TAVARES, Fla. (AP) - A Florida county with a fraught racial history is having second thoughts about housing a Confederate statue at a tax-supported historical museum at a time when Confederate monuments across the U.S. have been removed.
Lake County officials said Tuesday they will ask the state to find a more appropriate place for the statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith.
Lake County commissioners last year endorsed moving the statue to a historic courthouse in Tavares, which houses the Lake County Historical Society northwest of Orlando.
The statue of the Confederate general has been in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. But it was set to become homeless this year because Florida lawmakers requested that it be replaced with one of Mary McLeod Bethune. The new statute of the African American educator and civil rights advocate will be moved to the National Statuary Hall this year.
“It needs to go into a museum,” Commission Chairman Leslie Campione, said of the Confederate statue at a meeting Tuesday, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “Just not in our historic museum. … It is not the right museum for this particular artifact.”
Lake County was home to the Groveland Four, African American men accused of raping a white woman in a 1949 case now seen as a one of Florida’s most egregious miscarriages of justice. Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s three-member Cabinet granted posthumous pardons to the Groveland Four.
Confederate monuments across the country have fallen in recent years amid contentious debate over whether they are proud monuments to Southern heritage or hated symbols of racism and past slavery. The debate has escalated anew in the nationwide protests over police misconduct and racism after the death of George Floyd at police hands in Minnesota.
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