People Just Can’t Stop Cutting Down the Confederate Flags at a Vancouver Monument to Defeated Slavers

It’s the third time since August the Confederate park has been vandalized. Last time Portland antifa covered monuments in paint and tar.

Stars and bars (Creative Commons)

Jefferson Davis Park keeps getting vandalized.

Why? Because the Vancouver, Wash. area park is a Confederate monument that houses three Confederate flags and two Jefferson Davis plaques. (Davis was the only president of the Confederate States of America and firmly believed in the institution of slavery.)

The most recent "defacing," The Columbian reports, happened in January, when the security locks on the park's flagpoles were broken and the three Confederate flags cut down.

Before that, a Jefferson Davis plaque was painted over. And before that, following Heather Heyer's murder at the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in August, Portland antifa covered two of the park's monuments in tar and paint.  

Garth McKinney, first lieutenant commander of the Pacific Northwest Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the group that maintains the site, says the solution to halting repeated vandalism is to put up more flags.

"These instances of vandalism have inspired us to seek locations for additional poles and flags to bring awareness to our country's history for future generations to understand and educate themselves about," he told The Columbian.

City officials say that while they have received complaints about the park, they can't do much because it is on private property.

After Portland antifa tarred the Jefferson Davis markers, City Manager Steve Stuart told The Columbian, "The city of Ridgefield does not support or condone the racist symbolism of the marker, and would love if it wasn't anywhere near Ridgefield. The marker isn't in Ridgefield. It's on rural private property not associated with Ridgefield."

Last October, city commissioners did vote to remove the park from the county's historical registry.

But, McKinney says, the Sons of Confederate Veterans don't plan to move the site and are instead looking into fencing and security cameras.

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