Black musicians create a soundtrack as Raleigh’s tallest Confederate monument comes down
They sat near the shadow of the tallest Confederate monument in downtown Raleigh and made music on a bright Sunday morning. They sat on a sidewalk on Hillsborough Street, near the state Capitol, and made music while workers arrived to haul the monument away.
For 125 years, the statue atop that monument had cast a long shadow, figurative and literal. It was a statue of a Confederate soldier. He stood atop a narrow pedestal, 75 feet high, and held a rifle in one hand and faced west, staring down Hillsborough Street.
For 125 years, he’d stood watch. He’d stood tall in honor of men who’d fought for the Southern cause in the Civil War and, in one way, he’d looked down upon those who opposed that cause, and the slow-moving march toward change.
Now it had arrived, the final morning that the statue would stand above the grounds of North Carolina’s Capitol. The moment had arrived after three weeks of protests that began here, and across the country, after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
On Friday night, protesters here had torn down the statues of the two Confederate soldiers near the base of the monument. The protesters dragged those statues through the streets of downtown. They hung one from the pole of a stoplight at the corner of Hargett and Salisbury Streets. They deposited the other outside the courthouse, like bounty hunters delivering a runaway criminal.
On Saturday, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper ordered the rest of the monument to be removed, along with others that honored the Confederacy. Carly Prentis Jones and Shana Tucker, two friends and musicians, did not want to miss the moment when the statue that stood the tallest stood no more. They arrived downtown around sunrise on Sunday morning.
“We didn’t want to miss anything,” said Jones, 34.
Tucker, a professional musician, brought her cello. Jones, a vocalist, carried a microphone. They both wore long dresses.
They sat in chairs on a sidewalk across the street from the First Baptist Church. They plugged in an amplifier and made music, off and on, for about two hours. Slowly, the sun rose higher in front of them. The shadow of the monument grew shorter, but the women, both Black, had long become familiar with how far that shadow stretched.
Jones grew up in Raleigh. Her grandfather taught at St. Augustine’s University, a historically black university near downtown. Her father was part of the first class that integrated Enloe High School. Jones could recall childhood memories of walking past Raleigh’s Confederate monuments, and she could describe how those times made her feel. Now she was describing what brought her here on Sunday morning, near the crane in front of the monument.
“My family, along with so many Black families here, in North Carolina, have helped build this country,” she said. “And so (I’m) just glad to see this go. And so we wanted to serenade the statue goodbye. It just felt right.”
She and Tucker avoided describing what they did on Sunday as a “performance.” It wasn’t that, exactly. It was, Jones said, “more about just breathing hope into the air.” Tucker said she’d come in part to express something that couldn’t be captured in words. She’d been downtown on Saturday, and heard that the monument might come down then.
In the moment, she wished she’d brought her cello. On Saturday night, Jones contacted her and asked Tucker if she wanted to provide instrumentals while the monument came down on Sunday morning. Tucker’s response: “Yeah, girl. Let’s do it.”
“I can say things with my instruments,” she said. “Where words fail, music says (things). I don’t know how to say it.
“I’ve been here since 2003. I’ve never felt like Raleigh was truly home. North Carolina, yes. But Raleigh has never felt like someplace where I could truly exhale. It just felt very separate to me, very segregated to me. And this is the first time I’ve ever wanted to come down and just play, you know? So that’s what this was.”
Tucker is a touring cellist but she hadn’t felt much like playing the past three months, since the start of the pandemic. She and Jones had never made music together. Now came the time, amid the kind of moment that, until recently, seemed like it might never come. While workers arrived and a small crowd gathered, Tucker and Jones offered renditions of Amazing Grace and We Shall Overcome.
They played and sang There is a Balm in Gilead, another spiritual. While a crane moved into place a block away, and while a platform lifted two workers 75 feet high so that they could place straps around the statue of the soldier, Tucker and Jones played and sang Lift Every Voice and Sing, which for more than a century has been considered the unofficial Black national anthem. Jones, a classical opera singer, sang loudly:
... We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
‘Til now we stand at last ...
The song, originally a poem, was written in 1900. Around the same time, monuments to the Confederacy were going up all over the South. By then the one here, which finally began coming down on Friday, had already stood for five years.
“As Black women, I know this is a momentous occasion,” Jones said.
A few minutes before 8:30 on Sunday morning, workers secured straps to the statue of the soldier. The crane slowly lifted the bronze icon from its base. Just down Hillsborough Street, Tucker sat alone and drew a bow across the strings of her cello, delivering a deep, soft melody. People cheered in the distance at the sight of the statue dangling in the air. While it came down, 125 years after it rose, Tucker continued playing America the Beautiful.
