between us too wide and too deep for us to go to them, or for them to come to us.”

Another address reportedly referred to Reconstruction as a period of “misrule” and warned against the political participation of formerly enslaved people.

Had the statue been completed in the 1870s or even early 1880s, the dedication ceremony may have been more focused on commemorating the dead and concluded without any disturbing references to “Anglo-Saxon blood” and references to white supremacy. But as the proposed marker description correctly notes, this statue was not unveiled during the immediate postwar years—at a time when dedications took place in cemeteries—but roughly fifty years later.

This is a wonderful example of how white southerners linked a generation that had not experienced the Civil War and Reconstruction with their parents and grandparents, who had fought for four years to create an independent slaveholding republic. The dedication served as a rallying cry and a reminder to all white residents in the community of their responsibility to maintain the racial status quo established under Jim Crow law.

While it is true that the city of Florence and communities throughout Alabama have been prevented by state law to determine the fate of their monuments and statues on public ground, the question of whether residents deserve to know the truth remains. For whatever reason, the city council decided that it would be better to suppress the statue’s history than to educate its citizens.

Between the actions at the state level and that of the city council, they have all but guaranteed that the controversy will continue.