Grave marker for Confederate soldiers buried in Durham cemetery uprooted

An art historian riding his bike through Maplewood Cemetery in Durham this week noticed something askew.

A marker for a section of graves in the cemetery had been uprooted, and parts of the stone were chipped off.

“Confederate Soldiers of America,” the marker said.

“I was actually more surprised that someone hadn’t touched (it) earlier,” said Ryan Holmberg, who has lectured at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.

Holmberg started visiting the city-owned cemetery during the coronavirus pandemic. To him, it’s been like a park., a place he goes to read.

He says he rode past the grave marker in the cemetery July 4 after a downtown protest and saw the marker stone intact. On Monday, he rode by and it had been uprooted.

The News & Observer contacted the city’s cemeteries office by phone and email but had not received a response by 3 p.m. Friday.

The large white marker for Confederate soldiers lay on the ground, along with a concrete brick. It looked over one of two sections of graves for Confederate veterans. The pointed top distinguished graves of Confederate soldiers from those of Union soldiers, which have round tops.

Beside the graves sat a cannon which Holmberg said he had read about in civil-rights activist Pauli Murray’s autobiography “Proud Shoes.” The cannon first drew Holmberg’s attention to the gravestones.

The soldiers buried in the cemetery did not die in combat, said Adam Domby, historian and author of “The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory. “If you look at the people who were dead here, it looks like they were veterans who died (after the war),” he said.

“The style, black ink indicates it’s not an old stone,” he explained in an interview with The N&O on Thursday. “It’s probably (been) replaced recently.”

A Sons of Confederate Veterans member from Wake Forest, Frank Powell, said the gravestones and the section markers were put there in 2014.

“I’m just appalled and outraged at that,” he said about the vandalism. “Grave desecration, that shows a complete lack of respect.”

“You’ve got people resting in peace, and you’re disturbing their final rest in place,” he said.

Prior vandalism in Maplewood Cemetery

Soon after the gravestones were installed, the stand of a plaque dedicated to Confederate soldiers from Orange County was spray-painted with “Black Lives Matter” and “Tear it down” in 2015, WRAL reported.

A Sons of Confederate Veterans member attempted to scrub the graffiti off before the city power-washed it off.

The plaque says it was erected in 2014 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans Private Lorenzo Leigh Bennitt Camp #773.

The plaque was vandalized again in 2019 when someone smeared a cement-like substance on it, The N&O reported. Bits of the substance remain on the plaque today.

This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 3:03 PM.