Courtney Ritter, a stay-at-home mom who moved to Pittsboro from Alabama in 2002, has been at the forefront of recent protests demanding the removal of the Confederate Memorial that has stood in front of the historic Chatham County courthouse since 1907.
Last night, she and her fifteen-year-old son watched under the daggers of work lights as the copper-and-granite celebration of the men who fought for a white-supremacist rebellion was dismantled. Save for the occasional cheer, the crowd around them—about seventy-five people, according to The News & Observer—was mostly silent.
“The way that I parent is to show my children that, by the color of their skin, the place that they were born, the education they will receive, that they are privileged,” Ritter says. “The struggle for equality and diversity never will end really—not in their lifetimes.”
County commissioners had voted in August to remove the monument by November 1, but the United Daughters of the Confederacy sued to block the county’s plans. Since the vote, protests and counter-protests have taken place every Saturday. (Eleven people were arrested at last week’s protests.)
A judge lifted an injunction last week, and six days later, the county removed the monument.
“The last several months have been a painful time for Chatham County. We’ve experienced high emotions, division, and even violence which have impacted residents, businesses, and the overall feel of our community,” said Mike Dasher, who chairs the Board of Commissioners.
Unsurprisingly, the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans was “outraged.”
“[We are] outraged at the latest disturbing action of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners,” the SCV said in a statement. The group believes that the board made up controversy, invited protestors, and removed the statue “like a thief in the night, under the cover of darkness.” (You can, uh, support the Sons by ordering your very own SCV specialty license plate from the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles, which is a thing that somehow still exists in 2019.)
More surprisingly—or, at least, more depressingly—most North Carolina residents seem to think the Confederate fetishists should get to keep their treason participation trophy, according to a new poll from Elon University. In fact, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they thought Confederate monuments have a place on public property, even though two-thirds also recognized that black people are likely to find them offensive.
Doing some back-of-napkin math, that means that one-third of the people surveyed understand that Confederate monuments are horribly offensive reminders of racial oppression, but don’t think that’s a problem.
The poll’s silver lining, if you want to call it that: A slight majority thinks the monuments should be relocated to cemeteries, and a larger majority thinks we should stuff them in museums. Nearly three-quarters of residents think that, while we venerate men who were willing to kill and die to preserve chattel slavery, we should also put up a plaque noting the fact that they were willing to kill and die to preserve chattel slavery—or, as the poll describes it, “historical context.”
“Our findings suggest that a compromise might have broad support in local communities grappling with controversies about Confederate monuments,” says Jason Husser, the poll’s director.
(Really, who wouldn’t want to compromise with the kinds of folks who erected a Confederate flag outside of the historically black Horton Middle School in Chatham County? They seem nice.)
There are, of course, three Confederate monuments still on the grounds of State Capitol in Raleigh, even after protesters toppled Silent Sam at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2018 and a Confederate statue in downtown Durham the year before.
For now, though, a patch of earth in front of the Chatham County courthouse is seeing the sun for the first time in a century.
Contact digital content manager Sara Pequeño at spequeno@indyweek.com.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
