Thanx to MAGA, The South Is Rising Again: In a Private Park in North Carolina, Confederate Statues Are Rising Again
S. E. Anderson
In a Private Park in North Carolina, Confederate Statues Are Rising Again
A state law limits what can happen to a Confederate statue after it is removed. Valor Memorial, a private park, has become a destination for some.
By Anna Venarchik
Anna Venarchik has reported on Confederate monuments across the South. She visited Valor Memorial near Denton, N.C., twice over the past year.
Amid the rolling farmland of central North Carolina, near the small town of Denton, three nearly identical Confederate statues stand on a 1.5-acre patch of manicured grass.
All three statues depict unnamed soldiers — men with mustaches, clutching rifles, atop pedestals affixed to sturdy concrete bases. And all three previously stood in communities around the state, until social justice protests swept the country in recent years, and demonstrators demanded the statues’ removal because they saw them as memorializing historical racism.
Now they stand in a private park, Valor Memorial, that is dedicated to resurrecting Confederate statues that municipalities removed from public view.
One of the park’s creators, Toni London, said she believed that Confederate soldiers deserved the same honor as any other veterans.
“It’s been an obsession to make it succeed, to make it better,” Ms. London, 52, said of the park, “and to save more.”
But others — including officials in communities where Confederate statues have stood — have long seen the memorials as relics that inappropriately revel in the country’s racist past.
Many such monuments were erected across the South in the early 20th century by chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that works to preserve Confederate history and disputes the notion that Confederate imagery is racist. It also seeks to upend the historical consensus that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, in keeping with the “Lost Cause” myth that seeks to vindicate the Confederacy’s legacy.
“This shouldn’t be public,” said Melvin McLawhorn, a commissioner and longtime civil rights activist in Pitt County, N.C., which wrestled for years over what to do with the Confederate statue outside the county courthouse in Greenville. “Can you imagine going to a courthouse and seeing hatred being symbolized? That’s not right.”
Ms. London began envisioning Valor Memorial in 2020, as the nationwide push to remove Confederate imagery from the public square took root. Her efforts align with a more recent push by President trump, whose administration moved to restore Confederate memorials soon after he returned to office. In March, he ordered the return of any monument that was removed since 2020 in what he called “a false reconstruction of American history.”
But Mr. trump’s order applies only to memorials under federal jurisdiction, and the nearly 150 Confederate statues and monuments taken down after the murder of George Floyd, which incited the 2020 protests, are almost entirely the domain of state and local officials. They have often had a hard time figuring out what to do with them.
In North Carolina, a decade-old state law protecting such statues further complicates matters. It was passed soon after Confederate imagery all over the South came under intense scrutiny when a professed white supremacist killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. Under the law, local governments can sometimes still remove statues, but the law’s language is strict about what can happen to them next.
Places like Pitt County, N.C., where Black and white residents alike had protested the Confederate soldier statue, were in a bind.
‘Control the narrative’
The idea for Valor Memorial came to Ms. London in 2020, after a flatbed truck hauled a Confederate statue away from Main Street in Lexington, N.C. It was determined that the local Daughters of the Confederacy chapter owned the monument, and could have it. But the group needed a plan.
Ms. London, then a member of the organization, found a patch of land outside Denton, a predominantly white community between Charlotte and Greensboro. The owners donated the property after hearing about her quest, and volunteers helped clear the pines.
In 2021, the statue from Lexington was rededicated at Valor Memorial before about 600 people, Ms. London said.
On a recent Saturday at the park, Ms. London and Debra Barta, who was president of the local Daughters chapter when the statue was removed from Lexington, explained the purpose of the rock walls circling the monuments.
The knee-high barriers were not just decorative, Ms. London said, but “a security element.”
If a vehicle targeted the statues and plowed across the park, the walls would keep the collection safe, she explained, adding, “It ain’t going nowhere.” (There has been, she acknowledged, no vandalism at Valor Memorial.)
Though Ms. London and Ms. Barta believe such monuments should still stand in public spaces, they see the park as an opportunity to advance their vision of Confederate history, including that Southerners fought to protect their states and families against a “northern invader,” as Ms. London put it.
“If you control the property and control the statue,” Ms. London said, “you control the narrative.”
Some critics of Confederate memorials see that as a problem.
“It’s not as egregious as in front of a courthouse,” Rivka Maizlish, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said of putting Confederate statues at Valor Memorial. “But I think it’s still a site of education. People could go there and be propagandized into the Lost Cause mythology.”
The center tracks such memorials around the country and supports their removal.
Some communities in North Carolina view Valor Memorial pragmatically, as a solution to a previously unsolvable problem. After paying to store a Confederate statue for several years, Chatham County helped transfer it to the park in 2024 at a cost of nearly $4,000. Months later, Winston-Salem followed suit with a statue, paying more than $31,000 for it to be loaded onto a truck, shipped to Valor Memorial and installed.
Days after Mr. trump was re-elected last fall, the Winston-Salem statue was rededicated at the park before a crowd of about 100, in a ceremony with a string band that played “Dixie” and Confederate re-enactors who fired cannons.
Mayor Allen Joines of Winston-Salem said in an interview that given the challenges of finding a destination for the statue, he was “very thankful” that Valor Memorial had come along.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy is not involved in the park’s operations, according to Ms. London and Ms. Barta, who are no longer members of the group. Representatives of the organization did not reply to requests for comment.
Instead, Valor Memorial relies on volunteers and donors, who have helped fund the purchase of almost 12 additional acres, Ms. London said, where she plans to soon display five more Confederate statues from around the state.
The park has become a gathering place for people who say that Confederates should be not only remembered, but valorized. A statuette of Robert E. Lee is on display, as is a billowing rebel flag. “Sleep martyrs of a fallen cause” is among the inscriptions on the monuments.
Still, “we didn’t want it to just be a Confederate park,” Ms. London said. Valor Memorial honors all veterans, she said, through Veterans Day luncheons and a memorial wall with at least one tribute to a Union soldier. Memorials for the Spanish-American and Vietnam wars will soon be installed.
‘This sensitive subject’
In June 2020, as protesters targeted the Confederate statue in Greenville, a county commissioner, Chris Nunnally, submitted a motion to the Pitt County board for its removal, which state law allows if a monument threatens public safety. After a 7-to-2 vote, the statue was moved to storage.
Leaving it there, Mr. Nunnally said in an interview, would have been akin to sweeping the problem under the rug. So an ideologically diverse relocation committee was created to determine the statue’s future.
Possible options kept falling through, said Tom Coulson, a county commissioner at the time who voted against removing the statue, because the intended recipients encountered pushback or didn’t want the liability. For years, the statue remained in storage, hidden behind the jail, Mr. Coulson said.
Then, in April 2024, Ms. London sent a letter to the county proposing a “solution to this sensitive subject.” The commissioners voted unanimously to donate the statue to Valor Memorial’s nonprofit.
Both Mr. Nunnally and Mr. McLawhorn would not have minded, personally, if the statue had been destroyed. But in “the spirit of the First Amendment,” as Mr. Nunnally put it, private property seemed an appropriate resolution. After it stood outside the courthouse for more than 100 years, and spent four more in storage, the two commissioners were just glad to see the statue leaving Greenville. Mr. McLawhorn said that with the monument gone, “it was liberation throughout the county.”
Mr. Coulson believes the statue should never have been removed, but he is happy it is out of storage. Once the bronze soldier is back on its pedestal, he said, he plans to go see it. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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