Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has concluded that the City of Mobile’s decision to move a statue of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes from its prominent downtown location into a museum is a violation of the 2017 Alabama Memorial Preservation Act.
Marshall said the City of Mobile has agreed to pay the penalty for not obeying the act: a one time fine of $25,000.
“[T]he facts surrounding the removal and a plain reading of the law led me to determine that the Act was violated. After being notified of that determination, the City has agreed to pay the required fine of $25,000 without a court order,” wrote Marshall in a statement on Monday.
Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson first ordered the statue taken down on June 5 amidst unrest stemming from the death of George Floyd.
Stimpson’s office said at the time the removal was temporary, but on Sunday the mayor announced that the statue of Semmes has been permanently moved into the Mobile Museum of History at his direction.
The museum is about half a block away from where the statue stood for over 120 years in downtown Mobile.
Semmes became popular in the Mobile area while stationed there as a member of the U.S. Navy after he served in the Mexican-American War. He took up an offer to join the Confederacy in 1861 and remained a defender of the cause after the south lost.
The popular downtown hotel “The Admiral” is named after him, as well as the town of Semmes in western Mobile County.
Advocates for removal of Confederate statues have increased in recent weeks following a ratcheting up of racial tensions across the United States.
“I have no doubt that moving the statue from public display was the right thing to do for our community going forward. The values represented by this monument a century ago are not the values of Mobile in 2020,” wrote Stimpson as part of his explanation for taking down the statue.
Stimpson said over the weekend that he consulted with lawyers and believed moving the monument into a museum where it would remain visible to the public did not violate the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act.
However, the City of Mobile on Monday entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the attorney general’s office that the city would pay the fine for the statue’s removal in order to put an end to the issue.
Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: [email protected] or on Twitter @HenryThornton95
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