Jacksonville Reflections (#0017)

This photo is the starting point for what is going to be a long and slowly posted series of photo-essays of a recent trip to North Florida and Montgomery, Ala. The trip, labeled ‘FlaAla018’ in the keywords, was an effort to understand the relationship between the Florida I remembered from my own formative years, and the political sharp right turn that has happened there.

I was tempted to label this trip something like “Flyover 2018” because the parts of Florida that I was visiting are culturally very similar to those parts of the U.S. that have been characterized as ‘flyover country’ – the parts of the country that are assumed to be ignored by the urbane coastal life that dominates much of the culture. I decided not to use ‘flyover’ for two reasons. First, because it’s too often used as a pejorative which hides the complexities found throughout the U.S. Secondly, though, because one of the problems with being from north Florida is that south Florida is the image that comes to mind when you mention Florida and people have a tendency to write-off any language used to describe northern Florida as being much more similar to the cultural South than to southern Florida.

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The posting of photos from this trip is going to be slow because I’ve many thoughts still to work out about the trip. Since which photo to process and post is related to those thoughts, this isn’t a trip where I feel comfortable doing all of the processing of photos before I write the posts that will go with them.

Why, then, start with this photo? The photo is of the Confederate Memorial statue that dominates Hemming Park in the center of the historic sections of downtown Jacksonville. Though downtown Jacksonville is nothing like the bustling center of shopping that I experienced there as a child/teen in the 1950’s and 60’s, the photo is a good starting point for reflecting back on race relations and racial culture.

What’s key here is that even though I was regularly through Hemming Park for much of my formative years, most often getting to the park on racially segregated city buses and shopping in racially segregated stores, the statue was (for me) something that just happened to be in the center of the park – I had never even realized it was a Confederate memorial until looking up Confederate memorials for this trip. There was plenty of racism in the Jacksonville that I knew as a child/teen (more on that with later pictures), but the invisibility of this very visible landmark fits with the common story used in my community of those days. In our (white) culture, mature polite company didn’t make racist statements, the ‘real’ racism was thought to be predominantly further north of the border (in the ‘old south’ of Georgia, South Carolina) or in rural farm areas in the western part of the state. We were convinced, by the lack of mentioning, that ‘we’ hadn’t been part of the Confederacy, that plantation slavery was not something that had happened in our area.

I have known for years that the story of civility was mostly a veneer, but how much it was a veneer became evident in this effort to use uncovering the past as a way to question the present. I’ll provide more detail about this specific memorial in additional pictures later, but there is one key issue to point out here – there are no signs near this memorial indicating its possible use as source for questioning the continued prominence to this day of a memorial to the Confederate cause of white supremacy.