As Confederate monuments come down across Virginia and North Carolina, the Confederate monument in Edenton, N.C. still stands. It is the site of regular weekend protests and now the focus of a lawsuit.
Edenton’s monument is special because it’s a homage to Black people who fought as part of the Confederacy and other early American wars, supporters argue.
But opponents see the monument as a symbol of the Civil War, slavery and oppression of Black people.
“When you do the history on it, when the statues came up … across this country, it was about keeping Black people in their place,” said Pastor John Shannon of Edenton’s Providence Missionary Baptist Church and a member of the Edenton Human Relations Commission.
“A lot of people in this town feel as though they are not looked at as being equal to others. And so it's a lot of things that need to be worked out in this town,” Shannon said during a live broadcast of WHRO’s Another View with Barbara Hamm Lee in Edenton, N.C.
Listen to the full broadcast of Another View in Edenton here.
Like many Confederate monuments in the South, Edenton’s monument did not go up until decades after the end of the Civil War.
In 1909, the United Daughters of the Confederacy paid for the monument in front of the town courthouse. In 1961, the monument moved to the waterfront where it now sits in front of town council chambers.
The proliferation of such monuments happened at the same time the South began enacting laws limiting the rights of newly freed Black people.
Despite the timing and the placement of the monument, a lawyer for the coalition of groups suing to keep the monument in its current place said the statue is an educational memorial.
“These are men, African American men, who should be honored and they’re not. And to me, that is not telling the full story of history,” said Ed Phillips, the attorney representing the coalition suing the town to keep the monument where it is: The United Daughters of the Confederacy, North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Colonel William F. Martin Camp 1521 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the local unit of the organization.
Producers for Another View reached out to each of the groups to participate in the Edenton broadcast, but all declined because of the ongoing lawsuit.
Under North Carolina law, monuments can’t be moved to places of “lesser prominence.” That’s one of the main concerns of the coalition of groups who want to keep the monument where it is, Phillips said.
“At this point in the litigation, the choices they've seen or have heard being bandied about, they do not believe any of those really hit the mark in terms of a place of equal prominence,” he told Another View.
Leaders in the town of Edenton and Chowan County officials have both tried to find solutions, but there have been issues identifying who actually owns the monument and whether a move would violate the state law.
For now, no action can be taken until the lawsuit is resolved in court.
