A North Carolina appeals court has ruled in a case involving a Confederate monument standing outside a central North Carolina courthouse.

A North Carolina appeals court ruled Tuesday that local leaders who refused calls to remove a Confederate monument from outside a county courthouse acted in a constitutional manner and kept in place the statue at its longtime location in accordance with state law.

The three-judge panel unanimously upheld a trial court judge’s decision to side with Alamance County and its commissioners over the 30 foot (9.1 meter)-tall statue, which features a Confederate infantryman perched at the top. The state NAACP, the Alamance NAACP chapter, and other groups and individuals had sued the county and its leaders in 2021 after the commissioners rejected calls to take the statue down.

Confederate monuments in North Carolina, as elsewhere nationwide, were a frequent focal point for racial inequality protests in the late 2010s, and particularly in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. North Carolina legislators enacted a law in 2015 that limits when an “object of remembrance” such as a military monument can be relocated.

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      3•3 months ago

      It was originally private property which might have been the confusion, though even back in the 1920’s in the Jim crow era when it was first started there was government involvement with helping to fund it. It languished for decades unfinished though, until Brown V Board of Education and the birth of the civil rights movement renewed interest again in erecting more confederate statues. The segregationist governor Marvin Griffin began pushing for the state to buy the property and finish the carving.

      The main pillar of his platform was a promise to fight integration, a concept he called “an order to us from Washington [to] mongrelize the South.” Griffin also vowed, often in the same breath, to buy Stone Mountain for the state and finally complete the carving. He won the election.

      https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/what-telling-the-truth-about-stone-mountain-might-look-like/732I32LU4RFL5M5MNO75WEC774/

      The more you dig into confederate monuments the more you realize most of them have very little to do with being actual war memorials and a lot to do with the politics of white supremacy.