Confederate Monument Debate Continues While a Promising Solution Is Proposed
Opinions about removal of Morganton's Confederate monument remain mixed, but one community leader takes a stand and offers a solution that may appease all sides.
BURKE COUNTY, North Carolina—Recent efforts to remove or relocate the Confederate monument from the Historic Burke County Courthouse lawn have been met with lukewarm posturing from local elected officials and mixed responses from community members.
And some continue to peddle the pseudo-history of the so-called “Lost Cause” ideology, a movement dedicated to reframing Southern secession as a noble cause that was really about states’ rights, rather than, well, chattel slavery and the doctrine of white supremacy.
Fortunately, one leader in Morganton has offered a compromise that might generate enough support from all sides of the issue.
What Is More ‘Hateful’ and ‘Dishonest’?
During a public symposium this March, Bill Starnes, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans shared his opinions on the contested symbolism of the Confederate flags that intimidate drivers on I-40 as they enter Burke County from either direction.
He spoke as a Gaston County resident, however. Now, we finally have a public statement from his confederates within Burke County, and they didn’t mince words coming to the defense of their 9-foot-tall bronze soldier.
In an Oct. 14th letter to the editor, the Officers and Enlisted Men of the Valdese Burke Tigers, Camp 2162, Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) labeled the campaign to remove the Confederate monument as “the hateful, hypocritical, and dishonest ramblings of a minor, but loud collection of profiters and self-righteous zealots.”
What seems “hateful” and “dishonest” to me is to argue that it’s those who advocate for the removal of the monument that have “purposefully manufactured more dissent, division, and hate in the last eight years, than [the] memorial has ever caused in the entirety of its existence in the past century,” as the SCV contends.
Let’s not forget it was monument supporters who were armed and waving Confederate flags, in June 2020, when Black Lives Matter activists were demonstrating near the Historic Burke County Courthouse, alongside the 15 to 26 million others in public spaces throughout the United States denouncing police brutality and white supremacy after George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed in police custody.
It’s no coincidence that when a widely reported racial injustice occurs, attention regularly comes back to Confederate monuments. And that’s because the chain of racial violence and discrimination throughout the United States connects all memorials to the Confederacy.
In fact, counties that constructed Confederate monuments saw lower voter turnout rates among Black voters in the early post-Reconstruction era compared to other counties. Similarly, much higher lynching rates also occurred in counties within former Confederate states where a higher number of monuments were erected.
Racial intimidation and subjugation are poured into the very mortar that has kept these threatening monuments standing in communities throughout the region.
What Is That Statue Defending Burke County Against?
Defenders of the Confederate monument say it’s a way to remember their forebearers who died during the Civil War. While I believe that’s a genuine sentiment, it’s only one piece of what those stone blocks represent.
In addition to honoring the soldiers’ lives lost in the War of Southern Secession, the memorial lionizes the Confederate cause which claimed to “put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to [the] peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists . . . the negro is not equal to the white man; slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition,” as stated by Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech.”
Despite how much our neighbors affiliated with the SCV may argue the memorial is about the “right to honor their heritage and ancestors,” it’s impossible to divorce the menacing landmark from its vile and horrific progenitor—the Confederacy.
Certainly, there are better ways for Burke residents who lost family members during the Civil War to “venerate their forefathers,” which the SCV argues is the monument’s raison d'être.
For example, wouldn’t including the names of soldiers’ lives lost during the Civil War alongside those from other American wars in the same monument be a way to acknowledge them without also glorifying a government founded on white supremacy?
Furthermore, the SCV says that “no people has a right to limit or lessen the ability or ease that another may” honor their ancestors. If that’s the case, then why are those with ancestral ties to a racist and brutal regime given the most prominent public space in our county, while many other families have little to no representation for their ancestors?
What of the tortured lives of enslaved African Americans? Where is their honored place in our community?
It’s only been within the past year that Morganton has installed prominent murals downtown dedicated to the Southeast Asian American and African American members of our community.
And when the SCV uses the phrase “our county’s stoic defender” to describe the statue atop that Confederate monument—a site where the lynched body of Broadus Miller, a 27-year-old Black man, was displayed in 1927—it makes you wonder what exactly the bronze soldier is defending Burke County against.
Perhaps it’s racial progress, justice, and equality.
