Senate approves $4 million for African Americans monuments in Raleigh
The North Carolina Senate voted Monday night to spend $4 million on monuments to African Americans in downtown Raleigh.
They would join several monuments on state property to the Confederacy and those connected to white supremacy. Calls for removing Confederate statues have grown louder during the recent Black Lives Matter protests in North Carolina and across the country. However, while the state doesn’t plan to remove the monuments, it has revived plans — and funding — to commemorate the Black experience.
The funding, a last-minute amendment to a capital projects bill, would spend $2.5 million for a planned monument on the state Capitol grounds as well as $1.5 million for Freedom Park, a sculpture park planned for a few blocks away. Both projects were funded in the 2019 state budget vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper.
The amendment was proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown, a Jacksonville Republican.
Sen. Toby Fitch, a Wilson Democrat, thanked Brown for reviving the funding and said it should be done “especially with what’s going on in the world today.”
Fitch said the history of African Americans “shall not be buried, but put in stone.”
African Americans monument at the Capitol
N.C. Senate Democratic leader Dan Blue told The News & Observer in 2019 that he’d like to see the new monument include the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which he noted was boosted in Raleigh with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was founded at Shaw University in 1960.
Blue also said then that the monument should also show the Greensboro Four, the four N.C. A&T State University students whose sit-in at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter galvanized the sit-in movement across the country.
When the budget was vetoed in 2019, the monument was still in the early planning stages, though some details were already set based on previous recommendations. The target audience for the monument should be schoolchildren, a major segment of Capitol visitors, the state recommended. previously.
Other recommendations for the monument:
▪ Encapsulate the African-American experience in North Carolina.
▪ Historical and commemorative.
▪ Grounded in North Carolina history.
▪ Central element of the monument will be on the southeast corner of Union Square because of vacant space there as well as proximity to historically African-American Southeast Raleigh.
▪ Bas-relief timeline on the small hill adjacent to the Wilmington Street sidewalk. Bas-relief refers to slightly raised images off a flat surface. The monument could stand on multiple elevations on the grounds.
▪ Bronze and granite materials, like all the other monuments.
▪ No fire or water elements.
▪ All periods of history depicted, including slavery and Jim Crow, as well as achievements.
The recommendations followed meetings of the N.C. Historical Commission and N.C. African American Heritage Commission, a monument study committee and community meetings.
Freedom Park
Freedom Park at Wilmington and Lane streets will receive $1.5 million in bill. It will celebrate “freedom and the African American experience,” and is designed by the late architect Phil Freelon of Durham and Perkins+Will architecture firm. It also has received private funding for the public sculpture park that will “commemorate historic and on-going struggles for freedom in North Carolina,” according to the park’s website.
The bill goes next to the House for a vote, then to the governor.
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This story was originally published June 15, 2020 at 8:54 PM.
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