Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is renewing pressure on city and county leaders across the state who remove Confederate monuments in violation of state law, months after Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson had the statue of Confederate Adm. Raphael Semmes taken down from its longtime perch in the heart of downtown. The warning came in the form of a video message aimed squarely at municipal officials, and it carried a message that had been sharpened by the Mobile episode: removing a protected monument is not a settled debt but a violation with consequences. For Marshall, the statewide fight over monuments was becoming a fight over whether local officials believe state law binds them at all.
In a video message released this week, Marshall laid out his office’s position on enforcement of the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, a 2017 law that bars the relocation, removal, alteration or renaming of monuments and memorials that have stood on public property for 40 years or more without special permission from a state committee. The law is one of the strictest of its kind in the country, treating monuments that reach the four-decade threshold as permanent fixtures of public land unless a state panel signs off on their departure. Cities that want a monument gone must either win a waiver from that committee or face the attorney general in court.
“Any elected official who removes a historic monument or statue in violation of Alabama law has broken the law,” Marshall said in the video. “He has not simply decided to pay a fee so that he can lawfully have the monument or statue removed. He has committed an illegal act.” The distinction he drew was deliberate. Some officials, in his telling, had begun to describe the law’s civil penalties as a simple price of doing business — a toll to pay on the way to the removal they wanted. Marshall insisted that framing was wrong, and that paying a penalty after the fact does not retroactively make an illegal act legal.
Marshall argued that only the Legislature has the authority to change the law, and he urged officials who disagree with the statute to pursue that change through the lawmaking process rather than act unilaterally. It was a pointed reminder that several cities had complained about the statute without ever testing whether the Legislature would entertain an amendment. “I urge my fellow Alabamians to take note of those casting votes and spending their tax dollars to violate a law of this state,” he said. “It is now a question of when, not if, these same leaders will cast aside yet another law, being guided only by the political winds of the moment.”
The comments come as several Alabama cities have moved to remove Confederate-era statues and monuments amid a broader national reckoning over such memorials, prompting Marshall to warn that unchecked violations of state law could open the door to what he called disorder in local governance. “It all starts with subtle non-enforcement of laws and ordinances, and quickly devolves into utter lawlessness,” Marshall said. “As a state, we must remain vigilant that those elected to govern our localities do not lead us slowly down the same road.” In his view, the monument question was less about bronze and granite than about precedent: a city that treats an inconvenient statute as optional, he argued, has invited the same approach to every other law it finds inconvenient.
Mobile’s fight over the Semmes statue
Mobile’s own dispute over its Semmes statue has already run its course, according to the mayor’s office. The bronze statue of Semmes, a Confederate naval officer, stood for more than a century at the intersection of Royal and Government streets before it was removed overnight on June 4 amid the threat of protests over its presence downtown. The timing was not accidental. With demonstrations mounting in downtown Mobile and other cities across the country, city crews worked through the night to take the statue down before crowds gathered, preempting what officials feared could become a dangerous confrontation at the monument’s base.
The monument was originally commissioned in 1900 by a Confederate veterans group and was rededicated in 2000 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans Raphael Semmes Camp #11. Its century in the intersection made it one of Mobile’s most recognizable landmarks, a fixture of the downtown streetscape that generations of residents and visitors walked past without pausing — and, in the summer of 2020, the object on which the city’s reckoning with its past came to a head.
Rather than being destroyed or placed in storage, it was relocated to the History Museum of Mobile, where city officials have said additional historical context can be provided to visitors. The choice preserved the statue as an artifact while removing it from the civic prominence of a street intersection. Museum display, in the city’s argument, allowed the monument to be studied rather than revered — presented with the history of the man, the war and the campaign that put him on a pedestal in the first place.
Mobile and the attorney general’s office reached a memorandum of understanding on the matter June 15, formally resolving the city’s violation of the Memorial Preservation Act. Under the agreement, the city paid a $25,000 civil penalty in July, money that city officials say came entirely from donations by members of the community rather than taxpayer funds. The arrangement spared Mobile a protracted legal fight while giving the attorney general a public acknowledgment that the law had been broken — a compromise that both sides could claim had vindicated something.
City spokesperson Jason Johnson said in a statement that Mobile considers the issue closed. “The city of Mobile resolved all issues related to the removal of the Admiral Raphael Semmes statue with Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office in June without litigation,” Johnson said. “In July, a $25,000 civil penalty was paid entirely with funds donated by members of our community. If there are ongoing issues with decisions made in other parts of the state, those have no bearing on the city of Mobile.”
What comes next across the state
Marshall’s office has continued to monitor compliance with the Memorial Preservation Act statewide, and the attorney general’s latest remarks suggest additional municipalities could face similar civil penalties or legal action if they remove protected monuments without going through the law’s waiver process. The law allows local governments to petition a state committee for a waiver to relocate a monument, but that process can take months and does not guarantee approval, which has led some cities to act on their own and accept the financial consequences instead. The result is a landscape in which the statute functions less as a prohibition than as a price list, with each city deciding for itself whether a monument’s removal is worth the penalty.
That is precisely the dynamic Marshall’s video was intended to puncture. By insisting that a paid penalty does not launder an unlawful removal, the attorney general put every Alabama city on notice that the waiver process — slow, uncertain and unappealing as it is — remains the only lawful route. Whether the Legislature ever revisits the 2017 law, as officials in some cities have urged, remains an open question in Montgomery, where the measure passed with strong majorities and has shown no sign of losing its supporters.
For Mobile, city leaders have signaled they view the matter as settled and separate from any enforcement actions Marshall’s office may pursue elsewhere in Alabama. The statue itself remains at the History Museum of Mobile, where it is expected to remain as part of the museum’s collection. The intersection of Royal and Government streets, where the admiral stood watch for more than a century, is now simply a corner of downtown again — and for the city, the resolution of the Semmes fight stands as both the price paid and the precedent set for every monument dispute that follows elsewhere in the state.
The road to the June removal
The story of the Semmes statue’s final weeks in the intersection illustrates how quickly a monument fight can move from years of dormancy to a single overnight decision. For more than a century, the figure of the admiral had presided over one of downtown Mobile’s busiest corners, raised there when the generation that fought the Civil War was passing from the scene. By the summer of 2020, the national wave of demonstrations had transformed such statues from local curiosities into flashpoints, and Mobile’s officials had to weigh the legal consequences of removal against the risks of leaving the statue in place while crowds gathered beneath it.
Stimpson’s decision to remove the statue in the dark of night, before any protest could begin, resolved that calculation in the moment — and created the legal problem that followed. The Memorial Preservation Act made no allowance for emergency circumstances or public safety, and the June 4 removal was a violation of the statute the moment the crane lifted the bronze from its pedestal. The memorandum of understanding signed eleven days later converted that confrontation into an orderly settlement, with the acknowledgment of violation and the donated penalty taking the place of a courtroom battle.
For residents of downtown Mobile, the removal changed a familiar landscape permanently. Tourists and locals who once used the statue as a meeting point — “by the Semmes monument” was for years a workable set of directions in the city’s historic core — now navigate the intersection without it. The spot where the pedestal stood remains a marker of the episode itself, a small example of how the summer’s reckoning redrew the physical map of Alabama’s oldest city.