Birmingham mayor and council president clash over removing Confederate monuments

Mayor William Bell and City Council President Johnathan Austin agree that there should be no monuments of the Confederacy in the city’s parks.

But they clashed during the regular city council meeting Tuesday, Aug. 15, regarding the proper way to go about removing them.

“At the end of the day, the monuments need to come down,” Austin told Bell.

He asked the mayor to have any monuments taken down right away in defiance of an Alabama law that prohibits local governments from removing historical monuments from public property.

Bell, however, said he preferred to work through legal channels. “We are moving to challenge the authority of the state legislature to have power over municipal parks,” Bell said.

“I am not in the business of breaking the law that I swore to uphold,” he added.

“If you are asking me to disregard the law and take it down, the council can disregard the law and take it can just as well as the mayor,” Bell said.

Austin countered that he did not have as much authority as the mayor.

But he also told Bell that he would certainly support him in any legal challenge to the state law, which is similar to legislation passed in some other states.

Austin, citing what he called the “horrendous” events that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend – when a white supremacist plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters in a car and killed a woman and injured others – said that Confederate monuments are “offensive” and that they “celebrate racism and bigotry and hate.”

He requested if Bell could take down the monuments right away.

He said another option would be for Bell to consult the city’s legal department regarding the penalties the city would incur, then take the monuments down and pay the fine.

A third option would be to submit a request to a state commission that administers the law asking that the city be given permission to take them down, according to Austin. Then the city, even if it was not granted permission to do so, could still remove the monuments.

Bell said that he would “follow the process to challenge the state’s authority.” He also said that he and other mayors across the country are confronting the issue by “challenging state and federal governments on several different levels” and filing lawsuits.

He said that many of these monuments were put in place with private rather than public funds and that there are legal issues as to whether municipalities should be forced to maintain them.

One example of a privately funded monument is one of Confederate veterans in Linn Park downtown.