Beginning on February 14, the North Carolina Commission on Racial & Ethnic Disparities (NC CRED) is launching a new campaign and website to help residents remove confederate monuments across the state.
The co-founder and chair of NC CRED, James Williams, said the campaign will front an ongoing effort to help facilitate and coordinate the removal of monuments from courtyard spaces and public property.
Earlier this year, NC CRED wrote a letter to North Carolina Chief Justice Cheri Beasley asking her to remove the statue of former Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin from the state Court of Appeals building – as well as his life-size portrait that hangs in a place of honor above the bench of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Williams said NC CRED believes that confederate monuments have “no legitimate place” on public property and especially not inside or in front of courthouses.
“The symbolism that is situated – whether it’s portraits or statues – those types of things communicate not only what we supported back then, but also what we stand for now,” Williams said.
Williams said the overarching goal to remove confederate monuments from public property will be made possible by providing people in North Carolina with the resources they need to do so.
NC CRED has created a team of historians to provide background and context about these local monuments and a team of attorneys to address the legal issues surrounding their removal.
“A lot of people feel that, while we want to see the monument removed, North Carolina has a law that says you can’t move these monuments,” Williams said. “Part of what our attorney teams will do is talk about North Carolina’s Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act of 2015. We know what that was. That’s a fancy way of saying ‘we’re going to pass a law to make it pretty near impossible for people to remove these confederate monuments’ – these monuments to hate, white supremacy and terrorism.”
Williams said NC CRED’s campaign website will provide community members and local officials with information on how to lawfully remove confederate monuments if they so desire.
“We’ll have a website and at that website we want it to be a one-stop shop where people can go to get information that they might need to be informed about the monument in their community and also have a toolkit that will provide a step-by-step approach that might be used to remove these monuments,” Williams said.
This website will also include an interactive map where North Carolinians can select their jurisdiction and get information about any and all confederate monuments in their community.
“When it was created, under what circumstances, who made the dedication speeches and what did they say – that’s the type of information that will be available,” Williams said.
You can learn more about the Campaign to Remove Confederate Monuments here.
Hear more of 97.9 The Hill’s conversation with James Williams here.
Lead photo via NC CRED.
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