Fiscal Note
The proposed resolution calls on the Parks Commission and Equal Opportunities Commission to meet jointly to development recommendations regarding Confederate monuments in the Forest Hills Cemetery. The proposed resolution does not have a fiscal impact; however, recommendations to remove the monuments or construct new monuments may require a budget amendment.
Title
AMENDED - Establishing a Plan for the Confederate Monuments in Forest Hill Cemetery.
Body
WHEREAS, the City of Madison opened Forest Hill Cemetery in 1857, and continues to own and operate the Cemetery today; and,
WHEREAS, in 1862, 140 prisoners of the Confederate States of America being housed at the Union Army stockade at Camp Randall died and were ultimately buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in what is now known as the “Confederate Rest Area”; and,
WHEREAS, the Confederate Rest Area remains City owned and the gravesites and monuments contained in and around the area are owned by, and maintained by, the City; and,
WHEREAS, following the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the abolition of slavery, the freed slaves, others persons of color and their descendants faced a whole new system of legal, economic and social oppression in the form of Black Codes, or Jim Crow Laws. These laws, enacted throughout the south, and to some degree in the north, were designed to keep intact the subjugation of blacks. Even fifty-three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the impacts of these laws are still being felt in America; and,
WHEREAS, sometime in the early 1930s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy were allowed to donate and erect a stone monument in the Confederate Rest Area in honor of those buried there (the “UDC Monument”); and,
WHEREAS, the Southern Poverty Law Center lists the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a neo-Confederate group, and the group itself, through the erection of monuments throughout the United States, subscribes to the “Lost Cause” movement, which attempts t...
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