The Civil War Still Echoes in the South, Forcing Towns to Take Sides
Residents protesting Confederate statues on public land square off with neighbors refusing to surrender local landmarks
By Scott Calvert and Cameron McWhirter, WSJ
Sept. 21, 2024 9:00 pm ET
EDENTON, N.C.—Rod Phillips and Michael Dean, a pair of white 70-something retirees, take opposing sides in the Civil War, usually between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturdays.
They are separated by a bronze 7-foot Confederate soldier, in an unyielding though peaceful standoff going on almost as long as the war that divided the nation.
“It’s racist,” said Phillips, who wants the statue removed from public property. On Saturdays, he leads a small band of regulars to protest the monument’s looming presence over the town Forbes magazine called one of the prettiest in America.
“When it was put up, it was an expression of white supremacy,” Phillips said. He owned a sign-making business in Raleigh, N.C., before moving to Edenton in 2018. He picked the town, population 4,500, because it is halfway between his family in Johnston County, N.C., and his wife’s family in Virginia Beach, Va.
Dean, who sometimes wears a bespoke gray Confederate uniform, leads a handful of counter protesters across the street every Saturday. The statue is, plain and simple, a memorial to the 47 soldiers from Chowan County who lost their lives protecting the state, he said.
“Some of my ancestors were Confederates,” said Dean, 72 years old.
In Dean’s view, defending the statue is a stand against Marxists trying to rewrite history and “outsiders coming here stirring the pot,” he said. Efforts to erase Confederate memorials are symptoms of America’s moral decline, he said, along with more unwed mothers, disrespect for the law and “drag queens teaching reading to first-graders.”
Phillips, 79, usually musters a slightly larger group. But Dean says the law is on his side, a point Phillips disputes.
A Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature in 2015 approved a statute protecting “objects of remembrance,” a law since used to shield monuments that commemorate the four-year rebellion waged by the Confederate States of America.
In 2020, when protests over police violence against Black men and women spread around the U.S., the campaign to take down Confederate monuments in the South drew national attention. That year, statues were removed in Richmond, Va., the former Confederate capital, and in most of the 11 states that had seceded from the U.S.
In North Carolina, around 20 monuments were removed in a single month, some under the preservation law’s public-safety exemptions. Three were hauled from the grounds of the state capitol in Raleigh. “Monuments to white supremacy don’t belong in places of allegiance,” said North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who gave the order.
Yet more than 70 remain in public spaces around the state, largely in small towns and rural communities where local residents, like Dean, refuse to surrender their Confederate landmarks, saying they are a piece of history worth saving.
Similar fights are underway across the South, where hundreds of Confederate monuments and memorials remain.
“We’ve lost so much respect for our elders,” said Dean, a retired engineering technician who serviced ATMs. “Saving these memorials and saving the memory of these soldiers who died defending their homes and families, that’s part of that tradition, part of the country we don’t want to see lost.”
Local opponents have paid for billboard messages, including: We apologize for the Confederate statue. We’re working on it.
Edenton’s 115-year-old bronze Confederate soldier, rifle in hand, stands atop a 19-foot granite column in the heart of town and is visible for blocks. Last year, the town council voted to move the statue to a nearby park. But a judge issued a restraining order after the vote, in response to an emergency request from two heritage-preservation groups, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy. The groups had earlier sued to keep the monument in place.
Dean, an area commander in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said many of the Black people pained by the statue were “being told to be offended.”
John Shannon, a 69-year-old church pastor who joins the Saturday protests led by Phillips, also favors moving the monument away from its high-profile locale at the shore of Albemarle Sound. Shannon, who is Black, said some passersby give the group a thumbs-up. Others are hostile.
Shannon recalled one man who pulled his car over: “He looked at me and said, ‘Hey, little black boy. You need to go home, don’t you?’”
At a public meeting in June, Edenton Councilman Elton Bond said he worried about the simmering tensions.
