ST. LOUIS, MO — Two Missouri lawmakers, two radically divergent proposals for the future of Confederate monuments. The Post-Dispatch reports Democratic Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, who represents St. Louis, and Republican Rep. Warren Love, who represents Osceola, have introduced competing bills to address mounting controversy raised by the presence of monuments to Confederate soldiers on public grounds.

"Our country is polarized due to systemic racism," Nasheed said. "It's time for those confederate flags and monuments to go where they belong, in a museum." Her bill would prohibit the state from selling or displaying the Confederate flag unless it appears in a book or for educational or historical purposes. It also requires state-owned monuments and plaques that "commemorate any individual or sovereign entity that engaged in military action against the United States" to be transferred to a memorial park in Higginsville where more than 800 Missourians who fought for the Confederate cause are buried. (BREAKING: Travel site Fodor has added Missouri to a list of places to avoid, citing discrimination, racism and violence.)



Love's bill — the Missouri Veterans' Heritage Protection Act, does the opposite. It prohibits any state or municipal agency from relocating, renaming or modifying any historic military monument without holding a public hearing and receiving approval from the Missouri Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Love said he is trying to create a process to address the monuments, not "carve out anything that can't be done." But, he added, "I would not be in favor of going around the state and rounding up monuments placed by people who were honored because of serving their state."

Love's bill also makes vandalizing a Confederate monument a felony. He went further in a Facebook post over the summer, seeming to promote lynching for people who are caught vandalizing confederate monuments. "This is totally against the law," he wrote. "I hope they are found & hung from a tall tree with a long rope." Lynching has long been a tactic of terror and racial intimidation in the American South, often used to prevent black Americans from voting or organizing. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists and people who had escaped slavery were hanged with little accountability. During Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights era, the Tuskegee Institute counted almost 5,000 lynchings in 12 Southern states, many perpetrated under the guise of vigilante justice.

Love said his ancestors — who fought on both sides of the war — did not fight for or against slavery, but rather for their states. But, Nasheed and other critics of state-sanctioned Confederate monuments point to slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, citing the Confederacy's own founding documents.

The Confederate states' declarations of succession all mention slavery as their primary reason for leaving the Union. Texas, for example, cited the abolition of slavery and racial equality —calling it a debasing doctrine — as its reasons for breaking with the United States.

William Thompson, a southern newspaperman and the designer of the Confederacy's second national flag, which incorporated the battle flag of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia — what is now popularly called the Confederate flag — in its upper left, wrote in a series of editorials explaining what the new flag symbolized: As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematic of our cause. Upon a red field would stand forth our southern cross, gemmed with the stars of our confederation, all combined, preserving in beautiful contrast the red, white and blue. Or, consider Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' famous "Cornerstone Speech."