Outside the Gaston County, North Carolina courthouse, there’s a 35-foot tall statue of a Confederate soldier. Like most Confederate monuments, it wasn’t put up until years after the Civil War, and while latter day defenders of these abominations always run to saying “it’s just history!” the people who erected the monument were pretty explicit about why they did it. At the monument’s dedication, the speaker explained that North Carolina “stood for the integrity of a whole civilization and a white race, and today [in 1912] North Carolina holds in trust for the safety of the nation the purest Anglo-Saxon blood to be found on American shores.”
So, yeah, not so much about “history.”
But a new lawsuit takes aim at the statue and hopes to provide a model for lawyers across North Carolina and, to the extent possible under other state constitutions, across the country.
The lawsuit grew out of a political retreat. Gaston’s County Commissioners had pledged to remove the statue, but abruptly reversed course in August, agreeing to keep it up indefinitely. This prompted three Gaston County organizations focused on promoting equality for their Black members and for African Americans and a multi-racial group of individual plaintiffs to file suit. They’re represented by an array of civil rights specialists, consumer protection attorneys, and a former North Carolina Deputy Attorney General.
Generally, people have either pushed politicians to remove the statues voluntarily or taken direct action and torn them down like a Saddam statue. The lawsuit attempts to forge a middle path that bypasses feckless politicians, while not requiring anyone to take a jackhammer to public property. The North Carolina state constitution contains a number of provisions ranging from general statements of equal protection and anti-racial discrimination to specific provisions against supporting secession. That the county is shelling out upwards of $50,000 to maintain the statue doesn’t hurt the cause either, providing the sort of dollars and cents out for anyone not ready to join modern society and see the monument as a discriminatory attack on its face.
The suit was filed last week so the defendants haven’t had a chance to respond yet. Check out the full complaint on the next page.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.