For the fourth year running, the Florida Legislature has tried to force communities to keep Confederate monuments in place, even when local governments and the people who live in these communities want them gone. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s opposition helped ensure those bills (SB 496/HB 455) failed once again in 2026.
White supremacist groups still use Confederate imagery to recruit, to organize and to justify violence. The consequences are not abstract.
On Aug. 26, 2023, a white supremacist murdered three Black Floridians at a Jacksonville Dollar General. It was not random. The killer’s own writings praised Confederate imagery and declared, “The South will rise again.”
He was not an outlier. His crimes reflected an ideology these symbols continue to reinforce.
For many Floridians, these statues are monuments of racial terror tied to a rebellion fought to preserve slavery. Compelling communities to keep them in place — even if it means silencing people living there — sends a clear message about whose history gets honored and whose safety comes second. These bills are part of a long effort to reshape the story of the Confederacy. The SPLC’s Whose Heritage? report, now in its fourth biennial edition, offers a comprehensive and critical examination of efforts to remove Confederate monuments, flags, holidays, school names and other memorials across the country. These commemorations are often tied to the “Lost Cause” narrative — a revisionist retelling that reframes the Civil War as a noble struggle for Southern identity rather than a war fought to preserve slavery.
The research and data found in this report informed our advocacy campaign. But the pain, fear and hostility these monuments create is not confined to a PDF file.
“When it comes to Confederate monuments that were erected for a purpose — which was not a wholesome purpose, not a purpose to actually acknowledge the greatness of somebody — it was really erected to be a veiled threat to colored people and negroes,” state Rep. Bruce Antone said in committee. “Again, I always go back to my birth certificate. It says ‘negroid’ for race. Doesn’t say Black, colored, African American. It says ‘negroid.’ And so again, a lot of these Confederate monuments were erected for ill purposes.”
The history of the United States is complex, and the truth demands it be told. But glorification is different from historical education. The SPLC’s mission is to push white supremacy out of the mainstream. We stand defiantly against hate and the symbols that feed it. The right to decide whom a community glorifies belongs to the people who live there.
Jonathan Webber is the Florida policy director for the SPLC.
Illustration at top by Simón Prades.
