A North Carolina appeals court ruled Tuesday that local leaders who refused calls to remove a Confederate monument from outside a county courthouse acted in a constitutional manner and kept in place the statue at its longtime location in accordance with state law.
The three-judge panel unanimously upheld a trial court judge’s decision to side with Alamance County and its commissioners over the 30 foot (9.1 meter)-tall statue, which features a Confederate infantryman perched at the top. The state NAACP, the Alamance NAACP chapter, and other groups and individuals had sued the county and its leaders in 2021 after the commissioners rejected calls to take the statue down.
Confederate monuments in North Carolina, as elsewhere nationwide, were a frequent focal point for racial inequality protests in the late 2010s, and particularly in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. North Carolina legislators enacted a law in 2015 that limits when an “object of remembrance” such as a military monument can be relocated.
I guess now we have to remove it the hard way
The hard way involves enveloping the county in the progressive corridor down 85 and pushing out the commissioners who allow it to stay up. I’d much rather see it knocked down and flattened with rented construction equipment.
Can’t hurt to keep it defaced consistently while waiting on public sentiment to shift ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When I was regularly in Raleigh, I would spit on the Confederate statue downtown. Would have preferred to use a sledge hammer. But that’s about as far as i was going to go with it.
hard way
That’s a strange way to spell “fun way”.
Imagine if Germany allowed Hitler monuments… or worse, as in Atlanta, carved portraits of the Nazi leadership into the side of a mountain…
Let’s not forget here, that your example of ATL and Stone Mountain… is private land and not government land, courthouse grounds. The ATL and GA governments have nothing to do with it, and if they did or attempted to we’d have another issue regarding the rights of the land owners and board that runs the park there.
I’m all about exercising equal religious representation of courthouse or government land, and tearing down statues commemorating traitors or slave owners, again on government land, but government overreach is a thing I also don’t want to support too much.
Edit: it has been brought to my attention that I misremembered, it’s privately operated and managed, but state owned.
Stone mountain is Georgia state property:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain
They just hired a management company to help run it.
The state government of Georgia had everything to do with its creation. It was purchased by the state of Georgia in 1958, and the state explicitly authorized finishing the carving through the stone mountain memorial association act, passed in the same year, using public funds to help finance it. The carving wasn’t complete until 1970.
Georgia had to honor the birthplace of the kkk during the height of the Civil rights movement of course. It’s not a subtle message.
The German government building monuments to nazis analogy is apt.
I may have misremembered… and stand corrected.
It was originally private property which might have been the confusion, though even back in the 1920’s in the Jim crow era when it was first started there was government involvement with helping to fund it. It languished for decades unfinished though, until Brown V Board of Education and the birth of the civil rights movement renewed interest again in erecting more confederate statues. The segregationist governor Marvin Griffin began pushing for the state to buy the property and finish the carving.
The main pillar of his platform was a promise to fight integration, a concept he called “an order to us from Washington [to] mongrelize the South.” Griffin also vowed, often in the same breath, to buy Stone Mountain for the state and finally complete the carving. He won the election.
The more you dig into confederate monuments the more you realize most of them have very little to do with being actual war memorials and a lot to do with the politics of white supremacy.
From my understanding this is a monument to represent the common soldier who died not any particular person of note. IMHO we should keep the statues of the common men tricked into suck wars even if they were on the wrong and losing side. In my opinion, it is important to remember the human cost. Not glorify any leaders.
Eh… they were still members of a a counter government and military to the US, so ‘traitors’. And the common people that fought for them were fighting for the right of the southern states to support and continue slavery of a people they deemed ‘lesser’.
Have your cemeteries and museum memorials, but have them as private organizations and move your statues from Government land. This government and the states within it are the US, not the Confederacy, and their defeated enemy shouldn’t be honored on their grounds.
Especially since the Daughters of the Confederacy did a massive push to have statues and memorials built in southern states during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement to scare and disenfranchise newly freed slaves who had fought for their voting rights, as well.
The Republican party, where objects are more important than people.
That’s generous. Idealised concepts are more important than people to the Republican party.
Hypothetically, how large of a vehicle accidentally smashing into the monument , would it take to damage said monument beyond repair?
Problem is, it’s on top of a pedestal that, itself, is on top of a huge stone plinth. You’d have to knock down quite a lot of huge stuff at the base in order to topple the offending statue on top. 
The best course of action would be to climb up to the top and tie a bunch of rope or chains to the statue, then climb down and tie the ropes and/or chains to a vehicle at the bottom, and simply yank the statue off the top of the pedestal.
Or just attach explosives to the statue when you climb up to the top and blow it up.  that would certainly be both quicker and increase the likelihood of getting away. Although, if you did get caught, the criminal charges would be far, far worse.
Minor point: when doing this, yanking is how you break your truck. Ease into the tension and pull slow.
Gunning it with slack in the line will rip the hitch off then back end, probably wreck your frame, etc.
Good to know
I mean, I’d hate for someone to break their truck while doing a public service.
Or you could “borrow” a big ol’ dump truck from a construction site (there are several construction sites in Alamance). If I did this I would back into the statue base to knock it over without destroying the engine, to make it easier to get away. I’m betting that at some of these sites, they might leave the keys in the truck just in case someone forgets theirs.
Eh. A missing or damaged dump truck is gonna get noticed, also back in 2010 or so there was a massive crime wave that chopped construction vehicles so security remains mostly for anyone that had the big stuff.
Even if the keys are in there most big trucks have gps and geofenced alerts.
Ok, so the statue getting pulled right the fuck off its pedestal would be the most thorough way for the monument to be accidentally destroyed.
“Acccidentaly”
Mmmhmmm… oops!
Accidents happen.
“I was just dragging it to the dump, officer, I swear!”
Whoopsi-doodle
