As the Trump administration sets its sights on reinstalling Confederate monuments toppled at the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, a lawsuit over one statue at a North Carolina courthouse quietly advances in federal court.
Outside the Tyrrell County Courthouse, a 1902 monument to a Confederate soldier still stands. The 23-foot-tall statue also bears a likeness of Confederate States Army Commander Robert E. Lee and the inscription “IN APPRECIATION OF OUR FAITHFUL SLAVES.”
Last year, a group of Black residents under the name Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County sued the county’s Board of Commissioners for maintaining the monument, which they argue harbors a “textual endorsement of the institution of slavery.” Dozens of other courthouses in North Carolina still host statues glorifying the Confederacy, but according to the lawsuit, the inscription on the Tyrrell County monument makes it unique.
Now, the lawsuit is forging ahead. In May, a federal judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina dismissed some claims in the case but allowed the plaintiffs to continue challenging the constitutionality of such an inscription on public grounds.
The case moves forward as the Trump administration enlists the National Park Service to reinstall Confederate monuments toppled by activists at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, including a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike in Washington, DC, and a Confederate memorial in Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery. After the killing of George Floyd, protesters across the country extrajudicially dismantled and defaced an estimated 94 Confederate monuments in a moment of collective rage, which Trump has vowed to reverse. Years earlier, in 2017, the Charlottesville city council’s vote to remove a monument to Lee sparked the deadly, white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally, as well as a legal battle that culminated in the statue’s removal in 2021.
The plaintiffs in the North Carolina case, who are represented by lawyers from the racial justice advocacy nonprofit Emancipate NC, believe that the statue is the “only courthouse monument in the United States of America to textually express a racially discriminatory message,” according to court papers.
The presence of the inscription on public property, the lawsuit argues, is a violation of equal protection enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County formed in the 1990s with the initial goal of having the statue removed altogether, before shifting focus to push for the inscription to be removed or covered.
Ian Mance, senior counsel for Emancipation NC and one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, told Hyperallergic that the case is currently in discovery.