Boasting a list of 3,000 signatures from Burke residents supporting the monument, the SCV threatens its critics with “the knowledge of many more names” they can enlist “in defense of the South and her soldiers, believing their cause “is simply right.”
Which cause are we discussing here?
Cultural Genocide: One of These Isn’t Like the Other
While I understand the Confederate memorial “has been central to the lives and identity” of some “who call our county home,” I wonder what it will take for our neighbors to shift their attachments to Southerness or Confederate heritage toward other identities less infected by white supremacist ideologies.
Previously, I’ve offered up Appalachian as a nearby and underemphasized identity appropriate for the Foothills region to rally around.
(Common Appalachian is, after all, animated by a commitment to reorienting our sense of communal identity and reframing it around concern for our distinct cultural area and bioregion.)
Admittedly, Appalachia is not free of the sins of chattel slavery—people have been enslaved in nearly every Appalachian county—but it has the benefits of being a place-based community whose sense of identity is less encumbered by histories of white supremacy.
Oddly, the SCV equates removal of the Confederate monument to “cultural genocide.”
This mischaracterizes the situation and is offensive to actual instances of cultural genocide, such as when roughly 12.5 million Africans were violently shipped across the Atlantic, stripped of their heritage and native tongues, isolated from their families, and worked to death on plantations and farms across the South.
That is cultural genocide.
However, when shouts for change come from people within our own community—including both those whose ancestors’ names are featured on the Confederate monument and those whose ancestors were enslaved—calling for its removal, this is change from within, not from without.
This isn’t an external imposition or colonizing thought from outside. It’s internal transformation, becoming more aware of the sufferings of marginalized members of our community.
In a word, it’s reconciliation.
This is a moment of turning Confederate swords into Appalachian plowshares, where we abandon weapons of division and oppression and begin planting seeds for a more egalitarian and inclusive future.
A Solution That ‘Contributes Rather Than Removes’
Nonetheless, due to State Statue 100-2.1 and the unwillingness of local leaders to apply pressure to change or circumvent the law, it doesn’t appear the monument will be moving in the near future, regardless of what its supporters and critics have voiced.
In the meantime, however, a praiseworthy and pragmatic compromise has been presented.
In an editorial for the Paper, Allen Vannoppen recommends two structural additions that may help to better contextualize the Confederate monument while reducing the feelings of cultural erasure that some Burke residents fear would happen by removing it.
This includes installing a new historical marker and building a monument to the evils of chattel slavery.
Installing a Historical Marker
This expansive plaque would be placed “beside the existing statue” and put “both the statue and the Civil War in context,” Vannoppen argues. “Hopefully written by local historians, the words on this marker would explain the nature of the conflict, its impact on Burke County and, importantly, that the statue was erected during an era of rising white supremacy.”
Depending on which historians are involved in the process, this historical marker could provide a way to better educate Burke residents about our more difficult history and demonstrate to visitors more clearly what we value and what we don’t.
While there would likely be an ideological tussle over which historians contribute to the plaque, this is an opportunity to showcase the recent learning experienced in the community and a commitment to more updated views on our actual history.
A Monument to the Victims of Chattel Slavery
This would be constructed on the northern corner opposite the Confederate monument. Vannoppen wants it accompanied by plaques detailing the “horrific story” of chattel slavery and white supremacy in the Foothills.
He says it should honor “those who were kidnapped by raiders, packed into floating houses of death, and transported to a dangerous new world. . . . those who were bought, sold, prodded like cattle, whipped, sexually abused, and robbed of their humanity. . . . those who for centuries had no rights and whose continued servitude was an affront to the U.S. Constitution, the Holy Scriptures, and to the basic tenets of human decency.”
Optimistically, he believes “private monies could be raised to support both initiatives,” and envisions this “Monument Campus on the north side of the historic courthouse” as a “tremendous learning center for school students and other visitors.”
All things considered, Vannoppen’s proposal faces far fewer legal hurdles (if any at all), and it looks like something at least Morganton City Council members would likely support, in light of their recent comments on the monument.
Ultimately, Vannoppen believes his solutions “could tell our story accurately and fairly.” And, perhaps, the greatest harbinger of its success is the fact his proposal “contributes rather than removes.”
Time will tell, however, whether local elected officials and community members find the compromise palatable or continue dragging their feet toward progress.