3 Confederate Statues Will Remain at North Carolina Capitol
Less than two days after protesters at the University of North Carolina
toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier, the state’s historical commission rejected a request to remove three Confederate monuments from the grounds of the State Capitol in Raleigh.
Instead, the commission voted 10-1 on Wednesday to add information providing more context about slavery and the civil rights movement to the displays. The commission also urged the addition of a monument honoring the contributions of African-Americans to the state.
Gov. Roy Cooper asked last fall that the three monuments be moved to a Civil War battlefield about 45 miles away to ensure their preservation. His request came after the
deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and
the upending of a Confederate statue at a courthouse in Durham, N.C.
The commissioners said Wednesday that they believed they were hamstrung by a 2015 state law that prohibits the removal of memorials on public property except under rare circumstances, such as preserving a historical marker from destruction, or for major construction projects.
After the vote, Mr. Cooper, a Democrat, called on the General Assembly, which is controlled by Republicans, to change the law “so our state and its people have a better path to remove or relocate these monuments safely.”
“It is time for North Carolina to realize that we can document and learn from our history without idolizing painful symbols,” Mr. Cooper said. The governor has said that he believes a loophole would allow “an object of remembrance” to be removed without the commission’s approval if it is “a threat to public safety because of an unsafe or dangerous condition.”
The statues are only the latest issue to divide the governor and the legislature. Mr. Cooper, who was elected by a narrow margin in 2016, has clashed with the Republican-dominated General Assembly for years, fighting in Raleigh’s corridors of power about public policy issues and in the courts over executive power.
Republican lawmakers earlier told the commission that it did not have the power to remove the statues; and the Senate leader, who is also a Republican, said that the group would lose a lawsuit if it proceeded.
But the state attorney general’s office has said that the commission has the power to move the monuments, if the new site had the same prominence and availability. The battlefield that Mr. Cooper suggested has less than half the number of annual visitors as the Capitol.
On Wednesday, five members of a group tasked with studying the relocation of monuments met before recommending to the wider commission that the statues remain and that context be added.
“It is reimagining citizenship in a more inclusive and useful way,” a study committee member, Dr. Valerie A. Johnson, said. “These monuments are really memorials, appropriate for a museum or a cemetery space. Moving the statues does not hide history.”
The three include a 75-foot monument with the inscription: “To our Confederate dead;” the Henry Lawson Wyatt Monument, for the man believed to be the first in the state to die in the Civil War; and one with the inscription “To the North Carolina women of the Confederacy.” It shows a grandmotherly figure with a young boy.
On Monday night, protesters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill toppled a towering Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam.” They then tried to bury the fallen statue’s head, but university officials, who had signaled misgivings about the monument’s continued presence on their campus, quickly secured and removed it.
Carol L. Folt, the university chancellor, acknowledged on Tuesday that the statue “has been divisive for years, and its presence has been a source of frustration for many people not only on our campus but throughout the community.” Still, the chancellor called Monday night’s events “unlawful and dangerous.”
Mr. Cooper also criticized the protesters but said he understood their anger.
“The actions that toppled Silent Sam bear witness to the strong feelings many North Carolinians have about Confederate monuments,” the governor said. “I don’t agree with or condone the way that monument came down, but protesters concluded that their leaders would not — could not — act on the frustration and pain it caused.”