“It’s going to explode downtown,” he said. “Somebody’s going to get hurt.”
‘Changing the world’
Most of the Civil War monuments and memorials, from Texas to Virginia, were erected from around 1890 through the 1920s. They include Confederate generals on horseback, soldiers on foot and other commemorations standing on public property.
Historians say these public monuments were intended to reinforce the belief, embraced by many white Southerners then and now, that the Confederates pursued a noble cause about states’ rights, not preserving slavery. Most historians agree that protecting slavery was behind the Confederacy’s creation, a position supported by numerous speeches and documents from Southern leaders of the period.
Confederate monuments stand near county courthouses in roughly 30 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including Tyrrell County. That courthouse—located in the town of Columbia, N.C., population 600—has a 23-foot high monument, a Confederate soldier on a pedestal. It includes the inscription, “IN APPRECIATION OF OUR FAITHFUL SLAVES.”
Sherryreed Robinson, a 49-year-old resident who serves on the local library board, said the notion that Black people served loyally and contentedly in bondage was absurd and offensive. “The courthouse and the justice system is for justice,” she said. “To me, that statue represents inequality.”
Robinson led a march to the courthouse in 2020 that kicked off what she and others believed would be a swift campaign to remove the statue, “changing the world, one statue at a time,” she told supporters.
Sherryreed Robinson outside her home in Columbia, N.C. Photo: Kristen Zeis for WSJ
The monument, dedicated in 1902, remains. Robinson’s group, Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County, has urged moving it to a public park across the Scuppernong River. County officials say their hands are tied, citing the state’s 2015 preservation law.
In May, Robinson and three other residents filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that the county was engaged in racially discriminatory government speech by refusing to remove a monument with the phrase “faithful slaves.”
In a court filing, lawyers for the county commissioners said the county wasn’t protecting the monument “for any discriminatory purpose,” but was prohibited from taking action by the state law. Local officials declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment.
One of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs Joyce Sykes Fitch, 77, grew up in Tyrrell County and graduated from a segregated Black high school. She moved back to her hometown after living in New Jersey for more than five decades. On her return, Fitch said, she saw the monument with fresh eyes. “They think we were faithful? We wanted to be a slave?” she said.
Mark Nixon, president of Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County, and Joyce Sykes Fitch in Columbia, N.C. Photo: Kristen Zeis for WSJ
Since 2017, about three dozen Confederate monuments in North Carolina have been removed, according to an analysis of University of North Carolina data by The Wall Street Journal. A few were destroyed by protesters. Many more were removed by local governments.
A national poll released in June by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute found that American views about Confederate monuments split largely by race and political party, particularly in the South.
The poll found that 81% of Republicans nationwide were in favor of preserving the monuments compared with 30% of Democrats and a quarter of Black respondents. Together, that yielded 52% of respondents nationwide and 58% of Southerners in favor.
In May, the Alamance County chapter of the NAACP abandoned a three-year legal battle with the county to relocate a 110-year-old Confederate statue from in front of the county courthouse in Graham, N.C. A state appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling to keep it at the courthouse in the town of 18,000.
The Alamance County NAACP chapter is now focused on backing state and local political candidates who want to move the Confederate markers from public spaces. “If you shift the political landscape, the monument will go,” said Ernest Lewis Jr., the chapter’s legal redress chairman.
The NAACP chapter had tried to have the 30-foot tall monument moved to a “historically appropriate location.” County officials objected, citing the state’s preservation law.
The North Carolina legislature passed the law a few weeks after the 2015 racially motivated killing of nine Black people who had gathered for a Bible study at a church in Charleston, S.C. The man, convicted of murder in 2016, posed online with a Confederate flag. The North Carolina preservation law had been in the works before the murders.
The South Carolina governor at the time, Republican Nikki Haley, called for a vote by state lawmakers to remove a Confederate battle flag flying at the capitol, saying many saw it as “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.”
