‘Black existence’ missing from what students see at NC Capitol. Now that could change.

The long-stalled African American monument on the State Capitol grounds would get $3 million to fund it if lawmakers include North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s proposal in the final budget. And a top Republican has indicated his support.

The African American monument project has been waiting for several years and would be built on the southeast corner of the Capitol grounds. There is no monument at the historic Capitol in the center of downtown Raleigh that recognizes the contributions of African American people in North Carolina.

Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, told reporters on Thursday he still supports the project, which has been stalled for more than three years.

Funding for the project was part of the 2019 state budget that never became law, and after briefly resurfacing in 2020, was tabled after protesters and the government removed statues honoring the Confederacy on the Capitol grounds. The 2021 budget did not include funding for the African American monument, The N&O previously reported.

“We’ve supported it in the past. We’ll just see how it works out as far as the budget this time,” Berger said Thursday, adding that he hasn’t talked to Republican budget committee members about it.

“But I think it’s known that I have supported that in the past, and will continue to support it,” Berger said.

The N&O has asked lawmakers about the project on and off for years.

Sen. Dan Blue, the Senate minority leader and a Raleigh Democrat, told The News & Observer last month that the project needs to move forward “more urgently now than before.” He referenced all the springtime field trips students make to the Capitol complex.

“There is no experience on the Capitol grounds of Black existence in North Carolina,” Blue said.

Cooper’s budget proposal released Wednesday would allocate $3 million this upcoming fiscal year for the project. The money, higher than the $2.5 million for it in the failed 2019 budget bill, would be used to complete the planning, design and construction of the monument. The project, would be led by the African American Heritage Commission within the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Reid Wilson told The N&O in an interview Thursday that the project has been in “pause mode” waiting for legislative funding.

Wilson said the Capitol is “the most important block of honor in the state,” and sends a message about what the state chooses to honor.

If the funding comes through this year, next steps would be selecting a designer after a bidding process, then creating a more significant and concrete design for what the area would look like, and then finally construction.

Confederate monuments are gone

A 2016 state report about the monument said it should be designed with the most frequent Capitol visitors — schoolchildren — in mind. The report recommended several aspects of what the monument would look like, including that it would feature a bas relief timeline on the small hill adjacent to the Wilmington Street sidewalk. Bas relief is slightly raised images off a flat surface. The monument could stand on multiple elevations on the grounds. Recommended materials are bronze and granite, like other monuments at the Capitol.

At the time of those recommendations, the African American monument would have been placed on the same Union Square with mostly monuments featuring white men and three honoring the Confederacy, The N&O reported in 2020. Protesters tore down Confederate soldier statues that year during the protests that followed Minneapolis police’s killing of George Floyd, and the rest of the monuments were removed by the state.

A new African American monument could mean that women would be represented at the Capitol. One of the Confederate statues had featured a nameless woman. The only woman on the Capitol grounds now is “Lady Liberty,” holding a palm frond atop the large memorial to World War I, World War II and the Korean War on the Edenton Street side of the Capitol.

Wilson said the monument would “recognize and honor the many contributions African Americans have made to the state of North Carolina. That’s an important message for people to see and hear and experience, whether its a school field trip or people going down to the bluegrass festival.”

“That’s why it’s so important to have on the Capitol grounds — that it signifies the state recognizes that,” he said.

A few blocks away, a separate project honoring the Black experience in North Carolina — particularly the struggle for freedom — will open this summer. North Carolina Freedom Park, which is being built with public and private money, features a steel piece of public art at the center called the Beacon of Freedom. Quotations from North Carolinians are inscribed along the walls of the park. Freedom Park, which could be finished in June, takes up part of the block between the Executive Mansion and the Legislative Building.

The legislature has given funding to Freedom Park, but not the Capitol monument. The Legislative Black Caucus continues to have the monument on its list of priorities.

“I think it was a missed opportunity,” Sen. Natalie Murdock, a Durham Democrat, told The N&O in February. “I think with the reckoning we’ve honestly had nationwide, it really, really should be there.”