People who visit the Gaston County Courthouse will continue passing a 30-foot-tall Confederate monument not far from the front door after a court last week allowed it to remain on public property.
The three-judge Court of Appeals panel unanimously upheld a Superior Court ruling dismissing a legal challenge that described the monument as “a symbol of intimidation, oppression and injustice” that “conveys a racially disparaging message.”
The Gaston County branch of the NAACP, the National Association for Black Veterans, the historically Black Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, and three county residents sued Gaston County in 2020. They argued that the monument, topped by a Confederate soldier with both hands positioned on his rifle, violates their state constitutional rights to equal protection and access to justice.
The Republican-led General Assembly adopted a law in 2015 that restricts the removal, relocation, or alteration of “objects of remembrance” on public property. The Monument Protection Law allows for the relocation of statues in some circumstances, but the new site has to be of equal prominence. Gaston County contended that law prohibited removal of the statue and sought dismissal of the case for that reason.
The trial court judge rejected that argument, but dismissed the case on different grounds, saying the NAACP and others had not shown their equal access to justice had been blocked by the monument.
The appeals court agreed. Republican Judge Donna Stroud wrote for the panel, which also included Republican judges Jeff Carpenter and April Wood, that the organizations and Gaston residents needed to prove both discriminatory intent and “a meaningful disparate impact along racial lines.”
Their claims, Stroud added, “rest on negative feelings about historical symbols—feelings that, however deeply felt, cannot support a legal remedy.”
“Plaintiffs offered survey data showing that Black residents tend to have more negative feelings about Confederate monuments than White residents,” Stroud wrote. “They also submitted expert testimony about potential psychological harm from the monument. But they didn’t show that the monument has caused disparate results in judicial outcomes.”
Confederate monuments in North Carolina have been the target of numerous protests and several lawsuits in recent years in Alamance, Buncombe, Chowan, Orange, Pitt, and Tyrell counties. In the South, especially since the murder of George Floyd, the sites have become centers of conflict for their commemoration of people who fought against abolishing slavery.
Silent Sam, a Confederate statue that stood for nearly a century on a historic UNC-Chapel Hill campus quad, was the subject of long-running demonstrations. Protesters toppled the statue in 2018. The Sons of Confederate Veterans had planned to take ownership of Silent Sam in 2019 as part of a controversial settlement agreement with UNC-CH that was later voided by a judge. Since then, the statue’s location has not been publicly disclosed.
Last summer, an Edenton monument was removed from a waterfront park but put in storage while the courts weigh whether it can be relocated to public land near the Chowan County courthouse, as the Town of Edenton and the county have agreed to do. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is representing a group of eastern North Carolina residents who are fighting that agreement, arguing that it was made behind closed doors in violation of state public meetings laws.
Several Confederate heritage organizations, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit challenging the relocation and have appealed a trial judge’s rulings finding that they had no standing in the case.