Resurrected Relics of America’s Past
At the federal level, the Trump administration has sought to return Confederate memorials, including a statue in Washington. The Pentagon also ordered that a portrait of Robert E. Lee be rehung at West Point. And at the local level, in North Carolina, Toni London has taken up the cause. As a member in 2020 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization that erected many monuments throughout the past century, London was disturbed as the statues came down, and she began thinking about how to re-raise them. The result was Valor Memorial, a 1.5-acre private park near Denton, N.C., that is home to three nearly identical statues of unnamed Confederate soldiers that communities around the state had removed from town centers in recent years. “This was going back up,” she told me at the park in August, pointing to the first statue she restored, which had previously stood in nearby Lexington. Since then, she said, it’s been an obsession to save more. I’ve spoken with London throughout the past year for a recent article I wrote about Valor Memorial, and she told me that the grass-roots project is popular: The monthly chicken-dinner fund-raisers usually sell out quickly, she said, and the park is growing with nearly 12 additional acres where at least five more Confederate statues from around the state will soon be displayed. As a native Alabamian, I grew up seeing Confederate statues in public squares, and I began reporting on the issue years ago, curious to understand why — over 150 years after the Civil War’s end — Confederate culture still grips the South and what the ever-changing front lines in the fight over monuments reveal about America. The success of Valor Memorial has clarified an essential point in the debate: Criticism of monuments is sometimes less about what they stand for, and more about where they have been allowed to stand, which is often outside courthouses. “That’s entirely inappropriate for a government entity to have that on their front porch,” Chris Nunnally, a commissioner in Pitt County, N.C., said of Confederate memorials, like flags and statues. Nunnally told me that he had voted in 2020 to have the statue, which he believed to be a symbol of racist oppression, removed from the courthouse lawn. Elevating Confederate statues on government property is “a really critical, critical line that we should have never crossed,” he said. This line was breached, as Nunnally would put it, largely because of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The group once held sway in society and was allowed to erect statues on prominent pieces of public property, making many of the monuments a “product of private initiative to begin with,” W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on the state’s Confederate statues, told me. These monuments, he said, had always been “imposed on the public.” Removing the memorials from public land could be seen as a correction of this historical overstepping. The Pitt County commissioners, for example, joined a handful of communities that decided private property was the fitting fate for their monuments by donating them to Valor Memorial’s nonprofit. I’ve met dozens of supporters during my visits to the park who said the monuments were essential to local history and didn’t believe they stood for white supremacist ideas. But at least one organizer told me she understood why some people were offended by the statues and believed the countryside, rather than the public square, to be a more fitting setting for them. Throughout my reporting, I’ve spoken with people from all angles of the issue: historians, elected officials, social justice demonstrators and defenders of the Confederacy. Though their views on how the Confederacy should be remembered might conflict, I’ve been surprised to hear repeatedly that a private park like Valor Memorial was, all things considered, a good solution. On private property, those who valorize Confederates don’t need permission from municipalities to have events, London told me, like Veterans Day luncheons and Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies. Protesters have also never disturbed the park. Throughout 2020, Diane Taylor was one protester who persistently demonstrated in Pitt County against the local statue, which she called “a racial injustice.” “For it to be on the courthouse steps was an intimidation tactic, frankly, for African Americans that had to do business with the court,” she told me. She was thrilled when it was removed, and she said sending it somewhere like Valor Memorial was one of the best possible outcomes. If others wanted the monument on private land? “That’s fine,” she said: She couldn’t care less.
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