Springfield Park

by Tim Gilmore, 12/27/2023

cont’d from Springfield: Confederate Park: Monument “In Memory of Our Women of the Southland.”

At last, the City of Jacksonville has exorcised Springfield Park of the Confederate Lost Cause. Now it’s time for this community to reclaim this sacred space.

Hours before dawn, small crowds began to gather and watch construction crews remove the bronze figures of the park’s long-central monument, an homage to the Confederate States of America. The crowd chanted “Take ’em down!” and “Hard work pays off!”

Yet the dedicatory plaque on the statue said more than perhaps it intended to say: “Let this mute but eloquent structure speak to generations to come of a generation of the past. Let it repeat perpetually the imperishable story of our women of the ’60s, those noble women who sacrificed their all upon their country’s altar.”

In fact, “their country” is not our country, and it’s far past time for the United States to stop praising the Confederate States of America.

It took Jacksonville’s first female mayor to remove a statue Confederate apologists dedicated to “our women.” Donna Deegan is her own woman. She certainly doesn’t belong to the Confederacy. She is, however, “our” mayor.

It was Deegan’s predecessor, Lenny Curry, a Republican, who removed the city’s best known Confederate monument, the metal soldier atop a column in front of Jacksonville’s City Hall, in June 2020. In 1899, the City had renamed St. James Park, its central square, for Confederate veteran Charles Hemming, who’d donated the statue. Two months after Curry removed the monument, the City renamed the park for its most famous historic resident, James Weldon Johnson. Though Curry said he’d remove the Confederate monument in Springfield, he never did.

This statue, entitled “In Memory of Our Women of the Southland,” sculpted by Allen George Newman in 1915, is an almost perfect example of the Lost Cause Movement, the South’s disingenuous and sentimental attempt during the years of Jim Crow to rewrite history and pretend it had not fought the Civil War for slavery, though every Confederate state’s declaration of secession said so.

The statue was erected the same year D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation hit theaters, the same year the Ku Klux Klan came into being for the second time at Stone Mountain, Georgia. Reconstruction was gone, Jim Crow was the law of the land, and Southerners chose to lie to themselves and to the rest of the nation and world about what they’d killed and died for.

Jacksonville’s previous inability to get rid of its very few Confederate memorials says as much as or more than the presence of the memorials themselves. Mayor Donna Deegan has caught us up with where we should have been well back in the 20^th century. Deegan has put an end to the Lost Cause lie in Jacksonville.

Now when I look at the empty gazebo that housed the Confederate monument for 108 years, I see possibility. I see new potential. I see hope. And I can breathe. What, you have to wonder from the granite between these four pairs of columns, might be this park’s future history.

In decades past, when I came to Springfield Park, then called Confederate Park, I nearly always saw dozens of homeless people lying on blankets and cardboard. Today, the park floods regularly and remains empty of people.

Authorities filled in marshland around Hogans Creek to create this park, originally named Dignan Park, and today’s Klutho Park, originally called Springfield Park, from 1899 until after the Great Fire of 1901.

When 48,000 former Confederate soldiers flooded Downtown and the Victorian neighborhood of Springfield in 1914, thousands of them camping in tents in these parks, the City renamed Dignan Park Confederate Park.

In 1921, thousands of people packed the park to hear and meet the famous faith healer, Brother Isaiah of New Orleans, born John Cudney, self-proclaimed 88^th incarnation of the Prophet Isaiah. A May 26^th letter published in The [Cocoa Beach] Evening Tribune said, “He is an old man 74 years old, and he started working here Wednesday night at 8:00 o’clock. Maude and I stayed there and watched him until 2:00 a.m. Standing all the time, and they say he stayed there working until 4 a.m., and then next day, Thursday, he went down to Pablo Beach and came back and went to work curing people at 1 p.m., and stayed there all afternoon and all night long and didn’t stop until about 10 a.m.”

On January 4, 1923, funeral services were held for Confederate veteran C.J. Thomas, who’d been appointed “custodian for life” of Confederate Park and also ran the Florida Old Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Home on Talleyrand Avenue.

In 1930, when Mayor John T. Alsop spoke at the dedication of the Roberts Burns Memorial in the park, he said, “Our people are becoming more interested in making this city a cultural city.” Though Mayor Alsop called Jacksonville “now the finest place on earth,” he said it needed “to be a better place in which to live.”

By the 1970s, though Confederate Park had become a frequent crime scene, the Chamber of Commerce offered “a variety of plaques and prizes” and a “steak dinner in Confederate Park” to Chamber campaigners who brought in the most new memberships.

The first time hairdresser Eddie Buquo, owner of the Powder Puff Beauty Salon, ever saw pseudo serial killer Ottis Toole was at Confederate Park in the mid ’70s, then an infamous prostitution and cruising spot. Buquo saw Toole walking completely naked across the park, carrying his clothes over his shoulder. He introduced himself to Eddie, who thought Ottis said his name was Alice, then got into the back of a police car wearing nothing at all.

On July 9, 1978, Arcola David Young, 22 years old, shot and killed 32 year old Vickie Hart at a convenience store in Mims, Florida, then carjacked 23 year old James Arthur Davis, whom the newspapers called “a deaf mute,” shot him once in the back of the head and dumped his body in Confederate Park.

In the past several years, I met the members of Take ’Em Down Jax, dedicated to the removal of the city’s Confederate monuments, several times for rallies at Confederate Park. I gave a walking tour and talk about city founder Isaiah David Hart, after my book The Book of Isaiah: A Vision of the Founding of a City, that ended up here in 2018.

This morning, Wednesday, December 27^th, 2023, one name hung bittersweet on lots of lips. I always told him that if you could hear a mountain speak, you’d hear the voice of Ben Frazier, retired journalist and leader of the Northside Coalition, the activist group often at the center of the civil rights fight in Jacksonville.

Ben died in June, 73 years old. He’d fought these Confederate monuments as long as anybody had. Those who still honor the memory of slavery and the Confederacy, like City Council Member Nick Howland and State Representative Dean Black, hated Ben Frazier. Those of us on the right side loved him.

This morning, when cranes lifted the city’s largest Confederate memorial off its century-long perch, a spirit of love spread over those assembled and they began to chant, “Ben Frazier, Ben Frazier, Ben Frazier.”

A city park like this one is sacred land. All that’s best and worst of a community converge in this earth like ley lines. The future history of Springfield Park spans through new hope.

What’s next? My friend Laura Jeffries is hoping for Shakespeare in the Park. I’m looking forward to the Jacksonville Jazz Festival here. And to sitting in the gazebo where the Confederate shrine once stood and writing poems and the continued psychogeography of my hometown. Surely the full biography of Springfield Park merits a whole book. Surely this community, having finally defeated the Confederate States of America, merits its chapter in world history, nets one moment of global peace, then earns its own hopeful future.