This story incorrectly claimed the Tyrrell County Commission contained three members.
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After years of testifying at county meetings and community engagement, public interest group Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County (CCTC) are suing the Tyrrell County Board of Commissioners for using public dollars to maintain a pro-confederate monument pushing the myth of the “Faithful Slave.”
“The Concerned Citizens of Tyrrell County have been fighting this for several years,” said Jaelyn Miller, staff attorney with Emancipate NC, the nonprofit assisting Tyrrell County Black residents with removing the statue. “They’ve attended county commission meetings, they’ve had petitions, demonstrations, and exhausted a number of organization resources to try to convince the commission to remove the monument. We chose to go forth after exhausting all the conversations we could have.”
"It’s past time for it to come down.”
The county owns and maintains a monument near the front door of the county’s courthouse depicting a Confederate soldier on a pedestal. The statue declares “in appreciation of our faithful slaves.” White county officials unveiled the statue in 1902, at the height of a nationwide effort by Confederate sympathizers to romanticize the Confederacy, recast slavery as a beneficial institution, and rewrite the Civil War as a fight for states’ freedom—as opposed to a bloody nationwide battle to preserve white peoples’ right to legally own and rape other human beings and their children.
Federal court recently characterized a Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery depicting a similar image of “the faithful slave” as “mytholog[y],” in addition to part of a narrative that “denied the horrors of slavery” and “fueled white backlash” against the emerging constitutional rights of African-Americans. The CCTC suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eastern North Carolina, claims Black people expect their rights will be safeguarded when they enter state courthouses, including in Tyrell County. But the point of putting a mythological testament to the Lost Cause near the door of the Tyrrell County Courthouse in 1902 was to “remind Black people that the county’s institutions saw their rightful place as one of subservience and obedience,” and to hammer home the reality “that they could not and would not get justice in the courts.”
“This is an equal protection issue because of the contextually racist message on this statue,” Miller told BGX, adding it is reasonable for Black residents to look at Tyrrell County’s monument as an expression of racial hostility and an affirmation of discrimination.
Plaintiffs include CCTC Secretary Joyce Sykes Fitch, who was born in Tyrrell County in 1946. Fitch caught the scary butt-end of segregation as white residents ramped up efforts to derail Civil Rights in the days leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fitch says she’s personally lobbied the five-member commission about the “Faithful Slaves” monument at County meetings and helped organize demonstrations and funded billboards calling for its relocation, but to no avail.
“Tyrrell County is our home,” said Fitch in a statement. “This is the only place in America where you can go to a courthouse and see a public expression in support of the institution of slavery. It’s past time for it to come down.”
BGX emails to commission members did not receive a response at the time of publication. Miller warned that commissioners have closely guarded their personal opinions and are mindful of upsetting pro-confederate constituents.
“You won’t be able to find any quotes from them about whether they support the monument one way or the other. They’ve worked very hard to not be seen as supporting this explicitly racist monument,” Miller said. “But they’ve not made any comments against it. We don’t know their personal opinions on it, but their actions defend this monument.”
White North Carolina legislators sought to discourage the removal of their precious Confederate monuments in 2015 with the passage of a law protecting an “object of remembrance.” The law demands any object of remembrance that is permanently relocated “shall be relocated to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility, availability, and access … within the boundaries of the jurisdiction from which it was relocated.”
Legislators took care to make sure the law covers memorials, plaques, statues, and markers that commemorate “an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina's history.” They also made a point to discourage the relocation of certain memorials to museums, cemeteries, or mausoleums unless the offensive memorial originated at such a place.
Miller said the CCTC suit skirts the 2015 law, however, because the suit pertains to U.S. Constitutional law, which trumps state laws through the federal supremacy clause. Additionally, the North Carolina Supreme Court recently ruled that county-owned monuments are not necessarily covered under the 2015 statute, and that the statute pertains exclusively to monuments owned by the state.
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