Confederate statue removed from historic North Carolina courthouse
"A North Carolina county removed a Confederate statue from a historic courthouse early on Wednesday, joining the handful of places around the state where such monuments have come down in recent years despite a law protecting them.
News outlets reported that a subdued crowd of several dozen people watched as the statue of a soldier was taken down overnight outside the historic Chatham county courthouse, where it had stood since 1907. By dawn, even the base was gone..."
Burning books will be next...
Who made the decision to remove the statue? And where is it going now?
It's going back to the UDC who (the court ruled) still own it. And it's not the first statue they put up that they've agreed to take back and find a more appropriate place for it than a public building where it sits and implies a local government imprimatur (which was the whole point of putting them there in the first place).
But we have wags on here who want to tell the UDC that they can't take their own property back, simultaneously telling a town they don't live in what that town can do with their own property. Control Freakism gone wild.
The courthouse dates from 1785. More about Pittsboro from Wiki:
>> The area did not have large plantations, but farmers also depended on slave labor. In 1860 nearly one-third of the county population was made up of enslaved African Americans. After the Civil War and
emancipation, whites used violence and other means to enforce
white supremacy and suppress the freedmen's vote. The
Ku Klux Klan and other supremacist groups were active in the county.
[6]
In 1885 Pittsboro was the scene of a notorious mass
lynching of four African Americans, including a woman, that earned statewide condemnation. They were tenant farmers. A masked mob took Jerry Finch, his wife Harriet, and Lee Tyson from jail, where they were being held after arrest as suspects in a robbery/murder case.
[6] Harriet Finch was one of four black women to be lynched in the state.
[7] They also took and hanged John Pattishall, who was awaiting trial for two other unrelated robbery/murders.
[8]
Violence continued during the stress of economic hard times at the end of the century and into the early 20th century, when the state
disenfranchised most blacks. This political exclusion lasted until after 1965 and passage of the
Voting Rights Act. In 2019, a statue erected in 1907 of a Confederate soldier outside the
Chatham County Courthouse in Pittsboro was taken down.
[9][10] <<
-- looks like a natural progression from a distasteful past.
Oh and note that period when blacks were disenfranchised, coincides with the same era all these statues and monuments were going up and the same UDC was rewriting schoolbooks. Those are not unrelated. In the bigger picture (beyond the town) the same era coincides with Jim Crow laws and segregation, with the nadir of lynchings and race riots, with the release of "Birth of a Nation", with the re-formation of the Ku Klux Klan, and even with the "gentlemen's agreement" that kept blacks out of baseball from 1889 to 1947. All of these sprang from the same sewer.