For once in my scholarly life I feel like things are moving, well, too fast to keep up with them. Usually we get a monument protection act, or a case on monument law, or some new work on Jim Crow every few years. And now we have them all at once -- far too many to keep track of, let alone write about. I mean they just renamed Confederate Memorial Library up in Hillsborough -- and that was just a trivia question a few weeks ago. A while back Kyle Graham jokingly (I think) said the faculty lounge is the place to go for breaking news on eugenics and Confederate monuments. Now things are moving so fast we're not the place to look for the latest news. The front lines of the culture war on monuments are moving so fast they're losing contact with headquarters.
Today my colleague Max Eichner told me that there's a new bill pending in the North Carolina House to protect monuments (obviously this is about Confederate monuments -- no one's taking down Vietnam or WWII monuments). It's called the Historic Artifact Management and Patriotism Act. A bunch of other states have similar legislation. I think South Carolina was the first. This legislation probably wouldn't have protected the Reidsville Confederate Monument, because the sense was that while it was on public property the statue was privately owned (I'm skeptical of that -- but that was the resolution everyone was willing to live with). And it might spur some removals in advance of the passage -- a similar thing happened in Tennessee, where Memphis renamed some parks to get ahead of the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act.
As I read this, the change here is that they're limiting the ability of the North Carolina Historical Commission to approve the removal of public monuments. The News and Observer has an article about the Act here.
And as I was looking at the North Carolina General Statutes this evening, I see that back in 1905 the legislature authorized county commissioners to make a public expenditure for fences around Confederate monuments put up on public property with private money. Here's the statute:
When any monument has been or shall hereafter be erected to the memory of our Confederate dead or to perpetuate the memory and virtues of our distinguished dead, if such monument is erected by the voluntary subscription of the people and is placed on the courthouse square, the board of county commissioners of such county are permitted to expend from the public funds of the county an amount sufficient to erect a substantial iron fence around such monument in order that the same may be protected. (1905, c. 457; Rev., s. 3928; C.S., s. 6934.)
I'm guessing this one is going to be on the way out very soon. (Of course I'm against removing this statute because it'll facilitate forgetting.)
And, unsurprisingly, the legislature also authorized the expenditure of public money for a monument to "the war between the states." I think that was first done back in 1919.
The illustration is of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Raleigh. Someone at the Raleigh News and Observer thinks it ought to come down.
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