Lawmaker renews effort to replace Florida's Confederate statue
Posted By Jim Turner
News Service of Florida
Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 3:17 pm
Amid a national debate about monuments and statues, a South Florida lawmaker renewed his push Monday for a likeness of Mary McLeod Bethune —- an educator and civil-rights activist who founded what is now known as Bethune-Cookman University —- to represent Florida in the U.S. Capitol.
State Sen. Perry Thurston, D-Fort Lauderdale, proposed a resolution (SCR 184) to have Bethune replace Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith as one of Florida's two representatives in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C.
The proposal is filed for the 2018 legislative session, which starts in January. House members began filing bills for the session Friday, and a proposal dealing with the state's representation in National Statuary Hall had not been filed as of Monday morning.
The Legislature voted in 2016 to replace a statue of the St. Augustine-born Smith. That vote came during a nationwide backlash against Confederate symbols in the wake of the 2015 shooting deaths of nine African-American worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. Also, critics said Smith had only a tenuous connection to Florida ...
https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2017/08/21/lawmaker-renews-effort-to-replace-floridas-confederate-statue-with-mcleod-bethune