As Raleigh statues fall, calls rise for Charlotte to remove its Confederate monuments
Soon after agreeing in 1948 to help the United Daughters of the Confederacy erect a Tryon Street monument to Judah Benjamin, a Jewish cabinet officer of the Confederate States of America, Charlotte’s two Jewish synagogues took back their support.
A letter written by the son of a UDC member to its Charlotte chapter had stunned their community.
Local UDC members would “erroneously begin to think that our local Jews are good Jews,” the letter warned, Senior Rabbi Asher Knight of Temple Beth El said this week. “But be not deceived. The so-called ‘good’ Jews are good only because they are yet unrevealed, and even the good ones work hand-in-hand with the most objectionable of their race.”
Generations of Charlotte Jews have asked the city to remove the monument to Benjamin, whose sole connection to Charlotte was fleeing capture here by Union forces in 1865, Knight said. Still it stands — right beside the new Black Lives Matter street mural — although spray-painted and battered by an attack this week.
The Benjamin marker illustrates the durability of memorials to the more than 30,000 N.C. soldiers who died for the Confederacy and the growing frustration among critics that they still stand at courthouses, cemeteries and even churches.
Monuments were widely vandalized after the 2015 massacre of Black church members by a white supremacist in Charleston, S.C., and the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one person dead and 19 injured. Protests over the May 25 police killing of George Floyd reignited calls to take them down.
“It isn’t enough to do a mural,” Corine Mack, head of Charlotte’s NAACP, told the Observer last week, referring to the Tryon Street artwork. “We need substantive change.”
Other N.C. cities — but not Charlotte — have decided to remove their monuments or had protesters decide that for them.
Protesters in Raleigh pulled down two bronze soldiers on the 75-foot Confederate monument at the state Capitol Friday night, Raleigh’s News and Observer reported. The protesters hung the statue of a cavalryman by its neck from a streetlight. The other statue, an artilleryman, was dragged through the streets to the Wake County courthouse.
On Saturday morning, crews removed at least two more Confederate statues from downtown Raleigh: a monument to the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy and the Henry Wyatt Monument, a bronze statue that depicts the first Confederate soldier to die in battle, according to the N&O. Gov. Roy Cooper ordered those monuments and a third one removed from the state Capitol grounds to protect public safety, he said in a statement
Days earlier, Salisbury’s City Council decided its 111-year-old “Fame” monument was a public safety threat. And Buncombe County commissioners agreed with Asheville’s council to take down two downtown monuments but delayed action on a 75-foot granite obelisk honoring former Gov. Zebulon Vance, a segregationist.
Mack would like to see two Confederate monuments in Charlotte come down. One, relocated from Old City Hall in 2017, sits in city-owned Elmwood Cemetery. Another, owned by Mecklenburg County and commemorating a 1929 reunion of Confederate veterans, sits between Grady Cole Center and American Legion Memorial Stadium — behind plexiglass after repeated vandalism.
Mack says the city should also rename Stonewall Street – one of four uptown streets Charlotte aldermen named for Confederate leaders in 1869 – for Floyd.
Other reminders of a long-ago war are sprinkled around Charlotte. An obelisk honoring the Confederacy also stands in Elmwood Cemetery, behind a wrought iron fence that surrounds monuments to local Confederate army units, the Confederate States Navy Yard and North Carolina Military Institute that once stood in Charlotte, and rows of tombstones.
A monument just off Charlotte’s Square stands near where the last meeting of the Confederate cabinet was held, and a plaque embedded in a Tryon Street sidewalk marks where Confederate President Jefferson Davis learned that Abraham Lincoln had been shot and died.
German cities don’t honor Nazis
Then there’s the monument to Benjamin, which is inscribed with the names of the two Jewish congregations that would very much like for it to go away.
“We do not want our names associated with a man that tried to preserve slavery or an organization that had such a reprehensible purpose,” Knight and Senior Rabbi Howard Siegel of Temple Israel wrote Mayor Vi Lyles and City Council members in a renewed plea to remove it Wednesday. “The monument does not belong in a place of prominence within our city, just like German cities do not memorialize Nazi criminals.”
In a previous response to Jewish leaders, in 2018, the city cited a 2015 state law that prohibits removal of an “object of remembrance,” including historical markers, except in limited cases. The city has not yet responded to Observer questions about whether that law still applies to the Benjamin marker, the other Tryon Street markers or to the monuments at Elmwood Cemetery.
