Civil war monuments [View all]

[struggle4progress]

Posted: Sunday, August 16, 2015 9:18 am
Timothy B. Tyson

State Rep. Marilyn Avila, a Republican from Raleigh, argued for the new Mandatory Confederate Monuments bill, saying, “When you talk about memorials and remembrances, the point of time at which they were erected is extremely relevant”

Avila was right. She just didn’t have any idea when they were actually erected. She said that the Confederate monuments went up “shortly after the War Between the States” ...

White North Carolinians erected nearly all of our Confederate monuments after 1898, decades after the Civil War ended. More importantly, white North Carolinians built the monuments after the White Supremacy campaigns had seized power by force and taken the vote from black North Carolinians. The monuments reflected that moment of white supremacist ascendency ...

During the Civil War, the actual Confederacy bitterly divided North Carolina. This was the last Southern state to secede; Alamance County voted overwhelmingly against secession — 1,114 to 254 — the only time its residents got to vote on it. There remained a persistent outcry of moral dissent. Thousands of whites even took up arms against the Confederacy and far more refused to accept its authority. Thousands of black North Carolinians escaped slavery and served in the Union Army ...

http://www.greensboro.com/civil-war-monuments/article_8f00d3c3-e221-5729-a78d-2a6fef78a91e.html