BY MILES LAYTON
COLUMBIA — Since there are Confederate memorials in towns on both sides of the Albemarle Sound in Columbia and Edenton, here is the latest on the civil war being fought between anti-statue and save the monument forces.
A federal judge will allow Tyrrell County critics of the statue to proceed with their lawsuit aimed at moving the monument away from the front of the courthouse in Columbia.
The Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County, aka the plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit in May of 2024 seeking the removal or the covering of a phrase engraved on the side of the monument that says “in appreciation of our faithful slaves.”
The plaintiffs — Joyce Sykes Fitch, Mark Mixon, Sherryreed Robinson, and Adriana Blakeman — said that the phrase violated their rights under two claims – equal protection and an equal right to hold property.
Tyrrell County Commission, aka the defendants (because the Confederate monument is on county property), filed a motion to dismiss that lawsuit in October of 2024. Tyrrell County argued that it is entitled to legislative immunity because it acted in a legislative capacity when making decisions about the “faithful slaves” engraving, according to the lawsuit.
Wednesday, US District Judge James Dever III signed an order to proceed with the plaintiff’s complaint that it violates their equal protection rights. However, Dever dismissed the plaintiff’s right-to-hold property claim. See the Order at the end of the story.
For folks living in New York, Ohio or Europe who read the Albemarle Observer, a Confederate soldier statue stands atop a pedestal in front of the Tyrrell County Courthouse. The statue’s rectangular pedestal is covered by stone panels on each side that include engravings and iconography concerning the efforts of Tyrrell County residents who served the Confederacy in the Civil War filling each stone panel. One panel bears an engraving that reads, “in appreciation of our faithful slaves.”
Judge Dever wrote that the phrase violates the plaintiff’s equal protection rights.
“As for the underlying equal protection claim, Plaintiffs plausibly allege that the ‘faithful slaves’ engraving has a racially disproportionate impact on black residents of Tyrrell County. Tyrrell County provides no contrary argument. Plaintiffs also plausibly allege that an invidious discriminatory intent motivated Tyrrell County to install the ‘faithful slaves’ engraving in 1902,” the order says on page 8 about three-quarters down toward the bottom of the page.
As to the plaintiff’s property rights claim, Dever’s order cites legal precedent that says the right to property doesn’t exist because property interests “are not created by the Constitution, nor does a property interest exist solely because of the benefit to the recipient,” so that claim was dismissed.
Note for the record, state law prohibits the removal of Confederate memorials except under certain circumstances, and even then, these statues can only be moved to locations of equal prominence, meaning you can’t move these monuments to a museum or even a cemetery for that matter. That’s why this war rages on in courtrooms near and far.
And the issue certainly may get more complicated because in March, President Trump signed an Executive Order — Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History — that calls for a federal review of the statues toppled after George Floyd’s murder — an order that could lead to monuments to Confederate leaders being restored.
Chowan County’s Confederate Memorial
Meanwhile, in Edenton, the status of the Confederate memorial remains in limbo. Chowan County Commission and Edenton Town Council approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to place the memorial to Chowan County’s Civil War dead within Veterans Park.
In January, Jacob H. Sussman, an attorney for the Durham-based Social Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) that represents the Move the Monument Coalition filed a 198-page lawsuit that rejects the MOU for multiple reasons.
Both sides remain in a holding pattern until a new judge to evaluate the competing claims is appointed to replace Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillet, who retired May 1.
However, with issues of “standing” on one side of the coin and with the anti-monument side waging a war to move the statue out of sight/out of mind, no one will be moving any dirt in Veterans Park anytime soon no matter who is appointed as judge.
In related news, the Edenton Bell Battery will have a wreath laying and memorial service for the Chowan County veterans who died during the Civil War at noon, Saturday, May 10, at the Confederate Memorial in front of the Edenton Municipal Building at 504 South Broad Street.
