PHOENIX — Arizona has agreed to remove two of the four controversial Confederate monuments on state property, at the request of the group that placed them.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy offered to take back the memorial it placed across from the state Capitol in 1961, a time of increased activity in the civil-rights movement.
That organization also will take possession of a stone marker along U.S. 60 east of Mesa, which marks the Jefferson Davis Highway, named for the president of the Confederacy.
The planned removals, announced late Wednesday by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, get him out of a sticky political situation — at least in part.
Two other monuments to the Confederacy remain on state property, one at Picacho Peak State Park and the other at the state cemetery in Sierra Vista. And the governor appears in no rush to deal with them.
“We haven’t made any determinations on those,” said Ducey’s press aide Patrick Ptak. “The owners of those monuments are free to contract the state, as was the case with these two.”
Ducey has for years resisted calls to remove them, saying he sees nothing wrong with monuments to the Confederacy and those who fought for it remaining on state land.
“It’s not my desire or mission to tear down any monuments or memorials,” Ducey said three years ago. “It’s important that people know our history. I don’t think we should try to hide our history.”
More recently, in the wake of demonstrations in Arizona and nationally over the killing of George Floyd, an African American man, under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer, Ducey moderated his position. He said any decision to remove the monuments should be a “public process.” That, however, never materialized.
Instead, the removal was facilitated by three chapter presidents of the United Daughters of the Confederacy reaching out to Andy Tobin, head of the state Department of Administration, asking the state to return the items.
“These monuments were gifted to the state and are now in need of repair,” the letter states. “But due to the current political climate we believe it unwise to repair them where they are located.”
The writers told Tobin that time is now an issue.
“It is the wish of the Arizona members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the (organization’s) Monument Restoration Committee that the state facilitate this re-gifting as swiftly as possible to avoid any further damage, vandalization or complete destruction,” the letter reads.
The memorial to Arizona Confederate Troops in Wesley Bolin Plaza, across from the Capitol in Phoenix, has been the site of demonstrations since the May 25 killing of Floyd in Minneapolis. It has been vandalized at least twice, once with white paint in 2017 and, more recently, doused with red paint.
And the marker for the Jefferson Davis Highway was tarred and feathered in 2017.
Originally located in 1943 by the same group along what was U.S. 70 at Duncan, near the New Mexico border, the rock and granite marker was moved in the 1960s, with state approval, to its current location, on Department of Transportation right-of-way.
The two other monuments remain on state property. One, erected about a decade ago, sits inside the state-run Veteran Cemetery in Sierra Vista. Its inscription memorializes “Arizona’s Confederate veterans who sacrificed all in the struggle for independence and the constitutional right of self-government.”
It was placed by the Confederate Secret Service Camp 1710, Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The other is at Picacho Peak State Park, the site of the only Civil War battle in what was then the territory of Arizona, which the Confederacy claimed. It is inscribed as “dedicated to those Confederate frontiersmen who occupied Arizona Territory, Confederate States of America, created by President Jefferson Davis.”
The University of Arizona's and Atmospheric Sciences presents a video of today's storm moving in. Courtesy of the University of Arizona.
