EL DORADO -- Two small groups of petitioners stood near the intersection of Washington and Main streets Wednesday afternoon, gathering signatures to keep and remove the Confederate monument that sits on the Union County Courthouse grounds.
Regina and Mandy, a mother and daughter who declined to give their surnames, were having coffee at PJ's coffee shop with Mandy's children when they noticed the petitioners seeking the monument's removal across the street and decided to try to get signatures to keep it.
"We just made some signs. It wasn't a planned thing," Regina said. "I've got a backbone. I've got to stand up. I've lived here for more than 40 years."
Recent calls for the removal or relocation of the monument that sits at the corner of the courthouse are part of a movement nationwide to remove Confederate monuments from public properties. A growing number of Confederate monuments across the country have been removed from public property by cities or toppled by demonstrators in the wake of protests over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died May 25 while being restrained on the ground by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes.
El Dorado is one of several Arkansas communities trying to figure out how to address concerns from those who believe such monuments are racist and should be removed, and others who believe the monuments are a part of history and should be left alone. Arkansas has 34 Civil War properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places; 29 represent the Confederacy.
Confederate statues have been removed by city officials in Little Rock and Pine Bluff. Efforts are underway to remove another Confederate monument from Bentonville's city square, and a petition has circulated requesting the removal of a Confederate monument from the Sebastian County Courthouse grounds in Fort Smith.
The Union County Quorum Court's Monument Committee is seeking public opinion as it explores the legalities of the potential removal or relocation of the Confederate monument in El Dorado.
The monument was erected in 1910 after being purchased with funds raised by the Henry G. Bunn chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. According to the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the monument was unveiled during a ceremony March 21, 1910. Seventy Confederate veterans were surrounded by 700 school children during the monument's unveiling, which was accompanied by a city band performing "Dixie" as a United Daughters of the Confederacy member pulled off a 20-by-60 foot Confederate flag to reveal the monument.
With cardboard signs sporting slogans like "Preserve our history" and "Save the statue," Regina and Mandy stood by their car Wednesday afternoon asking people passing by if they would like to sign the petition. They had gotten about 50 signatures in the hour or so they'd been gathering them, and three more signed while the two spoke with a reporter.
"The statue shouldn't make or break change in the world. Change comes from the heart, not a monument," Mandy said. "It's just been a landmark in El Dorado for years, and just because it's a Confederate statue it doesn't mean we're promoting racism."
Mandy and Regina live in El Dorado, they said. Mandy was raised in the city and is now raising her own children there.
"Tearing down a statue that's been here for years, how would that stand for change? To me it just stands for destruction," Mandy said. "In society, people need to be more aware of what's going on. We're all equal, I believe that. But slavery was years ago.
"Black lives matter, everyone matters -- Black, white, brown, rainbow."
Danny Rone, Jake Reynolds, D'Orsay Bryant IV and Jake Smith gathered signatures in front of the monument Wednesday in support of its removal. Several said they'd been there Tuesday evening as well and had gathered about 100 signatures both nights.
Reynolds said their goal is to have the statue moved to a different location.
"There was no battle here. It's a symbol of injustice in a place where justice is supposed to be served," he said. "None of these people knew what this was or where this was a month ago."
Rone, 32, said he was born and raised in El Dorado and said several people had driven by and called him "boy," a term widely used during the Jim Crow era, which Martin Luther King Jr. referenced in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
"Racist slurs don't really bother me. They do, and they don't," Rone said. "It shows how ignorant the person is."
Cam Sanford stopped to sign the petition. He said he'd just gotten off work.
"I feel like we shouldn't have something rooted in racism in the pride of our town, which is our downtown," he said. "I just want it to be moved to a museum or anywhere other than downtown."
Bryant held a sign that read "Time for change."
"It just doesn't belong in front of the house of justice. We can't erase the past, but we can choose not to glorify the bloodiest part of it," he said. "This man fought for the oppression of an entire race of people, and he's surrounded by American flags."
Smith said he thinks it should be moved to private land or a museum.
"We don't wish to destroy anything, or ignore history. We want to make our Black communities feel welcome and represented by their city and its government," he said. "The statue is a wedge between our communities. We have to remove the knife so the wound can heal. Not an inch or two -- completely.
"We can remember history without living in it."