Editorial: Rename Kirby-Smith Center (FL)

[struggle4progress]

Published: Sunday, September 20, 2015 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 3:32 p.m.

... Kirby-Smith Center .... is named for Edmund Kirby Smith, a Confederate general during the Civil War.

Smith was born in St. Augustine but left for the U.S. Military Academy. He had little connection to Florida for the rest of his life, much less to Gainesville. He was a college professor in Tennessee later in life.

... Smith’s statue in the U.S. Capitol is also under fire for being a poor choice to represent Florida, with lawmakers pushing for it to be replaced ...

Smith certainly has a place in Civil War history as the last Confederate general to surrender. Yet as the News Service of Florida noted, “Other than being born to a distinguished family in St. Augustine in 1824, Smith had little to do with Florida during his lifetime” ...

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20150920/opinion01/150919719

[Ex Lurker]

1. My alma mater has buildings named for confederate soldiers

who went on to become professors and presidents of the university. Does their previous status cancel out their later service to the institution? Not a rhetorical question, I'm asking how far we should drill down with this.

[Igel]

2. We must destroy anything that currently offends us.

It makes me appreciate the truth of what ISIS and other Islamists do when they destroy things that remind them of evil or represent false beliefs.

How could you tolerate in your midst a giant idol that represents evil and falsehood? How can you tolerate a temple to deceipt and deception, the two things that oppress humanity the most?

The only thing to do is to destroy them in zeal and a passion for truth and in celebration of your sensitivity and offendedness. After all, there is no place safe for such deviant beliefs and views--who knows when you might wander off the strait and narrow into the cul de sac that houses those artefacts, or accidently climb over the wall that separates them from the good and true who might be corrupted?

Hard to find a principled resting place between "all evidence of the Confederacy must be removed" and "this includes memorials to slavery" on the one hand, the nationalist removal of all things Lenin and Soviet in Ukraine, the fundie Islam ghettoization of everything not Islamic, and more extreme cases like ISIS and the Taliban. Right now a lot of people are somewhere between "nationalistic" and "fundie," I think.

[struggle4progress]

3. The editorial I posted represents a local opinion about the naming of a government building

in a school district where about a third of the students are black

It doesn't seem an unreasonable PoV to me. Although Edmund Kirby Smith has a thin connection to Florida, having spent his childhood there, there can little connection to Gainesville, which was founded in 1853: he was in the US military at the time, having come back from the Mexican-American war to serve as an instructor at West Point, then being sent to survey the US-Mexican border, and afterwards serving as a captain on the Texas frontier

Smith has been lionized by confederates, as the last of the major civil war generals to surrender. After Appomattox Courthouse, Smith intended to keep fighting; but his troops began to walk away. He instructed his chief of staff Simon Buckner to move the troops of his Trans-Mississippi Department to Houston TX, where Smith hoped to muster, but Buckner instead arranged terms of surrender; and Smith, having no real prospects for continuing the war, finally surrendered in Galveston on 2 June 1865

Florida added its statue of Kirby Smith to the congressional Statuary Hall collection in 1922; the white-supremacist significance is clear from the date.

The editorial suggests that the Kirby-Smith building got its name (around 1939) primarily because Jesse Johnson Finley, who served under Kirby Smith, had moved to Gainesville after the civil war; and Finley's son became mayor there

Kirby Smith will, of course, be removed from Statuary Hall, there being plenty of admirable candidates for the replacement

We can (in some sense) regard the name of a local government building as a local matter, though such names always send some message, which may deserve scrutiny