COLUMBIA, N.C. (AP) – A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks to remove a Confederate monument reading “Thank You for Our Faithful Slaves” from outside a North Carolina county courthouse.
Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County, a citizen group focused on issues facing local black residents, and several of its members filed a lawsuit against county commissioners. The suit alleges that the monument constitutes racist government speech that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Tyrrell County is home to several thousand residents in eastern North Carolina. Erected on the grounds of the courthouse in 1902, this monument depicts a Confederate soldier standing on a pedestal, and one of his marks below mentions a “faithful slave.” Masu. The lawsuit claims the monument conveys a racist and offensive message that the county's enslaved Black people preferred slavery to freedom.
“The purpose of placing a monument like this near the doors of the Tyrrell County Courthouse is to remind black people that county institutions view their rightful place as one of submission and obedience, and that they deserve justice.” “It was meant to imply that he could not and would not receive the same in court,” the lawsuit alleges.
The Associated Press reached out to the Tyrrell County administrator via email for comment on the lawsuit.
In 2015, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted a law that limits when military memorials and other objects of remembrance can be moved. Still, the lawsuit says more than a dozen Confederate monuments have been removed in North Carolina in the past five years, many by votes of local officials.
Others were forcibly removed. In 2018, protesters vandalized a Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A statue of a soldier at the North Carolina Confederate Memorial on the Old Capitol grounds in Raleigh was toppled in June 2020. Gov. Roy Cooper, citing public safety, ordered the remainder of the monument and two others on the Capitol grounds to be removed.
Confederate monuments in North Carolina, like elsewhere across the country, became a frequent focus of racial injustice protests in the late 2010s and especially in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. .
Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County wrote that they have been fighting for years to have the courthouse monument removed, from testimony at county commission meetings to billboard ads.
Associated Press