The Confederate War Memorial near Dallas City Hall must come down, the City Council decided Wednesday.

In an 11-4 vote — Rickey Callahan, Jennifer Staubach Gates, Sandy Greyson and Adam McGough voted against — the council declared that the monument was “a non-contributing structure for the historic overlay district.” The measure also asks the city manager to get approval from the Landmark Commission to disassemble the monument and spend $480,000 for its removal.

While not the final step in the process, the council’s decision came after years of debate and little action on the city’s monuments to its pro-slavery Confederate past. Council members who supported the removal said it was about time.

“We have to acknowledge the sins of the past, and what kind of Dallas do we want going forward,” Mayor Pro Tem Casey Thomas said. “Today is not unfinished business. It’s finishing the business that we started.”

The vote was the council's second time in 18 months to remove a long-standing monument to the Confederacy. Not long after violent white supremacist attacks in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., the council moved quickly to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from what was then called Lee Park. The city later restored the park’s previous name, Oak Lawn Park.

The Confederate War Memorial was a thornier issue because it is in Pioneer Cemetery, a designated city landmark across the street from City Hall, just outside the city-owned Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.

1 / 4The Confederate War Memorial in downtown Dallas must go, the City Council has decided.(Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer) 2 / 4Georgeann Goldsborough of Houston looks at the Confederate War Memorial at Pioneer Park Cemetery in Dallas.(2018 File Photo / Staff ) 3 / 4Victoria Miller of Dallas reads an inscription on the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park cemetery in downtown Dallas.(2017 File Photo / Staff ) 4 / 4The Dallas school board has renamed four schools once named after Confederate generals depicted on the Confederate War Memorial in downtown Dallas. They are Robert E. Lee (top photo, far left), and (clockwise from right) Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston and William L. Cabell.(The Dallas Morning News / Staff photos)

Preservation Dallas had warned of a “dangerous precedent” if the council voted to take down a memorial in a designated historic area.

The monument — a 65-foot obelisk topped with a Confederate soldier and ringed by statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Albert Johnston — was moved to the cemetery in 1961, more than six decades after it was unveiled in Old City Park in 1897.

Following rancor and drama over the Lee statue removal — and a flood of calls, emails and letters to city officials made at the behest of a conservative political group — the council last April delayed its decision on the monument. In the meantime, the council asked the city staff for options besides removal.

Two of the four black council members — Thomas and Tennell Atkins — were among those who had voted last year to postpone the decision. But both spoke strongly in favor of Wednesday’s motion for removal.

“We must move on,” Atkins said. “Time to bury the hatchet and move on to a better day.”

Callahan was the most vociferous council voice against bringing down the monument, as he was with the Lee statue. American history, he said, was “bloody” and “sinful” — “but it’s our history.”

Gates called the proposal feckless, saying the vote pushed the tough decisions to city commissions.

The Landmark Commission will take up the issue before the monument can be removed. If it votes against the removal, the City Plan Commission will hear an appeal.

Gates instead tried to propose a separate amendment that would “re-envision the memorial and the site.”

Artist Lauren Woods attended a briefing on the Confederate War Memorial at Dallas City Hall on Wednesday. City Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates wanted to delay a vote to allow time for Woods, a Southern Methodist University lecturer, to develop a way to add modern context to the memorial. (Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer)

But after a debate over the legality of her motion, Gates withdrew it and instead asked to delay the vote until the council’s June 12 meeting. She hoped that would give time for Southern Methodist University lecturer Lauren Woods to develop a way to add modern context to the statue and the surrounding space.

Preservation Dallas supported that plan, saying in a letter that the recontextualization “can help move us forward into a future where people know the full story of the most troubling period in our country’s history by using the monument to teach that history.”

Kevin Felder — a black council member who was embroiled in a mini-drama at the council meeting after police began looking into his alleged involvement in a traffic accident earlier in the day — scoffed at that idea.

“What are we thinking? Who wants to reconceptualize the Confederacy? That’s asinine,” Felder said.

The council vote came after several speakers called on the council to take down the memorials.

Civic leaders who served on the city’s Confederate monuments task force — including rights activist John Fullinwider and CitySquare’s Gerald Britt — said it was past time to bring the monument down.

“There comes a time when a generation declares enough is enough, and this is the time,” Britt said.

Fullinwider said the city should “be free of the delusions of white supremacy.”

“We will never be free ... until we free ourselves from this prison of white racism,” he said.