The Alabama Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the city of Birmingham for hiding a Confederate monument in Linn Park on Wednesday, according to USA Today.
A crew erected plywood walls around the 52-foot-tall obelisk that honors Confederate sailors and soldiers, after a violent white supremacist rally defending a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, VA turned deadly over the weekend. Concealing the monument violated a state law that aims to preserve historic monuments, and the AG’s office intends to get to the bottom of the controversy.
“My office has determined that by affixing tarps and placing plywood around the Linn Park Memorial such that it is hidden from view, the defendants have ‘altered’ or ‘otherwise disturbed’ the memorial in violation of the letter and spirit of the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement indicating that this was a clear violation of the law.
The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, filed in response to Birmingham officials wanting to remove the Linn Park monument in 2015, was passed and signed into earlier this year. It prohibits the alteration of historic monuments that are 40 years or older. For monuments between 20 and 40 years old, cities must also petition a state committee to remove or alter them. This is meant to stop the denigration of southern heritage by Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, and other left-wing agitator groups.
“We look forward to the court system clarifying the rights and power of a municipality to control its parks absent state intervention,” Birmingham Mayor William Bell said to ABC News. Bell’s office is currently looking at ways to challenge the state law so that they can remove the statue.
Bell and other Democratic bureaucrats are intent on not letting this crisis go to waste, but, at least in Alabama, they will have to fight the AG and other fierce patriots in order to make their dreams of removing those monuments a reality.