Mayor Paul Soglin says the gravesite of Confederate soldiers at Forest Hill Cemetery is being used as cover to “rewrite American history.” Known as the Confederate Rest, more than 100 rebel troops are buried at the city cemetery. Soglin says the site also contains a decades-old “slab of propaganda” paid for by a racist organization. “It’s time for education,” the mayor told reporters Monday.
“The larger monument at Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery is not a Civil War monument. It was installed over 60 years after the end of the war … when our city was inattentive to the new form of slavery propagated by the donors with the Black Codes,” Soglin said at the press conference, referring to laws that legalized discrimination against African Americans. “[It’s] a vicious neo-Confederate monument to racism and white superiority.”
The monument was purchased around 1930 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which Soglin calls a white supremacy group. He says the organization erected Confederate monuments around the country decades after the Civil War, as part of a propaganda effort to “retell the story of the South,” which helped perpetuate “economic enslavement of blacks” through Jim Crow laws. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, based in Virginia, did not return Isthmus’ request for comment.
The stone monument at Forest Hill lists the names of the Confederate soldiers buried at the site as well as the name of the group. The mayor is calling on the Common Council to take one of three actions: Remove the monument from city property; let it stand but remove the words “United Daughters of the Confederacy”; or put up another monument that would bring “exposure to the lies.”
“We have a century of lying and propaganda to combat which has shaped this nation in the most tragic way,” Soglin said. “[The United Daughters of the Confederacy] has spread [its] false history beyond the boundaries of [its] own states. This ghastly, racist organization was able to sneak into our lives and into our city and into our cemetery.”
The Confederate Rest is the northernmost Confederate cemetery in the country, containing the bodies of soldiers who died while imprisoned at Camp Randall. On Aug. 16, the mayor ordered city staff to remove a plaque, installed in 1981, that described the Confederate soldiers as “valiant” and “unsung heroes.” Soglin’s order came following a clash in Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacist groups and counter-protesters over the effort to remove a Robert E. Lee statue. One woman was killed when a man drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Soglin says he was justified in removing the small plaque.
“It is clear that it is not part of the cemetery,” Soglin said. “In fact, when it was put in, it was in violation of the sanctity of the site.”
Not everyone is pleased with Soglin’s call to “remove evidence of racist historical revisionism.” His office received around 100 calls after the small plaque was removed, most in opposition. But Katie Crawley, deputy mayor, says “the majority were also from area codes other than 608.”
Conservative blogger David Blaska, a former member of the Dane County Board, says the mayor has a “bad case of me too-ism” and is glomming onto the broader, national movement to remove Confederate monuments in cities across the country. He says the mayor “doesn’t want to let Charlottesville have all the fun.”
“The way the mayor talks, these ladies snuck into the cemetery at night and put up a big stone. No, I rather think they received city permission,” Blaska wrote in an email to alders and the mayor. “Where is the justification of slavery? What history is being ’rewritten’ at Forest Hill?”
At the council’s Sept. 5 meeting, the mayor will introduce a resolution charging the Common Council with deciding the fate of the larger monument at the Confederate Rest. The first public hearing on the matter will likely take place at a joint meeting of the city’s Parks Commission and Landmarks Commission.
M Adams, co-executive director of Freedom Inc., supports the recent scrutiny of Confederate monuments. Madison may be far from the Mason-Dixon line, but Adams says the city is in denial about its “historic and current support” of racism.
“Not only do we have white supremacy monuments in Madison, we are home to some of the worst racial disparities in the world,” Adams says. “I think right now is time when we have got to find courage. I’m quite confident that we can continue to move this country towards the arch of justice.”
