'No place for hate,' Curry tweets after Confederate flag flies over TIAA Bank Field
Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry tweeted “there is no place for hate of any kind in our city” and restated his support for removing Confederate monuments after a group opposing their removal flew a Confederate flag over an NFL crowd TIAA Bank Field Sunday.
A plane carried the flag and a banner reading “Put Monuments Back” past the stadium shortly before the start of the Jaguars’ winning game against the Baltimore Ravens.
A pro-monument group called Save Southern Heritage — Florida said it arranged for the flight to denounce removal of Confederate tributes in both cities.
“This is a Thanksgiving gift to the people of these cities who are suffering under these cancel culture tyrants,” a group spokesman, Kirk Lyons, said in a release posted to the organization’s website.
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Curry, who in 2020 had crews remove the statue of a Confederate soldier from a still-standing column in the city’s since-renamed James Weldon Johnson Park outside City Hall, responded by tweeting that “my position on monuments remains clear, I have allocated money for removal and empowered city council to take action.”
The answer references an unresolved dispute within city government about how to handle another public display, the "Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy" monument in Springfield Park.
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Curry’s request to the City Council for about $1.3 million to remove and store the 1915-vintage monument was rebuffed, and this year he included $500,000 in his city budget proposal.
Save Southern Heritage said its polling in Jacksonville showed most people opposed removing Confederate monuments, but Curry's Twitter statement was retweeted scores of times and liked about 200 times Sunday. The pro-monument group's Twitter account was listed on the site as "temporarily unavailable" because it violated Twitter media policy.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 'No place for hate,' Jacksonville mayor says after Confederate flag flies