Folks can certainly debate the causes of the war and have since 1861, but no one can deny that there were Confederate soldiers who never returned to their families in Chowan County.
“Saturday is important to both the community and county in that it’s held as a memory of ancestors who were never returned to a place family, friends and descendants could mourn their loss,” said Michael Dean, president of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Edenton Bell Battery Camp. “Many of the names to be read in memorium are familiar family names yet living here. It should never be forgotten of their sacrifice in defending their homes and families during the bloodiest and darkest time of our shared history.”
Dean said the memorial honors the call of duty of men who gave their lives “defending their homes and families from Northern aggression.”
“They did not return to their families even to a gravesite where they may be mourned, but were interred on distant ground often as an unknown soldier,” he said. “Let’s not dishonor their sacrifice and memory. These are our people.”
Chowan County’s war dead — first time ever in print:
Charles Davenport
Edward Bunch
John H Cale
William B Cofield
Samuel R Dennis
James M Hankins
Amos Harrell
Thomas Harrell
Joshua S Harvey
John Haste
Elisha Lane
Henry Lane
Hosea Mansfield
Jonathan Miller
Harvey Nixon
John H Norcom
William Norcom
Jeremiah Rogerson
Robert K Sexton
Benjamiah Skinner
Henry Skinner
Norman Smith
Abraham Stamm
Bryant Todd
James Wiggins
Thomas Backus
Kenny Boyce
Timothy Copeland
James Creecy
Charles Elliott
Stephen Garrett
BF Goodwin
Eli Goodwin
John W Hudson
NC Jordan
William E Parrish
Timothy Perry
John Proctor
William J Smith
William B Welch
Baker F Halsey
Quenten T Sanders
John Dail
Jesse Davis
John Taylor
Baker Hasley
James Keith Marshal
2 responses to “Judge Rules on Tyrrell County Confederate Statue Lawsuit”
This list of war dead were never returned to Chowan County. We have discovered 3 more who were interred in a Confederate prison cemetery at Elmyra NY only a couple of months before war’s end. They were all members of the Edenton Bell Battery. generations have passed without families knowing their whereabouts. Last September I travelled to Elmyra to render military honors to these soldiers for the first time since 1865. The story goes even farther regarding the cemetery itself but I won’t write it here. The soldiers are Calvin A. Haste, John L. Outlaw, A.P. Doughty. I relayed the story to the Chowan herald along with pictures but it didn’t even rate a byline. SMH. Michael Dean, Commander, SCV Edenton Bell Battery
The politically motivated attacks on Confederate monuments have been only the opening gun of the “woke” radical left’s War on History. Monuments to other great American’s have also come under attack by the self-styled “social justice warriors” including most of our founding fathers, many presidents, and great explorers.
One can look north to New York City, where the woke left has succeeded in removing monuments to two outstanding US presidents, Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt. Jefferson is a key founding father who wrote the Declaration of Independence and also the first law from the US national government to include a ban on slavery, the Northwest Ordinance.
What did they replace the Jefferson statue on Times Square with? A 12 foot statue of an overweight sloppily dressed random black woman, not even a real person.
https://www.beaufortcountynow.com/post/88776/war-on-history-nyc-tears-down-statue-of-jefferson-to-put-up-hefty-black-woman.html
When it comes to attacks on war memorials by the woke left, another shameful example from the north is from Boston. During the George Floyd riots, a BLM mob attacked and desecrated a memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry there. That unit was the heroic black Union regiment portrayed in the movie “Glory “. That was only one of the Union war memorials attacked by BLM rioters as they also attacked Confederate monuments and even military memorials from other wars.
Totalitarian movements everywhere seem to want to abolish and rewrite history. The Taliban did it. ISIS did it. The Communists did it. The Nazis did it. Now the woke radical left is doing it here and around the world. A passage from George Orwell’s dystopian novel of a totalitarian society “1984” has an apt passage that explains what is going on:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.”