A bill that would allow “any interested person” to sue over an alleged improper removal of a historic monument narrowly failed in the Georgia House of Representatives on Tuesday. Pictured is a statue of John Brown Gordon, a major general in the Confederate Army, that is located on the state Capitol grounds. Jill Nolin/Georgia Recorder
A bill backed by neo-Confederates that aimed to protect historic monuments from removal was shot down in a narrow House vote Wednesday when a handful of Republicans voted no or abstained from voting.
With Georgia’s annual lawmaking session set to end late Thursday night, the bill is likely, but not certainly, dead for the year.
Hartwell Republican state Rep. Alan Powell presented Senate Bill 175 in the House as a way to protect Georgia’s historic monuments by granting legal standing to sue over alleged improper removal of a historic monument to “any interested person” regardless of whether they would actually be harmed by the removal of the monument.
In 2022, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of lawsuits filed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans against Newton and Henry county commissioners over the removal of Confederate monuments. The court found the group lacked standing to sue the counties because their members didn’t live there.
The bill also attempts to create a process for local governments seeking to remove a monument that would include a chance for third parties to petition to obtain the monument in order to preserve it for public display elsewhere.
Senate Bill 175 originally dealt with elections but was amended in a House committee to include language largely identical to that found in SB 301. That earlier bill was tabled in the Senate after Democrats attempted to introduce an amendment exempting monuments depicting members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Powell framed SB 175 bill as a neutral attempt to protect statues from any historic era.
“I’m not going to talk about history,” Powell said. “I’m not going to talk about the Confederacy. I’m not going to talk about slavery. I’m not going to talk about a lot of things because this bill encompasses all monuments. It makes no difference whether it was a monument that was put up by the widows of the men and citizens that died during that terrible war. It makes no difference if we’re talking about the monuments from our friends that served in Vietnam.”
In fact much of Tuesday night’s roughly 90-minute debate did center around the Confederacy.
Dozens of statues honoring Confederate generals and troops were built in prominent places around Georgia during the Jim Crow era, and critics see the monuments as celebrations of the Confederacy’s white supremacist ideology.
Recent years have seen attempts to remove or relocate Confederate statues and rename buildings and military installations named after prominent white supremacists in Georgia and elsewhere. These efforts have sparked pushback from conservatives, who liken them to efforts to erase the past.
“The people who we are memorializing in these Confederate monuments went to war with their own countrymen over slavery,” said state Rep. Tanya Miller, an Atlanta Democrat who is running for attorney general. “Over the right to own another person, to force women to have babies and breed, to buck-break Black men. We will not, in this moment – and I know we’re getting close to the end (of the session) and we get a little squirrely – but what we will not do is skate past the history of my ancestors, my history in this country, of people stolen from across the ocean, many of whom chose the sea rather than to become property of the folks that you seek to defend and memorialize.”
The politics
The bill needed 91 votes to pass but only received 89. Republican Reps. Steven Sainz, Rick Townsend and Dale Washburn voted against the measure, while four other GOP lawmakers – Reps. Sharon Cooper, Gerald Greene, Deborah Silcox and Lynn Smith – abstained, helping to seal the bill’s defeat.
In an email to supporters following the vote, Sons of Confederate Veterans Georgia Division Commander Timothy Pilgrim characterized Republicans who did not support the measure as “cowardly Republicans who betrayed their voter base.”
The sons have rallied members to call their representatives to support the bill, including on March 28, when Pilgrim wrote, “Brothers, now is our time to take action. We have to get our monument protection laws firmed up now, while we have a conservative majority in the State House.”
Speaking after the measure failed, House Speaker Jon Burns, a Newington Republican, characterized the bill as worthwhile and said the debate missed the point.
“There was a lot of discussion on the floor, none of it really went to the heart of the bill of the legislation, what its intent was,” he said. “And the intent of legislation was to create some guardrails out there so local governments would understand how to handle historic monuments, and that’s what it was about. We’ll get there. It’s a continuing conversation we’ll be having in the future to make sure that local governments understand how to handle these issues.”
House Minority Whip Sam Park, a Lawrenceville Democrat, said Republican support for Confederate statues does not bode well for their chances in November’s midterm elections, especially in swing districts.
“They don’t recognize how oppressive and how offensive Confederate monuments are, especially to the descendants of slaves, some who we have serving in the body today, and certainly they don’t understand the impact that that has on their communities,” he said. “If they can’t empathize, demonstrate even a little bit of understanding as to how some folks view a Confederate monument, I think it speaks volumes to their representation, and my hope is that the people see clearly, based on their actions, that they may not be the best person to be their voice in the legislature.”
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