The Confederate Monuments of the 1990s
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Gwinnett County, Georgia put up a Confederate monument in……1993! It’s now coming down.
At 10:01 p.m. Thursday night, the 28-year-old Confederate monument that stood in Lawrenceville’s downtown square lay in the back of a flatbed truck.
The face-down granite slabs were secured by yellow straps as the truck drove west, down Pike Street. Four police cars followed, taking the statue to an undisclosed location, where it will be held while the courts decide its fate.
“There it goes,” said Paul Runnels, who jumped out of his car with his wife, Debbie, when they saw the statue being dismantled. The pair posed for pictures next to a cordoned-off hole in front of the historic Gwinnett County courthouse, where the monument had stood since 1993.
“I think it’s the right thing to do, I really do,” Runnels said.
Gwinnett County commissioners last month agreed to put the monument into storage for the duration of a legal challenge. While state law prohibits the removal or relocation of Confederate monuments, except “for the preservation, protection, and interpretation” of them, county commissioners agreed that two acts of vandalism threatened the monument’s safety.
Why in the living hell did Gwinnett County put this up in the Clinton years? This doesn’t really get into the racist white backlash politics of suburban Atlanta at the time per se, but you can actually read some of the transcript of the county commissioners meeting that decided this in 1993. Right or wrong, have to honor those traitors!