A former attorney will face a three-judge federal appeals court on Friday, fighting to resurrect his 2021 lawsuit meant to bar Jacksonville and Florida from spending funds to preserve public tributes to Confederates after itt was dismissed.
Earl Johnson Jr. argues that Confederate tributes on public land, supported by his tax dollars, violate the U.S. Constitution and Civil Rights Act of 1964. And as a Black descendant of enslaved people, Johnson says that these are "symbols of White supremacy ideology that demean, belittle, and diminish him."
The monuments, Johnson argues, infringe on his rights to be free from racial discrimination in public places.
His suit was dismissed in June 2023 by U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard, who said he had no standing. But the dismissal did not rule on whether the arguments had any merit. The judge's decision came after city and state lawyers asked the federal courts to dismiss Johnson's case in a 2021 hearing.
Even after the 108-year-old "Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy" statue was taken off its base in late 2023 in Springfield Park, Johnson believes he has legal standing for an appeal because he is being injured by any of these monuments, a stigmatic injury "that is real," he said.
"A stigma is a symbol of negativity based on one's person, and so what the Constitution does in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, often referred to as the civil rights amendments, is to protect against that stigma," Johnson told WJCT on "First Connect."
"The 13th Amendment says slavery is abolished; but it also says that the badges of slavery are abolished, the stigma of slavery is abolished," he said.
But Jon Phillips, a former senior assistant general counsel who defended the lawsuit on behalf of the city, still believes the claim has no merit.
"There are certain things that are just not legally appropriate for litigation," Phillips said on "First Connect." "Of course, people can disagree with that, and I know Mr. Johnson disagrees, but we felt it was pretty clear that he did not have standing."
Johnson helped organize the nonprofit Take 'Em Down to lobby for the removal of Confederate monuments on Jacksonville's public land. His father, the late Earl Johnson Sr., was a Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame attorney who represented the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped desegregate state schools and public places in the 1960s.
Along with contending that Confederate monuments on public property violate the Constitution and Civil Rights Act, Johnson's lawsuit argued that spending taxpayer money for tributes to the Confederacy violates the 13th and 14th Amendments. Johnson said that he should have the right to be free of any vestiges of slavery.
Government attorneys argued in federal court in November 2021 that Johnson did not demonstrate a real threat to himself that had to be solved by the courts and asked for the suit to be dismissed, which Howard did in June 2023.
When his suit was filed, "Tribune to the Women of the Southern Confederacy was still in Springfield Park, while there was an empty pedestal in James Weldon Johnson Park outside city hall that until recently had held up a statue of Confederate Civil War veteran.
The monument at Springfield Park was removed in late 2023 by Mayor Donna Deegan with funding from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund and anonymous donors to 904WARD, a nonprofit organization that promotes racial equity in Jacksonville. Former Mayor Lenny Curry ordered the overnight removal of the statue in James Weldon Johnson Park. The pedestal was later removed by the Deegan administration.
During Thursday's radio appearance, Phillips agreed that Confederate monuments are "offensive to some people" but probably not everyone.
"I personally am not in favor of Confederate tributes," Phillips said. "The issue in this lawsuit was for us at the city, was whether Mr. Johnson had standing and whether this is an appropriate way to deal with it as opposed to the political process. I would note that one of the statues on Johnson Park was taken down before this lawsuit was filed, and the Confederate women monument was taken down after the suit was dismissed, so the lawsuit didn't move the needle. The political process did."
But Johnson said he still believes his suit is an appropriate test of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says "people must be free from racial, religious, those kinds of discriminations in public places."
Wells Todd, founder of Take 'Em Down Jax, and Kelly Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, will join Johnson at Friday's court hearing before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Todd and Frazier, daughter of the late civil rights activist Ben Frazier, have long advocated for the removal of Confederate tributes from public land.
Johnson was disbarred in 2019 after he allegedly continued to practice law while under a suspension, and failed to appropriately notify his clients. The original case was cited as Earl M. Johnson Jr. v. Mayor Donna Deegan and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
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