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.
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.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-will-happen-stone-mountain-americas-largest-confederate-memorial-180964588/
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.
https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/what-telling-the-truth-about-stone-mountain-might-look-like/732I32LU4RFL5M5MNO75WEC774/
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.
https://pomortzeff.com/german
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.