(Florida Times-Union) A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a Jacksonville civil rights activist trying to block government spending to maintain tributes to the Confederacy, including county names memorializing Confederate figures.
Earl M. Johnson Jr., whose ancestors had been enslaved in the South before the Civil War, had argued that using his taxes to maintain “badges, indicia and vestiges of slavery” violated the U.S. Constitution’s 13th and 14th Amendments, which prohibited slavery and guaranteed equal protection under the law.
But a federal magistrate concluded Johnson hadn’t shown he had legal standing to file the suit and U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard decided…