Protests over whether a Florida suburb should strip the names of Robert E Lee and two other Confederate generals from city streets briefly turned tense today when a lone pro-Confederate protester charged at about 100 anti-Confederate demonstrators.
Hollywood police quickly tackled Chris Tedino, 21, of Miami, throwing him and his Confederate flag to the ground. About five officers carried him away as his opponents cheered.
The confrontation occurred outside Hollywood City Hall just hours before the city commission was scheduled to decide whether to remove the three names from residential streets of this Fort Lauderdale suburb.
If the measure passes, Hollywood would join Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, and the Gulf coast town of Bradenton as Florida cities that have removed Confederate memorials. Those two cities removed statues.
Tedino had been standing alone, holding a flag that was half-Confederate battle flag and half a black X on a white field. He was yelling at the other group, calling them "traitors."
A self-proclaimed member of the League of South, a pro- Confederacy group, Tedino said he had joined a white supremacist rally earlier this month in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a car later slammed into a crowd, killing one person, during a counterdemonstration. He blamed the anti- Confederate protesters for the violence in Virginia.
"I was at Charlottesville and I will not forget what you people did," Tedino yelled at his opponents. "But revenge is coming."
About 10 minutes later, he made his attempted charge as organizers on the anti-Confederate side yelled to their members, "Do not engage him."
Earlier, Tameka Hobbs, an assistant history professor at Florida Memorial University -- a historically black school -- told the demonstrators that street names should be changed and that other Confederate monuments throughout the South should be moved to museums and not kept in places of honor.
"We need to do the right thing, even though the right thing isn't always easy," Hobbs said.
The question of whether Confederate leaders should continue to be honored has been debated for years at state and local levels in Florida.
The Florida Legislature voted in 2016 to remove the statue of Florida native and Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith that has represented the state in the US Capitol building since 1922. But the change has stalled because of a fight over what figure should replace him.
In Hollywood, a proposal to change the street names first arose 15 years ago, but never gained traction. Two years ago, vandals painted over street signs bearing the names of Lee and fellow Gens. Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Bell Hood.
Several street names dating to the city's 1925 founding honor military officers both US and Confederate. Others are named after US Civil War Gen. George McLellan, Adm. David Farragut, who led the Union Navy during the Civil War, as well as World War I Gen. John J. Pershing.
Forrest and Hood streets both cut through Liberia, Hollywood's historically African-American neighborhood, while crossing this city of 150,000, known for its beach and accompanying Broadwalk.
The debate finds echoes elsewhere in the US.
In Kentucky, group of black lawmakers, pastors and advocacy groups called anew this week for the removal of a Jefferson Davis statue in that state's Capitol.
That landmark building is home to five statues of famous Kentuckians, including former President Abraham Lincoln and Davis, the only president of the Confederacy.
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