A Confederate monument sits in front of the county courthouse in Graham, N.C.; a mural across from the monument.
Cornell Watson for WSJ
The monument at the county courthouse in Graham, a Confederate soldier on a pedestal, is now surrounded by a $32,000, 8-foot spiked iron fence. Jason Cox, who owns a building across the street, commissioned a mural that says, “LOVE ALWAYS WINS.” He supported moving the statue, in part, because it hurt business by drawing people to “yell at each other,” he said.
Dustin Gladwell is a 47-year-old Army veteran and the founder and managing director of a veterans nonprofit that runs a coffee shop facing the monument. Gladwell, who served in Afghanistan and elsewhere, doesn’t support the statue but knows many locals who do.
Dustin Gladwell in Graham, N.C. Photo: Cornell Watson for WSJ
“Do I want it torn down? No,” he said, “Do I want it to be there? No. But it’s there.”
Doug Cartwright, 78, is glad the monument is staying, he said. He owns the nearby Court Square Bar, which displays Confederate, U.S. and pro-Trump flags.
The statue never meant much to him, Cartwright said, until protesters, some from outside the county, began trying to “take everything down and start trouble for nothing.”
Shared experience
A lone protester stood by the Confederate monument in Edenton on Juneteenth 2021 and started ringing a bell. It turned into a weekly ritual.
Phillips heard about the bell-ringer later that year and decided to spread the word. On Christmas Day 2021, Phillips and a handful of others held their first protest.
Dean said he and a couple of friends, also veterans, then began their weekly counter-demonstrations, calling themselves “Vets for Vets.” They saw the statue as a memorial to Confederate soldiers, he said, not a monument to the Confederacy.
“We decided these people on the other side,” Dean said, “they were only presenting one side. It was the wrong side.”
After about a year, a nearby chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans invited Dean and the other men to join the group.
Dean and Phillips don’t recall having any conversation between them. Despite their differences, the two men share similar backgrounds. Both grew up in the segregated South and became activists only in retirement, tethered to the same statue.
Phillips lived on a rented farm as a boy until his family moved to the town of Micro, N.C., which counted 458 residents in the 2020 census. His father took a job at the general store owned by Phillips’s grandfather. The store served people of all races, Phillips said, and extended credit to customers for months at a time.
Dean tells of a similar neighborliness by his grandmother, who ran a country store in rural North Carolina. He grew up in Monroe, La., joined the Navy after high school and served for eight years. He settled in Edenton, got a college degree and put in more than 37 years as a technical troubleshooter for ATM-maker Diebold.
Phillips attended segregated all-white schools and graduated from the University of North Carolina. He did social work for a while before entering the sign-making business in Raleigh.
Phillips, who leaned left politically from a young age, said he steered clear of civic activism during his years in Raleigh, too busy with his business and other interests. But in Edenton, he said, “If you don’t step up, there may be no one else that will do it.”
Dean thought the same thing, and he has since helped establish a local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
In June, Edenton’s town manager imposed rules on the demonstrators, limiting the size of signs and barring bullhorns and similar devices. Town Councilman Patrick Sellers said some residents told him that the protests scared their children.
Local business owners also have become wary of the weekly skirmish. They temporarily sidelined demonstrators during the summer tourist season: The owners snapped up town picketing permits at the statue in July for the hours of 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
“Residents are kind of tired of the little show that goes on down there,” said restaurateur Joe Wach, who owns the Herringbone on the Waterfront with his wife.
In August, a lawyer told officials that a client offered to buy the statue, relocate it and donate $50,000 to local charities. The town’s lawyer said the restraining order prevented officials from taking any action. On Tuesday, the offer was withdrawn.
The two sides showed up as usual on a recent Saturday with what seemed like war-weariness.
“It’s important that we keep up the pressure,” Phillips said.
“As long as the Marxists are there, we will be there,” Dean said.
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