A Town Tried to Heal Racial Divides. It Energized Confederate Supporters Instead.

Confederate supporters arrived first, establishing a Saturday morning base near the town waterfront with “Save our history” signs and Civil War information sheets. Some sported red MAGA hats and shirts that proclaimed “America First,” or, in one case, “If you don’t like Trump then you probably won’t like me and I’m OK with that.”

The opposition showed up about two hours later carrying stark white signs with black letters: “Remove this statue.”

For the next two hours, as they’ve done nearly every Saturday for the past three years, the groups mingled with confused tourists in a seemingly unending fight over a Confederate monument at the heart of this historic town, which is nearly 60 percent Black.

What started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite. A chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, long extinct locally, sprang to life. The forgotten Confederate Memorial Day was resurrected and commemorated again last month with a wreath-laying and roll call of the rebel dead.

And the town council, which had formed a Human Relations Commission in 2020 to consider steps for racial reconciliation, last fall came up with a novel way to handle the statue of a generic Confederate soldier:

Take it down from the waterfront. Add it to the courthouse.

Facing north, the green-patina figure of the soldier — one of many that were once found throughout the South — stands atop a stone column on a grassy traffic median where the town market once stood. Enslaved people were bought, sold or offered for hire on that spot.

The Civil War is a small part of the long heritage of Edenton, a town of about 4,500 located in Chowan County near the western end of Albemarle Sound. Today the town thrives on tourism, its streets an Americana confection of pre-Revolution Colonial homes next to Victorian fantasies next to 1920s cottages. Broad Street is lined with shops and restaurants, a promenade of quaintness leading straight down to the water and the Confederate monument.

Now mired in legal challenges, moving the monument would be the first time in a decade that any locality in the United States has added a Confederate statue on courthouse grounds, according to a study published last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation.

At a moment when the Trump administration is scrubbing prominent Black historic figures from U.S. government websites and condemning Smithsonian exhibits on race as “divisive ideology,” the Edenton statue drama — community activism, followed by a resurgence of the old order — seems to embody the nation’s pivot from the reckonings of 2020 that were prompted by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

States and localities removed or renamed 169 Confederate memorials in 2020, according to the recent SPLC study, the fourth update of a survey originally conducted in 2016. Removals have declined every year since, plummeting last year to two, the study found through an analysis of federal, state and local data.

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Mike Dean, commander of the Edenton Bell Battery of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, roared up on his Harley — dubbed “Traveller” after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s horse — and took command of the outpost. When a few protesters began marching up the sidewalk, Dean gestured to a woman walking by with a sign that read “Remove this statue.”

“Understand,” Dean said, “these are Marxists. Marxists want to destroy history.”

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The town council spent a couple of years mulling what to do with the recommendation to move the statue. Under a North Carolina law passed in 2015, options were limited. A locality can’t simply remove a Confederate memorial or any other public-owned “object of remembrance;” if it wants to relocate one, the memorial has to go to a position of “similar prominence, honor, visibility, availability, and access.” And the answer can’t be a cemetery.

When Confederate heritage groups filed suit to block any move, the public process seemed to come to a halt. In November, though, the town council caught statue opponents off guard by revealing a plan to transfer ownership of the statue to Chowan County, which would then move it a few blocks over to the working courthouse. (Edenton’s original 1767 courthouse is now a historic site).

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice responded with a lawsuit of its own, claiming among other things that putting a statue at the courthouse violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by intimidating Black people who show up for legal proceedings.

Both cases are mired in procedural delays.

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