Story by Ethan Horton
Cover by Carson Elm-Picard
Theresa Draughn stood on a sidewalk in Graham, North Carolina, holding a sign that read, “There are no white people in the Bible.”
Draughn was protesting in the heat by herself just feet away from a 30-foot-tall statue of a Confederate soldier, standing on a pedestal with a rifle by his right side.
It was July 2020, less than two months after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and racism. Draughn, who is white, had moved from New York just a few years earlier. She had become concerned for the safety of her fellow community members — especially people of color.
Draughn, a canvassing leader with the rural organizing nonprofit Down Home NC, was careful not to agitate the officers who approached her. She hadn’t interacted much with law enforcement and she didn’t know what might happen if she pushed too hard.
Soon afterward, community leaders organized a large march from nearby Burlington into downtown Graham and the Confederate statue. Draughn didn’t join, but met the group as they got to the statue.
When she left the small alley between where she’d parked and where she was headed, she saw more than 60 counter-protestors shouting racist slurs, waving Confederate flags and holding signs that read, “I didn’t own slaves.”
“I had never seen anything like it, and it angered me so badly,” Draughn said. “Because we weren’t coming from a place of violence or even anger. We were just there to have folks’ voices heard and to make it known that we’re not going to stand for this anymore. We’re not going to stand around and watch as brown and Black folks get killed by police.”
Graham has been a focal point of the battle over Confederate monuments since protests about George Floyd’s murder became widespread in the early summer of 2020. Even before that, in places like Winston-Salem and Chapel Hill, Confederate statues had been sites of protest and contention — and even removal.
Ernest Lewis Jr., the chair of the Alamance County NAACP’s legal redress team, said the statue in Graham had long been a symbol of oppression and white supremacy.
In 1870, Ku Klux Klan members lynched Wyatt Outlaw — Graham’s first Black town commissioner and a well-known Republican leader — outside the courthouse. Jacob Long, the Klan chief who led the lynching, pinned a note to Outlaw’s chest that read “Beware you guilty both white and Black.”
The lynching led Gov. William Woods Holden to declare martial law in Alamance County to suppress KKK activity.
Over 40 years later, Long introduced the speaker at the Graham Confederate statue’s dedication, half a football field away from the site of Outlaw’s lynching. Henry London, a former state treasurer candidate who openly called for disenfranchisement of Black voters, gave the dedication speech.
Lewis himself moved to Alamance County when he was 5 years old, more than 30 years ago. He didn’t realize the significance of the statue until he went to the courthouse on a school field trip late in fourth or fifth grade.
Ebony Pinnix, an Alamance County native who works with Draughn at Down Home NC, also said she was never taught about the monument or its history in the county’s public schools. But, she said, local officials were intent on keeping it in place.
In 2015, an Alamance County commissioner requested that then-County Attorney Clyde Albright compile a list of laws regarding Confederate monuments. Albright later confirmed in a deposition that it “wasn’t a request for legal advice.”
Instead, as the title of his note back to commissioners suggested, Albright collected a list of “Laws Protecting the Confederate Memorial.”
Pinnix said Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson told protestors and activists in 2020 that the statue was simply not coming down — though at least 26 Confederate monuments, including one in Winston-Salem, have been removed across the state since 2013. Alamance County then installed a $40,000 fence circling the monument.
“We were told that it was not coming down,” Pinnix said. “Not, ‘We don’t want it to.’ Like, blatantly, ‘It’s not going anywhere. You might as well get over it.’”
Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
Legal action
Down Home NC sued with Alamance County residents and other advocacy groups — including Lewis’ Alamance NAACP chapter — to remove the statue in March 2021. They argued the local governments’ decisions not to remove the monument violated the state constitution’s equal protection and open courts clauses.
The monument’s location right in front of the county courthouse was a major point of contention in the lawsuit.
The North Carolina Constitution guarantees a right to an “impartial tribunal,” but the lawsuit argued the existence of a Confederate statue in front of the courthouse “broadcasts officially sanctioned racial degradation” and therefore shows the judicial process could not be impartial.
Two Black plaintiffs who submitted testimony in the case said they felt the statue conveyed a message that there was “unequal access to justice along racial lines” and made them “question whether Black and brown people will receive justice in the courthouse in front of which it stands.”
In a pre-trial testimony, clinical psychologist and former Duke professor John Blackshear, said that symbology like the Confederate statue can activate previously existing unconscious racial biases. Black residents, Blackshear wrote, may avoid involvement in the justice system because of the fear and intimidation that comes from the statue.
Lucy Britt, another pre-trial witness and a political science professor at Gettysburg College, conducted a study for the case on whether Black Southerners were disproportionately impacted by statues like the one in Graham.
