Tonight’s St Augustine City Commission meeting will be packed with constituents

Come early to get a seat. We need you to speak to the commissioners during public comments (the first piece of business) in support of preserving the Ladies Memorial Association’s 1879 cenotaph.

On October 23, 2017, the St. Augustine City Commission voted to keep the Confederate Memorial from the Plaza de la Constitución and to add contextualization.

Then on July 9, 2018, the Commission approved the plan developed by the Confederate Memorial Contextualization Advisory Committee. The wording they came up with discusses slavery, white supremacy, and other ideas that were not mentioned in the plaques attached to the memorial.

At the last meeting, Ronald Rawls Jr. of Gainesville, supported by the New Black Panther Party and a handful of Jacksonville’s progressive protest groups, sent more than a dozen straw man speakers to the podium to demean the commissioners who voted to support the memorial.

One commissioner, Nancy Sikes-Kline, has been attending prayer meetings held by a new Methodist pastor in town. The meetings are also attended by Rawls and City Manager John Regan and include heated, race-baiting discussion; prejudiced against the memorial.

At the close of the last commission meeting, Kline says that she has “seen enough” to make her re-think her past support for the memorial. She needs to hear from the thousands of citizens who rose in support of the memorial when it came to the commission for a vote in October 2017.

She needs to stop trying to destroy the integrity of the Ladies Memorial Association’s 1879 cenotaph recognizing the mostly Minorcan families whose loved ones were never returned home for a Christian burial.

This obelisk is not a Monument to the US Civil War, or to slavery. It has been sitting peacefully in the Plaza de la Constitution for nearly 150 years.