What will become of these Confederate monuments in Raleigh?

A decision expected Wednesday on a request from Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration to move three Confederate monuments from Raleigh to Johnston County comes in the shadow of the toppling of a Confederate statue in Chapel Hill on Monday night.

Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration asked the state Historical Commission to move the three statues from the state Capitol grounds to Bentonville Battlefield, the site of a major Civil War battle, where the monuments can be studied in context.

Cooper first raised the issue more than a year ago, after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and after a crowd tore down a Confederate statue in Durham.

The commission reviewed the administration’s request even as legislative leaders warned that it did not have the authority to order the monuments’ relocation. A 2015 state law limits removal or relocation of statues or any “object of remembrance” on public property.

Members of the Historical Commission requested guidance on what the law allows and views from historians on Confederate monuments as they considered how to respond to the petition.

An advisory letter from the state attorney general’s office said the commission can relocate the monuments “if it finds that relocation is required to preserve the monuments” and that the Bentonville site or any other site “is of similar prominence, honor, visibility and availability.”

The commission can also recommend the monuments be reinterpreted, the letter said.

A UNC School of Government analysis emphasized the law’s ambiguity, but concluded that the commission could relocate the monuments to preserve them, or if they are in the way of construction or transportation projects. The commission can also approve or deny requests to alter state-owned objects of remembrance, the analysis said.

House Republican leaders and Senate leader Phil Berger said in letters last year that the law does not allow the commission to recommend relocation. House Republican leaders said in their letter the commission could not justify moving the monuments by saying they need protection from vandals. Bentonville Battlefield is not a site similar to the Capitol grounds, and does not meet the law’s criteria for a suitable location, they wrote. Berger sent Cooper a letter saying the commission could not legally grant his request and it would lose in court if someone sued.

Two Republican House members, Rep. Nelson Dollar of Cary and Rep. Mike Clampitt of Swain County, wrote their own letters objecting to relocation.

“The motivation for the removal request before the Commission arises from policy and political considerations far beyond the specific statute or mandate of the North Carolina Historical Commission,” Dollar said in his March 28 letter.

“The purpose of the law is to preserve history now and in the future against the fashion and political winds of the day. It has never been the intent of the General Assembly to place the Historical Commission in the position of refereeing such matters or in anyway making such policy or political judgments.”

The Cooper administration wants to move the 1895 Confederate monument, the Henry Lawson Wyatt monument, which depicts the first Confederate soldier to die in battle, and the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy monument, The News & Observer has reported.

The commission received 6,940 comments through an electronic portal. Most of the speakers at a March public hearing supported keeping the statues on the Capitol grounds.

The Southern Poverty Law Center supported the petition in an April letter.

“Black residents suffer each time they are forced to witness or confront the state-sanctioned veneration of people who believed that fighting for Black enslavement was a noble and worthy cause,” the center’s legal deputy director, David C. Dinielli, wrote.

Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center, told the commission that the dedication of the three Raleigh monuments coincided with the “expansion and consolidation of white supremacist policies of the Jim Crow era.”

In his March 5 letter, Hale said the monuments’ dedication speeches “contain language that supported Lost Cause mythology and the revisionist narrative of the Civil War.”

“Because of these historical myths that misrepresent the true history of North Carolina, I believe the status quo of leaving the monuments in place without proper historical contextualization is not a principled option,” Hale wrote.

This story was originally published August 21, 2018 at 6:34 PM.