Response: Challenging the State-Sponsored Protection of Confederate Monuments, Iconography, and Heritage in Florida

This symposium brings together politicians, activists, artists and other community stakeholders to focus on issues of restorative justice and memorialization. Highlighting the Gamble Plantation as a local example, this panel will discuss the movement to de-memorialize Confederate symbols, flags and monuments, and to repeal legislation designed to protect Confederate iconography and heritage. This discussion will center around the issues presented in John Sims’ series of Op-Eds, which call for us to de-romanticize slave plantations and re-critique notions of antebellum Southern heritage, while making space for long overdue national apology for slavery, statewide and federally, and “move to create new memorials, rituals and spaces for transformative healing and recurring reflections that celebrate liberty and justice going forward.

Panelists: Thomas Barwin, Sarasota City Manager; Antoinette Jackson, Chair and Professor, USF Department of Anthropology; Artist, writer and activist John Sims; Diane Wallman, Assistant Professor, USF Department of Anthropology; Moderator: Renee Gilmore.

This program is funded in part by a Florida Humanities Community Project Grant, in partnership with the University of South Florida Department of Anthropology