After surveying more than 1,600 Black and white North Carolinians, Britt found Confederate statues in front of courthouses Confederate monuments make Black — but not white — residents less likely to feel welcome, more likely to fear for their safety and more likely to avoid entering the courthouse.
A trial court ruled for the county before a trial even began, dismissing the case. The N.C. Court of Appeals agreed in March, and the plaintiffs won’t be appealing to the state Supreme Court.
“After the Court of Appeals decision, we recognized the low probability of this case proceeding to a full trial on the merits of our constitutional claims, even though we continue to believe that the facts and the law warranted a trial,” Marissa Wenzel, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We have elected to focus our efforts instead on empowering our clients to advocate for change through grassroots political processes.”
The backbone of the court decisions was a 2015 state law preventing removal of a statue unless it is privately owned and there has been an agreement made with local governments or the state for its relocation — or if it has been deemed a threat to public safety. The Graham statue is owned by the county and officials had surrounded the statue with the $40,000 fence.
‘Commemorative arms race’
Very few Confederate monuments were dedicated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Instead, most of the state’s more than 200 memorials were put up from 1900-35, like the one in Graham.
Fitzhugh Brundage, the William Umstead Distinguished Professor in UNC-CH’s history department, said the spike in Confederate memorial dedication in the early 20th century was partially in response to a large number of Union dedications, especially in Washington, D.C.
“I think we should interpret (Confederate monuments) as part of a commemorative arms race,” Brundage said. “In the late 19th century, white Southerners who were committed to commemorating the Confederacy thought they were losing the commemorative arms race, and by any normal measure, you would say they were.”
Often, he said, the monuments were not put up in a sense of triumph and pride in the Confederacy — they were erected in moments of anxiety about the supremacy of whites in the South. The monuments’ placement in front of courthouses and other high-traffic public spaces was intentional, he said.
“If you really feel secure in your authority, you don’t necessarily need to put monuments up,” Brundage said. “But on the other hand, if you have the sense of, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got to put these up in stone so that people can’t ignore us and what we value.’”
Winston-Salem’s Confederate monument was one of four Confederate memorial dedications across North Carolina in 1905, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has compiled memorials honoring the Confederacy across the country.
In 2014, more than 100 years after its Confederate statue was put up, the City of Winston-Salem gave the deed to its courthouse to a real estate developer to build multi-family housing on the site. The monument, positioned outside the courthouse, was allowed to stay on the site.
But over the next five years, two instances of vandalization and several major protests around the statue caused the City to begin to reconsider. In March 2019, after deciding the statue was officially a “public nuisance,” it chose to remove the monument and place it in storage before it could be moved to a cemetery.
Winston-Salem declaring the monument unsafe — and the fact that it was now on private property — helped the city navigate the 2015 state law that defines when a commemorative monument can be removed.
The problem with Winston-Salem’s removal, though, was that the United Daughters of the Confederacy — a nonprofit group committed to “honoring the memory of its Confederate ancestors” but which says it is opposed to white supremacy — had filed a complaint in state court to attempt to stop the City from removing the statue.
The group said it would be harmed by the removal of the statue because it was the “legacy organization which raised the money necessary to design, build, and place the monument” back in 1905.
The trial court disagreed and said the organization lacked legal standing — the UDC never made a claim to own the statue or other legal interest in preserving the monument.
In 2020, the N.C. Court of Appeals upheld that decision. In 2022, the N.C. Supreme Court upheld it, too, but sent the case back to the Forsyth County trial court for further proceedings.
And two years after that decision, Winston-Salem and the UDC have settled to move the statue to Valor Memorial Park in Davidson County, a 45-minute drive to the south of its original site and the location of several other monuments.
Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines, who has been the mayor since 2001, said having the statue displayed so prominently downtown was untenable for the city’s 34 percent Black population. He said he received death threats and other unpleasant comments during the removal process — many of which came from outside of Winston-Salem.
“But sometimes when you’re doing the right thing, you just do it,” Joines said.
In Graham, Draughn is still frustrated. She has seen communities across the state, including nearby Pittsboro, take down their Confederate statues.
The one in Graham remains in place, inscribed with a poem from the Mexican-American War often used by Confederate sympathizers: “On fame’s eternal camping ground, their silent tents are spread, and glory guards, with solemn round, the bivouac of the dead.”
Draughn said she will keep fighting. Now, her goal is a change in leadership in Graham, Alamance County and across the state — which she said might be the only way to get the statue down. Down Home NC is expected to knock on 500,000 doors across the state during its canvassing project before the 2024 elections.
“I think we find this will to keep going because, if we get enough of us, we can build this really amazing f—— power,” Draughn said. “And they’re not going to be able to argue with that.”
Great work Ethan. Incredible work, MediaHub will miss you.