Cornelius Confederate monument must go, group says. ‘Our main strategy is education.’
A north Mecklenburg citizens group is reaching out to local congregations beginning this week to muster support to remove a 114-year-old Confederate soldier monument just south of downtown Cornelius.
“It’s not in keeping with the values of the town,” Pam Jones, president of Unity in Community North Mecklenburg told The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday about the statue.
The group describes itself on its website as a multiracial, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving racial equity in northern Mecklenburg County.
Besides arranging annual protests at the monument in recent years, the all-volunteer group tackles affordable-housing issues, organizes voter-education and -registration initiatives and supports the needs of residents of Smithville and other historically Black northern Mecklenburg communities, Jones said.
Despite news media coverage of the monument for more than a decade, which has included reports on recent vandalism arrests, many nearby residents don’t know the statue exists, Jones said.
Statue stands on private, gated plot
Some who know about the statue believe the false Civil War narrative known as “The Lost Cause,” Jones said, that Southerners fought over states’ rights rather than to preserve slavery.
The Cornelius monument and others like it promote that false belief, she said.
Many of those other monuments, however, stood or still stand on public land, such as the lawns of courthouses, making their removal by governments a bit easier, Jones said.
The Cornelius monument is on a private, gated plot owned by the Mount Zion Monument Association, a group formed by descendants of Confederate veterans, the Observer previously reported. Descendants now live all over the United States.
The plot is on the lawn outside Mount Zion United Methodist Church on Zion Avenue. A sign on the monument fence says the monument “is on privately owned property and is not the property of Mt Zion UMC.”
Zion Avenue runs parallel to heavily traveled N.C. 115, where drivers can see it.
Vandalism arrests
The memorial, an obelisk topped by the statue of a soldier, has drawn protests and been vandalized in recent years. The statue was built in 1909 during the Jim Crow era, the time of legalized racial segregation.
Police in 2017 charged a Davidson man with misdemeanor injury to property after the Cornelius memorial was defaced with an “X” in blue spray paint over the words “Our Confederate Soldiers,” the Observer reported at the time.
In 2020, police arrested three people on charges of first-degree trespassing and injury to personal property after vandals spray-painted the words “racist” and “BLM,” short for Black Lives Matter, on the monument, according to video taken of the scene by The Charlotte Observer.
In 2020, Mt. Zion pastors Jonathan and Angela Marlowe called for the Cornelius statue’s removal. Leaders of the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church also said at the time that the statue should go.
“The argument that these monuments are simply a part of some people’s heritage, is actually a reminder and legacy of the shame, hate, intimidation and degradation of a whole people,” conference leaders said in a statement that year.
What’s next in effort to remove monument
Jones said her group has tried to get Cornelius elected officials to at least pass a resolution denouncing the monument.
Town board members and officials have told the group they can’t consider such a resolution because the monument is privately owned and on private property, Jones said.
Unity in Community members are shifting their focus more to educating the public about the monument, she said. Maybe more public pressure will one day convince the association to move the statue, she said.
Monument association representatives couldn’t be reached by the Observer this week.
But as an example of the education outreach, Unity in Community members are meeting with a rabbi of the local Temple Kol Tikvah this week, Jones said.
Jones recalled Martin Luther King Jr.’s saying in the ongoing struggle for civil rights: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re committed to it for as long as it takes,” she said.