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“Project Say Something, a social justice nonprofit, held a public event last week to discuss the Florence’s Confederate monument, which is located in front of the Lauderdale County Courthouse.

The Lauderdale County monument was dedicated in 1903, two years after Alabama’s 1901 constitution that included laws that were meant to disenfranchise blacks and create segregation. Statues akin to the local one were erected in towns across the South around the same time.

There’s been a national debate — sometimes with violent conflict — about the appropriateness of Confederate monuments, particularly on public grounds.

Project Say Something founder and president Camille Bennett said the group does not advocate for the removal of the statue — partly because that would be illegal in Alabama — but rather desires to tell the full history of the Confederacy, the Civil War and continued race relations in the local region and beyond.

At the meeting, Tori Bailey, president of the Tri-County Branch of the NAACP, suggested an accompanying statue of James T. Rapier next to the Confederate monument would give a fuller picture. Rapier, born in Florence in 1837, represented Alabama in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1873 to 1875.

We applaud Project Say Something for holding a forum meant not only to educate the public on both sides of the issue, but for suggesting a non-violent way to ease the conflict.’