Monuments hold a protected place
Published January 19, 2018
Editorial by Greensboro News-Record, January 18, 2018.
State law gives the N.C. Historical Commission the authority to accept or approve monuments, memorials and works of art. The 11 members, appointed by governors, have plenty of leeway to decide.
Not so when it comes to removing monuments. Then, the commission is allowed very little discretion to exercise judgment — virtually none, in some cases.
That’s unfortunate, because whether to keep or remove a monument can be a question that requires sensitivity, understanding and judgment. The N.C. legislature changed state law in 2015 to remove such considerations.
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, asked the Historical Commission last summer to remove three Confederate monuments from the Capitol grounds in Raleigh and place them at the Bentonville Civil War battlefield in Johnston County instead.
The request deserves a thoughtful response. Some members of the public are tired of seeing tributes to the Confederacy in public places of honor. Not only did Confederate states fight a bloody war against the United States to preserve slavery, but many of the monuments were erected in the early 1900s to express support for Jim Crow regimes and white supremacy. So there’s a strong argument for relocating them to places where they belong more obviously to a historical context, such as museums or battlefields.
Others disagree, and their arguments should be heard as well.
But, according to state Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican, the debate is already over. The 2015 law, which passed his chamber with little discussion, settled the matter. “The North Carolina Historical Commission does not even have the authority to grant your request,” Berger wrote to Cooper in September.
For its part, the commission appointed a Monument Study Committee to “seek advice and legal opinions from appropriate entities,” but it’s likely to find that Berger is right.
The law prohibits the commission from approving the permanent removal of a state-owned “object of remembrance” unless it’s relocated “to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility, availability and access,” and if removal is required for the object’s preservation or made necessary by reconstruction, renovation or other major work. One exception is if it “poses a threat to public safety because of an unsafe or dangerous condition.”
The legislature’s intent was to bar the removal of state-owned Confederate monuments from any public property for any reason. “Objects of remembrance” honoring the cause of rebellion, slavery and Jim Crow will stand forever — or at least until the legislature’s 2015 act is repealed.
