NC town takes first step in relocating Confederate monument, removing soldier from top
Workers have plucked the anonymous soldier from atop the monument “To Our Confederate Dead” in Louisburg and placed the bronze likeness in storage until it can be installed in a new location in the town cemetery.
Town Council member and local attorney Boyd Sturges said Monday the removal of the statue would prevent it from being vandalized.
The town board voted last week to take down the monument that was erected in 1914 in the middle of Main Street and move it to the section of the town cemetery where Confederate veterans are buried.
Another local attorney Larry Norman, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, filed a request for an injunction to halt the action but had not found a judge to hear it.
The town doesn’t have a specific timeline for moving the granite base on which the soldier figure stood or for completing the move to the cemetery.
The monument in Louisburg was placed there by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in honor of the men from Franklin County who, the monument says, “gave their lives and fortunes for constitutional liberty and state sovereignty in obedience to the teaching of the fathers, who framed the constitution and established the union of these states.”
When it was installed, the monument sat just outside the campus of what is now predominantly-Black Louisburg College. In 1914 Louisburg College was an all-white, all-female school. The Methodist-affiliated school accepted its first Black students in 1968.
The campus now has buildings on both sides of Main Street and students cross back and forth under the monument. In recent years, instructors at the school have incorporated the monument in their plans.
There were at least 140 Confederate monuments in public spaces in 2016, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most of the monuments were installed at times when Southern states were resisting efforts by Black residents to get political power and civil rights. They were especially popular during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when white Democrats dominated legislatures in Southern states and enacted Jim Crow Laws. Since 2017, counting the one in Louisburg, at least nine have been taken down, some by protesters angry over their racist history and others by government entities.
Opponents to the removal say the monuments are historical objects that should be preserved; that they help tell the story of the nation and of the South; and that removing them is illegal under a 2015 state law.
When the removal of the monument in Louisburg is complete, town leaders have said United States and North Carolina flags will be raised on the site and a new memorial likely will be installed that honors all local residents who died in any U.S. war.
This story was originally published June 30, 2020 at 9:30 AM.
