Let Raleigh's Confederate monuments fall, too

Self-described white nationalists, carrying tiki torches and chanting, among other things, “blood and soil,” surrounded the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia’s campus and took to the streets of Charlottesville on August 11 and 12.  This particular slogan lays bare the leanings of many participants of the so-called “Unite the Right” rally; it was a Nazi slogan supporting the “purity” of Aryan blood and the virtues of working the land.  Today it is turned against African Americans and immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants living here as undocumented residents.  Among the many emblems seen in crowd shots were swastikas and the Confederate battle flag, often flown alongside the Stars and Stripes.

The focal point of Saturday’s activity, which was declared an unlawful assembly by Charlottesville police as violence broke out, with a 20 year-old Ohio man injuring 19 and killing one as he plowed his car into a crowd, was a statue of Robert E. Lee, slated for removal from the city’s Emancipation Park.  Following, as it does, the politically-charged removal of monuments to the Confederacy and white supremacy in New Orleans, it’s hard to deny the symbolic power and comfort such monuments offer to modern-day white supremacists.

And why not?  The monuments were and are emblems of white supremacy, even when the words aren’t explicitly used, as they were in the removed Liberty Place monument in New Orleans, erected to commemorate a white supremacist uprising against the Reconstruction government there. 

All of the hubbub around these monuments suggest that maybe it would be a good time for us here in the Old North State to rethink our relationship to our Confederate monuments.  Citizens of Durham did this spontaneously on August 14, tearing down the monument dedicated “In the memory of the boys who wore the gray” that stood in front of the courthouse.  This is the only way to bring the monuments down at the moment; the General Assembly in 2015 passed a law requiring state permission for the removal of such monuments.  And so still, on Union Square, where our state Capitol building sits, there are four explicitly Confederate monuments.

Pride of place goes to the 1895 Soldiers and Sailors monument that stands prominently at the end of Hillsborough Street, so that anyone approaching the Capitol is put face-to-face with it.  Dedicated “To our Confederate Dead,” it is emblazoned with the seal of the Confederate States of America, its 75 feet capped with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier.  North Carolina gave more sons to the Confederate cause than any other states and this celebrates that legacy. 

Nowhere on Union Square is a monument to the 1,000 or so Tar Heels who gave their lives fighting for the Union, people who ultimately contributed to the liberation of the 4 million African Americans held as property in the sixteen states.

On the Morgan Street side is a monument to the Women of the Confederacy, gifted by a Confederate veteran and unveiled in 1914.  On the statue we see a Confederate matron, her face fixed in a mask of determination, steely gaze looking out.  Beside her a child, holding on to a sword, destined to be the next defender of Southern womanhood or some such.

Deeper in the Capitol grounds there is a monument to Henry Lawson Wyatt, the North Carolinan who was the first Confederate solider to die in the war.  A small thing to celebrate, I suppose, but the monument itself has a big name attached to it—Gutzon Borglum, who created the North Carolina monument at Gettysburg and the monument at Mount Rushmore.  Who knows why Wyatt fought?  Was he coerced?  Did he support slavery as an institution?  Whatever the case, he laid down his life that others might keep their fellow humans as animals.

Perhaps most insidious is the marker dedicated to Samuel A’Court Ashe, dedicated in 1940.  Ashe was the last surviving Confederate officer, and died in 1938.  His memorial lists his many accomplishments, and there are a few worthy ones.  He is eulogized as a “patriot, soldier, historian, legislator, editor, Christian citizen.”  However the first “accomplishment” listed is that he was “Captain and Assistant Adjutant General of Pender’s Staff.”  This “patriot” is being celebrated for his efforts on behalf of treason. 

It gets better.

The next line lionizes him as the “Heroic defender of Fort Wagner,” a reference to the Battle of  Fort Wagner in 1863, in which Union forces made a concerted effort to capture the strategic location, failing with heavy loss of life.  Among the fallen were members of the 54^th Massachusetts, the unit featured in the movie Glory, a unit made up of African Americans.  So, for defending the white blood and soil of the Confederacy against African Americans, Samuel A’Court Ashe got a monument at the metaphorical heart of the state. 

What sort of message does that send to African American Tar Heels?

Here, then, is the crux of the matter.  These monuments, all of them, are intended to tell a story and educate the public.  The story here is that of the Lost Cause, the idea that the South fought to defend itself against the overreaching federal government.  That it lost only because it was overwhelmed by northern industrial might.  That the struggle to defend slavery was somehow noble.

They were intended to intimidate African Americans, and any who might work with them to build a better North Carolina, as well as to provide comfort to the white supremacist, a function they sadly still fulfill.  The year after the Soldiers and Sailors monument was dedicated, a Republican governor was elected and progress was possible under a multiracial coalition that controlled the entire state government. 

This progress was halted in the elections of 1898 by internal squabbling and a resurgent Democratic party campaigning on white supremacy, and its last vestiges were removed two days later by the Wilmington Insurrection, where whites threw out the Republican mayor and drove about 2,100 black citizens from the city, killing as many as 100, in a coup d’état.  A coup encouraged, it should be noted, by future governor Charles Aycock, also memorialized on the Capitol grounds.

They are, then, a statement that Black lives don’t matter.

Time to re-think our monuments indeed.  It’s hard to say these things in some ways.  I work in history, I have a preservationist impulse, though one that grows weaker all the time.  These monuments need to go.

Some cry “erasure” as these monuments fall.  But supporters ignore the act of historical erasure that they already represent.  For a long time, the dominant narrative of the Civil War was the “states’ rights” lie and the Lost Cause that went along with it.  That is what the monuments document.  What they are is a celebration of traitors who thought the defense of slavery a worthy act.  No just society celebrates injustice, and no sane society celebrates men who tried to destroy it.

Pull them down, Governor Cooper, Mayor McFarlane, members of the General Assembly.  Put the artistically significant ones in the North Carolina Museum of history with a full explanation (I’d love to see the damaged Durham statue in there…what an exhibit).  Grind the rest down and let African American artists make something worthwhile of them.  

When something bad happens, we so often shake our heads and say, “We’re better than this.”  Now’s a good time to put up or shut up.  Monuments are expressions of who we were and who we wanted to be when they were erected.  By leaving them in place, we leave the door open to being those people again, if we aren’t already.  

Let’s aspire to something better, and shout it to the world with something new.