The state law enacted by the Republican-majority legislature prohibits removal of monuments on public property, other than to a place of “similar prominence,” unless measures are taken to preserve it or when needed to allow for construction. Exceptions are granted for state highway markers, agreements between private monument owners and government entities or when they threaten public safety.
A group of 66 prominent North Carolina lawyers, including former federal prosecutors, civil rights attorneys and law professors, argued this week that the state law shouldn’t stand in the way of immediately removing Confederate monuments.
Monuments at the state Capitol and elsewhere, the lawyers wrote Gov. Roy Cooper and state legislative leaders, “are inextricably tied to secession, slavery, and white supremacy.” Government-maintained monuments run counter to constitutional principles of equality, the group wrote, and amount to government’s sanction of racist speech. It urged the repeal of the 2015 law.
“We’re willing to consider any legal step to see the monuments removed but also recognize that the wheels of justice can turn slowly,” said former N.C. deputy attorney general Hampton Dellinger, one of the signers. “We wanted to make the point to elected officials that there is a legal basis to remove the monuments, and that state law is not an obstacle.”
A significant piece of history
Privately owned Confederate monuments also continue to inspire both pride and despair.
In Cornelius, the pastors of Mt. Zion United Methodist Church want a statue of a Confederate soldier moved from outside their church. It’s been privately owned and maintained by the Mt. Zion Monument Association since 1909, the Observer reported.
“We call on the Mt. Zion Monument Association to consider the harm their monument causes to our Black brothers and sisters,” pastors Jonathan and Angela Marlowe said. ”We ask them to listen to all the voices in our community, particularly the Black community of Cornelius, as they consider what to do with their monument.
Association Chairman Donald Archer said the group is considering how to save and protect the monument, which has been previously vandalized.
“This memorial is most likely the only one in the state of North Carolina and possibly the Southeast that was funded and dedicated by fellow North Carolina soldiers in the early 1900s,” Archer said in a statement. “In today’s politically charged climate, many people do not view this memorial as a significant and valuable piece of history.”
Post-war mythology
Confederate monuments sprang up by the hundreds across the South, beginning in about 1901, as part of a post-war mythology that celebrated the rise of white supremacy after a bitter wartime defeat, two historians of the South said in an online discussion hosted Wednesday night by Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South.
It’s no accident, the historians said, that the monument-raising years coincided with the rise of Jim Crow laws from the late 1800s to the early 1900s that enforced racial segregation across the South.
“I often think of them as artifacts of Jim Crow,” said UNC Charlotte historian Karen Cox, who’s writing a book on Confederate monuments. “If they were removed, it’s not that we’re removing history. … By removing it from a place and maybe placing it in a museum, it gives us a better opportunity to provide context than it may be where they sit, which offers no context.”
The Civil War left vast economic and physical destruction, followed by Reconstruction, which granted civil rights to freed slaves. In its wake, said College of Charleston historian Adam Domby, white survivors reshaped their memories of the war. It was easier to defend a war fought over states rights, for example, than its true roots in slavery, he said.
“Those mythologies were crucial in defending and justifying Jim Crow and other forms of white supremacy into the present,” Domby said.
When thousands gathered in Charlotte in June 1929 for a reunion of Confederate veterans, the Observer reported at the time, Gov. O. Max Gardner declared victory— solely for whites — in rebuilding the South.
“It was a long and bitter struggle and by the end of the century hope had returned and victory was well in sight,” the governor said. “And this story of the rebuilding of the South, carried in the face of almost heart-breaking difficulties, forms one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race. And our victory was essentially a victory of the spirit.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, which raised money for many of the monuments raised across the South, has no apologies for them.
The North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy has a photo of a Confederate monument on its website with words from Proverbs: “Do not remove the ancient landmark which your fathers have set.”
The division “categorically opposes any effort to destroy, remove, relocate, or mischaracterize Confederate memorials,” President Sara Powell said in a statement. “As we have repeatedly stated, these memorials, which were gifted to cities or counties, are part of North Carolina’s rich history and honor veterans who fought and died for their homes. Just like any other memorial to American veterans, these memorials deserve to remain unmolested.
“Further, objects of remembrance such as Confederate memorials are protected by state law. Though lawlessness is the order of the day, we support the rule of law. Knee-jerk political partisanship and mobs must be stopped.”
Staff writer Joe Marusak contributed.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 2:12 PM with the headline "As Raleigh statues fall, calls rise for Charlotte to remove its Confederate monuments."