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Gov. Broward's Family Speaks Up After His Statue Was Removed From Courthouse

statue
Mike Stocker
/
The Sun Sentinel via The Miami Herald
Former Florida Gov. Broward's statue inside the county courthouse was removed overnight Wednesday. It's been placed in storage.

  The statue of Broward County’s namesake stands in its courthouse no more. 

The figure of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward II was removed quietly Wednesday night, after excerpts from a speech the former Florida governor gave surfaced on an online blog to reveal segregationist views. 

 

In Broward’s State of the State address to the Legislature in 1907, he called for the creation of a separate country for blacks, saying he considered them to be  “wards of the white people.” 

This was a far cry from the man that his family knew, said Sun Sentinel reporter Larry Barszewski who interviewed some of Broward's family members.

Broward’s great-grandchildren knew him as the governor who sought to drain the Everglades, helped start the state’s university system and cared about strict child labor laws. 

“And so he carried a very good reputation, and this is what the family had grown up hearing about,” he said.

Barszewski recalled stories from family members about Broward’s early days as Duval County sheriff, working with a deputy sheriff who was black and being upset at his death. 

Other family stories mention how Broward’s family saw him as a liberator, Barszewski said. “He had done gun-running to Cuba, to help Cubans who were revolting against the Spanish occupation,” he said.

Now the family is left with a question: “How much is it him, and how much is it just what was the accepted positions at the time?” Barszewski said.

Barszewski says he found in his reporting, that while Broward is remembered for all the good he did, his comments in 1907 show a previously unknown side of him.  

“Absent this written document, we might never have heard this other side to him,” he said.

The TJ Reddick Bar Association, a local group of black lawyers, called for the statue’s removal from the courthouse. 

The statue of Broward, which was donated to the county in the early 1990s, will now be treated just like any other piece of art that officials can move around, with no county commission vote required. For now, it’s in storage.

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