‘Save Our South’ group sues Birmingham to keep Confederate memorial in city park

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August 20, 2015

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — An Alabama group calling themselves ‘Save the South,’ announced a lawsuit against the City of Birmingham Thursday for the Parks and Recreation board’s decision to remove a Civil War memorial in Linn Park, downtown.

“We are taking the first steps to protect history for future generations here in Birmingham. Since we can’t reason with the City, the only way to represent the people of Birmingham and Alabama is in a court of law,” said Save Our South attorney Melvin Hasting on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse.

Funded and erected by the Pelham chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy on April 26, 1905, the monument has remained in place through the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement, and in the 50 years since the Voting Rights Act.

In the fallout of the Charleston Shootings, when a white supremacist who waved the Confederate battle flag and burned the American flag in photos found after his arrest shot and killed 9 African Americans in a South Carolina church, vestiges of honor or remembrance of the Confederacy are being threatened with removal from public property.

Leadership in Birmingham says the monuments themselves have no place on city land.

“My personal opinion is any monument that commemorates the tradition of slavery , the tradition of suppression of a race should be removed,” Birmingham Mayor William Bell told reporters in July.

During the first Special Session, Senator Gerald Allen (R-Cullman), sponsored a bill that would “prohibit the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, rededication, or other disturbance of any statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, or plaque located on public property that has been erected for, or named, or dedicated in honor of certain historical military, civil rights, and Native American events, figures, and organizations.”

The bill did not pass both houses of the Alabama Legislature.

Mr. Hasting also sued Governor Robert Bentley (R-AL), the Alabama Historical Commission, and its acting executive director Lisa Jones last month for removing of the Confederate Flag from the State Capitol grounds.