Nicole Raz
WMAL
WASHINGTON (WMAL) — After the Charleston shootings earlier this summer, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett ordered the confederate statue outside Rockville’s courthouse to be moved immediately. Months later, the city’s Historic District Commission will vote Thursday whether the county can move it to the city’s Beall Dawson Historic Park.
“While not specific of the time period, it is a historic property,” says Montgomery County’s General Services Director David Dise. “And there is a nice park adjacent to the property–so those that want to still see that statue still remain in Rockville and be in a historic setting, this would be a suitable location for that.”
The Beall Dawson Historic Park would also meet Montgomery County’s NAACP’s request that the statue be removed from county property.
“It is an appropriate compromise to a situation that is growing increasingly intolerable,” says Elbridge James, a Montgomery County NAACP spokesman. ”
Courthouses are supposed to be a palace where everybody receives fair and equitable justice, and having a confederate statue there sends a contradictory message, James said.
“The confederate solider, to us, does not stand for freedom, or equality, or for justice under the law,” he said.
If the Commission allows the move, then Montgomery county officials will have to get the green light from the Rockville City Council to place the statue inside the Beall Dawson lot, since the land is owned by the city.
“We believe that there is space on that site–a couple of options–to locate the statue there,” Dise said.
The county will hire a contractor and landscaper to get the job done; Dise said the county has already received estimates ranging from $25,000 to $50,000.
“As a Montgomery County taxpayer, it’s not how I’d like to see our dollars spent,” said Matt Logan, Executive Director of the Montgomery County Historical Society. “We’re spending a lot of money to fix something that had never been a problem, and yet has– through some hasty action–become a problem.”
Logan says the Beall Dawson House is not ideal, because “there just aren’t good spots for 18-foot-tall, bronze, confederate statues. In the era that it was erected, there were a whole lot of them that were put up in courthouse squares across the country.”
Logan added that it is also “awkward” to try to fit a 1913 statue in a civil-war era style lot.
“The compromise solution is what we call the West Lot that’s on Middle Lane. That’s in a neighborhood, and if the statue needs to face south, that means it’s going to be looking directly into trees, and beyond the trees into the backyards of a couple of residences. And its back, or its butt, basically will be facing the public and the people on Middle Lane.”
James told WMAL that if the county decides to respect the outdated and offensive traditions of the past and chooses to face the statue southward on that particular spot, then it’s keeping the offensive symbolism of the statue alive–“separatism, white supremacy, white power”–and its more than “appropriate” to have a butt-facing-public statue.
“The necessity of having that statue face the south is a slap at the Republic, and if that caveat has to be maintained then there are consequences for that caveat,” James said.
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