The Soldiers’ Monument that stands at the intersection of College Avenue and Broad Street in Downtown Athens is being constructed on Aug. 9, 2020 to later be moved. The monument lists the names of Athens-Clarke County Confederate soldiers who died during the Civil War. “It was at least five years ago when I was on the commission that many of us, myself included, promoted an effort to move (the monument). The way social movements work is that there becomes this growing momentum and this sort of group understanding, and that understanding just is greater now (after the recent rise of Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country),” ACC Mayor Kelly Girtz said. “As mayor, I just definitively told the county attorney, ‘We’re going to figure out how to move it. Give me the best plan, and we’re going to go with it.’” Photo by Dalila Tejada
At a Special Called Session on June 25, 2020, the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission approved the movement of the Confederate monument, formally known as the Soldiers’ Monument, that stood at the intersection of College Avenue and Broad Street.
The monument commemorates the soldiers of ACC who died on behalf of the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1872, the Ladies’ Memorial Association raised money to build the monument, which originally stood at the intersection of College Avenue and Washington Street. It was relocated to College Avenue and Broad Street in 1912, until it’s most recent movement on Aug. 11, 2020.
“That obelisk was erected by one of the most notorious propagandists for white supremacy and her name was Mildred Rutherford. Her mother raised the money to build the monument and her mother was the sister of Civil War Confederate General Thomas Cobb — a well known slave owning family in the late 1800’s,” ACC Mayor Pro Tempore Russell Edwards said. “She gave speeches all over the place and would work to incorporate her view of history into the curriculum for American history all across the south. So when you think about all of the little boys and girls who for decades and decades and decades, all through probably up until 1980, 1970, read this perversed view of Southern history — that slavery was benevolant and the civil war was just — it begins to make sense how we’ve been dealing with racism and white supremacy for so long, because these ideas have been passed on very deliberatly through the formalized education of our children.”
To many Athens locals, the monument represents the causes of slavery, promotes white supremacy and is intended to do more than just remember the fallen.
“It was a monument to the Confederate dead in Athens, but it’s not really a Civil War monument because it doesn’t actually have any of the Union dead from Athens. So Black soldiers who fought for the Union, White soldiers who fought for the Union, there are even officers who died who are from Athens, but they weren’t mentioned in the monument,” University of Georgia Athletics Association Professor of History Scott Nelson said. “So it’s really not a monument to the war, it’s a monument to the Confederates. The people who are connected to it are the people who are also connected to the (Ku Klux) Klan – that’s the thing that most irritated me about the monument is that the people who paid for it and who talked about it when it was erected were associated with the Klan and saw it as a kind of screw you to the Union in the middle of reconstruction.”
After the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, protests and riots erupted across the United States calling for police reform as well as equal rights for African Americans.
“This last 10 years– well it’s been tough– every shift in a society is tough. (The killing of George Floyd) has been an important eye opening for America and that continues– it’s not a one and done proposition where suddenly we have all wisdom to send upon us lands in our minds and hearts,” ACC Mayor Kelly Girtz said. “I think there is an enormously growing wisdom and understanding, and I would attribute this move to the growth in that wisdom and understanding.”
The process to remove the Soldiers’ Monument began on Aug. 10. According to Girtz, moving the monument had been an interest of the Athens community for a long time, but in 2019 Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill that protects monuments, including those dedicated to the Confederacy, making it more difficult to move the monument.
“Despite that environment (and difficulty through the bill), the gravity of everyone’s thoughts about moving the monument really just grew through the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020, and for me, the tipping point was just standing very near it, listening to a woman speak about the pain she felt crossing the street to go to class at (the UGA) every day, and so I just thought, it’s gotta go,” Girtz said.
According to Girtz, to circumvent the bill, members of the ACC Government proposed a transportation enhancement for the intersection of College Avenue and Broad Street.
“Dating four years back to 2016, our then Chief Traffic Engineer and the gentlemen who’s now our Director of the Public Works Department, Steve Decker, had analyzed the intersection and seen the presence of the monument as a public safety hazard because of it blocking sight lines and the view-shed for both motorists and, of course, for pedestrians,” Girtz said. “So we both needed a wider berth so you could get more people across the street safely and needed an environment where you just didn’t have something blocking pedestrian-motorists’ view of each other.”
It is currently being stored on county property near the ACC jail and will eventually be located at the Battle of Barber Creek site where one skirmish in ACC took place during the Civil War in 1864.
“There was a confederate group called the Stoneman’s Raiders that were sort of retreating from the Macon area. (They) kind of entered the edge of Clarke County off Macon Highway, were repelled, and then headed towards Winder or Gainesville,” Girtz said. “The county took ownership of that site about 30 years ago, and (we’ll) be cleaning up the site somewhat.”
“We can’t let these statues limit us to our capability of what we can do to help better our generation in general.”
— Hayyah DeLane,
Clarke Central High School Black Culture Club President
While Clarke Central High School Black Culture Club President Hayyah DeLane believes this site is an appropriate place for the monument to be relocated, she urges citizens to look at the bigger picture.
“To me, it makes sense for it to be over there just because of what the whole battlefield represents, but honestly, we can’t erase our history, and by that law saying that we can’t even fully get rid of monuments, that just goes to show it’s always going to be a part of what we have to deal with,” DeLane said. “Now we just have to learn– how do we take that and still move forward without feeling limited. We can’t let these statues limit us to our capability of what we can do to help better our generation in general.”
What will take the monument’s place is a brick crosswalk with possibly, according to Girtz, other historical signage or some marker of its history and long-time presence there. Despite these efforts, Edwards hopes to see more progression in the future of paying proper amage to everyone who fought in the Civil War, not just the Confederates.
“I think there’s growing awareness, but it’s not universal. There’s still pockets of Georgia and every other place probably where these ideas (of White Supremacy) are unfortunately allowed to fester and perpetuate,” Edwards said. “I think we still have work to do. There’s still other aspects of our physical environment that could be more truthfully edited to give a contextualized view of history. Some of that will require the cooperation of the Georgia Historic Preservation Board and the UGA Board of Regents.”
