Seeking ‘reparation’ from Supreme Court, NC Confederate descendants fight statue removal

Saying it’s owed reparations, a pro-Confederate group argued in front of the N.C. Supreme Court Monday that government officials in Winston-Salem improperly removed a prominent downtown Confederate statue in 2019.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy have lost several previous court arguments in this case, and the statue remains down. Even if they win Monday’s case in front of the state’s highest court, it’s unlikely the statue would immediately be put back up. Instead the Confederate group has asked for a new trial to be held over the statue’s fate, this time with more favorable facts for its side.

An important and unresolved question is who actually owns the statue — because if the Confederate group does own it, its lawyer argued Monday, then its rights were violated when the city took down the statue without giving it due process to fight that decision.

“If the court finds, in its wisdom, that the monument is owned by the UDC, then they have reparation rights,” James Davis, the group’s attorney, said.

In formal legal parlance, “reparations” is defined as “the redress of an injury; amends for a wrong inflicted.” But particularly in the context of the Civil War, the word is often used to denote something owed to enslaved people or their descendants, not the descendants of Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve slavery. One of of the justices in the court’s Democratic majority, Sam Ervin IV, asked Davis what exactly he meant.

“What kind of reparation rights?” Ervin said. “I mean, is there any evidence in — any allegation in the complaint, that the monument itself has sustained any physical damage?”

Davis said he wasn’t sure.

“The monument has been dismantled and removed and placed into storage in an unknown location,” he said.

How the statue fight started, and what’s next

The attorney for the city of Winston-Salem, Angela Carmon, said the city is keeping good care of the statue and is willing to give it to a private group if the group wants to put it back up on private land, somewhere it won’t cause a public safety concern.

Public safety was the city’s stated reason for taking it down in the first place.

Carmon said Monday’s oral arguments took place five years after protesters first vandalized the statue in August 2017.

The protesters were upset with events earlier that month at the 2017 “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist groups rallied against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. One of the pro-statue protesters, James Fields, murdered a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, by ramming his car into the crowd, and was later sentenced to life in prison.

After multiple acts of vandalism targeting the Winston-Salem statue, the city sent a letter to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in late 2018, asking the group to take down the statue by early 2019. The Confederate group asked for a delay, but the city took it down anyway, which led to this lawsuit.

Carmon said the Confederate group shouldn’t even have standing to sue the city over that decision, saying it can’t prove ownership or any damages.

Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, questioned that logic. He pointed to the letter the city sent in 2018, and suggested that even if the United Daughters of the Confederacy doesn’t own the statue, the letter may have given them standing to sue since it implied the city thought they owned it, and might therefore have fined the group.

Carmon said the city only sent that letter as a courtesy, in case the United Daughters of the Confederacy were interested in taking the statue for themselves. The city’s intent was never to destroy it, she added, noting that it’s still holding onto the statue in case a private group wants to put it up — as long as it’s somewhere that wouldn’t pose the same type of public safety threat the city cited to move it out away from the courthouse.

“We have said, ‘Find a place where it will not be prejudicial to public safety and we will erect the monument, at no cost to anybody,’” Carmon said. “The city will bear that expense. We understand there are citizens in Winston-Salem who value that statue. We want to put it somewhere where it’s safe ... so it can be enjoyed by individuals who enjoy seeing such monuments.”

Who are the parties involved?

The United Daughters of the Confederacy opens its membership only to women directly descended from someone who fought for, or otherwise aided, the Confederacy during the Civil War. And that ancestor must have stuck it out for the whole war, or died trying. The group’s bylaws says any rebel who swore allegiance to the United States before Lee surrendered at Appomattox doesn’t count as a real Confederate — unless there’s proof they went back on their oath and kept fighting for secession.

While the group’s membership is overwhelmingly white, Winston-Salem itself is not. White residents make up just 45% of the city’s population. The city council, where Democrats hold a 7-1 majority, is split evenly between white and Black politicians.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the statue, hosting a 1903 fundraiser to pay for it. But Winston-Salem argues the city has covered many of the costs for the statue since then, including removing spray paint after it was vandalized, removing it in 2019 and storing it since then.

Complicating matters further, the spot where it stood near the Forsyth County Courthouse was county-owned land for most of the statue’s existence. But in 2014, a year before North Carolina passed a new state law prohibiting the removal of Confederate statues on public property, the county transferred ownership of the land to a private company.

The city, the county and the private landowners were all in court Monday defending the decision to take down the statue.