Tryon: Salute to secession seems OK with board

The best thing that can be said about the Manatee County Commission's decision to create an advisory board intended to recommend sites for resurrecting a tired Confederate memorial is that it could have been worse.

The commission's refusal to make a tough decision on siting the obelisk and insistence on deferring an ultimate decision to voters in 2020 was an abdication of leadership. Matters of governance and certain forms of taxation are appropriate subjects for referendums. But other decisions — on budgets and massive developments, for instance  — are not. So, what's the justification for a referendum on the location of a memorial that was appropriately removed from the courthouse square?

Perhaps I'm underestimating the ability to have a civil debate over the Civil War, the central role of slavery and the subsequent use of Confederate symbols to intimidate African-Americans. But the circumstances that led to removal of the 1924 obelisk and its storage out of public view suggests a referendum will be contentious and divisive.

The idea that an advisory group will recommend three sites for voters to consider is problematic: It is easy to envision a scenario in which no site receives a majority of votes. What, then? Furthermore, if a referendum is intended to gauge the views of voters, one option on the ballot should be "none of the above."

Most troubling, however, was the sense of false equivalency promoted by a majority of commissioners. Commissioner Vanessa Baugh wants the memorial — engraved with the Confederate battle flag and the names of three Southern leaders — returned to the courthouse lawn. She blamed "leftists" for the narrative (accurate) that the Civil War was over slavery and later added that "like any war, there is good and bad." That argument doesn't fly; the Confederates rebelled and fought against the United States and, umm, what was "good" about, say, Nazi Germans and imperial Japanese in World War II?

The upside is that the County Commission agreed to appoint at least three African-Americans to the advisory board and require its members to follow open-meetings and public-records laws. There was some talk about ensuring that the memorial, if taken out of storage, would be accompanied by "educational" presentations; this should be mandatory and historically accurate and complete.

Commissioner Carol Whitmore said "this is history ... we can't whitewash it."

Actually, history has long been whitewashed, literally and figuratively — in part with memorials that glorify the Confederacy, yet fail to tell the painful story of slavery and the carnage caused by secession and war.

Tom Tryon is opinion editor.