Jacksonville’s Democrat mayor celebrates removing women’s history statue

Wednesday’s “celebration” in Jacksonville, Florida, where recently elected Mayor Donna Deegan unilaterally tore down two bronze post-Civil War statues that leftists had deemed racist, was Orwellian politics at its worst.

The statues were collectively named “Tribute to the Women of Southern Confederacy and included a robed woman carrying a Confederate flag and a woman reading to two children, which had stood for more than a century in the now renamed “Confederate Park. This tribute was to the women of the Southland who courageously took the places of their husbands, brothers, and sons who left to fight in the Civil War and often were killed, for taking on their jobs and the care of their families by themselves.

Women from the South, whatever you may think of their original cause, became engaged in public life and family caretaking as a result of the war. After the war, some founded the organization, United Daughters of the Confederacy, to honor the memory of their relatives in the Confederacy and eventually to support U.S. troops and veterans of all subsequent U.S. wars as national reconciliation took hold.

The Southland women’s intention was to “tell of the glorious fight against the greatest odds a nation ever faced, that their hallowed memory should never die.”

Nevertheless, Marxist radicals have had it in for them for a while. They burned down the UDC headquarters in Richmond during the George Floyd “peaceful protests.” Wednesday’s statue removal has come now, which effectively dehumanized the Southern women honored, with their memories erased in a single afternoon.

Though the Civil War ended in 1865, and the community had healed enough to erect a commissioned memorial honoring Southland women in 1915, the site was one of several historic monuments that the George Floyd era’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists had demanded be removed. Donors to the leftist organization 904WARD, and the Jessie Ball duPont Fund (headed up by globalist and Harvard graduate, Mari Kuraishi,) funded the statue to be removed, but “not erased,” whatever that means.

Eradicating the statue was done to appease the Marxist groups who continue indoctrinating the nation with chants of systemic racism and teach public schools to view the country through the segregating lens of Critical Race Theory.

But, removing a historic piece of architecture that symbolizes a historic era, and the image of a traditional moment of a Southland mother reading a book to her children, is offensive to a lot of people. Some of them may be from unlikely quarters, such as survivors of the murderous Communist Mao Zedong who indoctrinated China’s citizens to hate their traditions and history, and erased history significantly there, utilizing his Red Guard, (just as the American Marxist thugs), to destroy anything misaligned with communist ideas, be it books or statues.

To state the obvious, the women’s memorial annihilator, Mayor Deegan, is a socialist Democrat, and her revisionist history tactic of thoughtlessly destroying anything that does not appear go along with woke-leftist ideology is reminiscent of Mao’s era.

The people at Wednesday’s ceremony received Deegan’s Pravda-like gaslighting, including her statement that she is not trying to “erase history”– while she was literally erasing history in front of their eyes — by removing the statue.

Deegan’s rhetoric about “humanity” was also baffling, considering she was removing a women’s movement commemoration, and she herself was a winner of womens’ organization awards, such as Jacksonville Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award, and the Enterprising Women’s Leadership Award. So to desecrate a statue symbolizing the courage of honored wives, mothers, and daughters of the Southland, who were antecedents to the women leaders in her party, illuminates Democrats’ hypocrisy

Finally, the women who were erased in the statue removal had vested their hearts and souls into what they believed was a good purpose. and they had mourned their “lost cause”  for an autonomous South.  

Regardless what anyone thinks, the statues’ removal does erase Southern heritage. Instead of honestly appreciating history whatever it may be, and honoring the eventual social progress that followed, as well as hailing women’s strength and courage throughout our country’s history, they tore down all evidence of that in the statues.

Not everyone wants that. An opponent to the monument’s removal, state Rep. Dean Black, (R-Jacksonville) who blasted Deegan’s “stunning abuse of power,” pointed out that Deegan, as many Democrats do, executed decisions without consulting city leaders or by holding a vote by the city council. He added that her overreach, “is another in a long line of woke Democrats’ obsession with cancel culture and tearing down history.”

Rep. Black filed legislation for the 2022 and then the 2023 legislative session to block cities from removing Confederate and other historical memorials in Florida. The (HB 395)  would give Gov. Ron DeSantis the means to admonish any state official who would unilaterally take down historic memorials. The bill says that “an accurate and factual history belongs to all Floridians and future generations and the state has an obligation to protect and preserve such history.”

Another proactive voice illuminating Deegan’s subservience to anti-American organizations such as BLM, is Jacksonville Sheriff ,T.K. Waters who supported Republican candidate Daniel Davis in the mayoral race.

It seems Republicans, just as Lincoln who eliminated the historic Democrats’ Confederate way of life in the first place, would like to keep historical monuments in place as a reminder of how far we have come as a nation, and that we can accept and embrace history, whatever it is, because it is the truth and not a fabrication of some imaginary Utopia as communism or the current woke culture which in time will another Lost Cause.

Image: Screen shot from News4JAX video, via YouTube