Social justice monument balances Alabama's Confederate history, organization says

About 45 people strolled into the Kennedy-Douglass Center of the Arts in Florence on Saturday night to discuss what they called the unbalanced retelling of the town's pre-Civil War history and how a monument next to a Confederate statue could add to the narrative.

The event was part of a campaign called "Whose Monument?" that was started last year by local nonprofit Project Say Something. The mission of the campaign is two-fold: to educate the town's population about the 115-year-old statue honoring Confederate deaths outside the Lauderdale County Courthouse, and to push for a monument representing social justice that they would like to be erected next to the confederate statue.

Four different designs of what the social justice monument could look like were unveiled during Saturday's showing for public comments. Despite protests and counter protests in recent years around the handling of Confederate monuments in other states, there was no opposition present at the unveiling and no one spoke against erecting a social justice monument alongside the Confederate monument.

Laura Lopez was drawn to a design called "Breaking the Chains," which features an enslaved Dredd Scott and his wife, Harriet, pulling the chains of bondage. The couple lost their lawsuit for their freedom in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they couldn't sue their masters because blacks, enslaved or freed, were not considered U.S. citizens.

Read more: https://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2018/08/social_justice_monument_balanc.html