Missouri Lawmakers Spar Over Confederate Monuments

ST. LOUIS, MO — Two Missouri lawmakers, two radically divergent proposals for the future of Confederate monuments. The Post-Dispatch reports Democratic Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, who represents St. Louis, and Republican Rep. Warren Love, who represents Osceola, have introduced competing bills to address mounting controversy raised by the presence of monuments to Confederate soldiers on public grounds.

"Our country is polarized due to systemic racism," Nasheed said. "It's time for those confederate flags and monuments to go where they belong, in a museum." Her bill would prohibit the state from selling or displaying the Confederate flag unless it appears in a book or for educational or historical purposes. It also requires state-owned monuments and plaques that "commemorate any individual or sovereign entity that engaged in military action against the United States" to be transferred to a memorial park in Higginsville where more than 800 Missourians who fought for the Confederate cause are buried.

(BREAKING: Travel site Fodor has added Missouri to a list of places to avoid, citing discrimination, racism and violence.)

Love's bill — the Missouri Veterans' Heritage Protection Act, does the opposite. It prohibits any state or municipal agency from relocating, renaming or modifying any historic military monument without holding a public hearing and receiving approval from the Missouri Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

Love said he is trying to create a process to address the monuments, not "carve out anything that can't be done." But, he added, "I would not be in favor of going around the state and rounding up monuments placed by people who were honored because of serving their state."

Love's bill also makes vandalizing a Confederate monument a felony. He went further in a Facebook post over the summer, seeming to promote lynching for people who are caught vandalizing confederate monuments. "This is totally against the law," he wrote. "I hope they are found & hung from a tall tree with a long rope."

Lynching has long been a tactic of terror and racial intimidation in the American South, often used to prevent black Americans from voting or organizing. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists and people who had escaped slavery were hanged with little accountability. During Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights era, the Tuskegee Institute counted almost 5,000 lynchings in 12 Southern states, many perpetrated under the guise of vigilante justice.

Love said his ancestors — who fought on both sides of the war — did not fight for or against slavery, but rather for their states. But, Nasheed and other critics of state-sanctioned Confederate monuments point to slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, citing the Confederacy's own founding documents.

The Confederate states' declarations of succession all mention slavery as their primary reason for leaving the Union. Texas, for example, cited the abolition of slavery and racial equality —calling it a debasing doctrine — as its reasons for breaking with the United States.

William Thompson, a southern newspaperman and the designer of the Confederacy's second national flag, which incorporated the battle flag of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia — what is now popularly called the Confederate flag — in its upper left, wrote in a series of editorials explaining what the new flag symbolized:

As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematic of our cause. Upon a red field would stand forth our southern cross, gemmed with the stars of our confederation, all combined, preserving in beautiful contrast the red, white and blue.

Or, consider Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' famous "Cornerstone Speech."

[Our new government's] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based up on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

"Let's put that history behind us," Nasheed said, adding that if it was politically feasible she would go further and have the monuments destroyed. Though Republicans control the state house, she said she expects her bill to pass, because "it's the right thing to do."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Photo: People stage a re-enactment of a mid-19th century slave auction January 15, 2011, in downtown St. Louis. Some 150 re-enactors participated in the mock-auction on the steps of the city's Old Courthouse, as the first commemorative event in Missouri marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. With other sesquicentennial events in the South emphasizing 'states rights' as the cause of the conflict, organizers in St. Louis said they held the educational event because they wanted to stress slavery as the central issue of the war. Before the war, St. Louis, with its location on the Mississippi River, had been a primary hub for the sale and movement of slaves. The U.S. Civil War, which lasted from 1861-1865, resulted in the death of more than 600,000 Americans, more than in all of the country's other wars combined. (John Moore/News/Getty Images)