A Confederate monument stands on South Broad Street in Edenton, North Carolina. Photo / John C. Clark, for the Washington Post
Confederate supporters arrived first, establishing a Saturday morning base near the town waterfront with “Save our history” signs and United States Civil War information sheets.
Some sported red Maga hats and shirts that proclaimed, “America First”, or, in one case, “If you don’t like Trump then you probably won’t like me and I’m OK with that”.
The opposition showed up about two hours later carrying stark white signs with black letters: “Remove this statue”.
For the next two hours, as they’ve done nearly every Saturday for the past three years, the groups mingled with confused tourists in a seemingly unending fight over a Confederate monument at the heart of this historic town, which is nearly 60% black.
What started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton, North Carolina, by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite.
A chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, long extinct locally, sprang to life.
The forgotten Confederate Memorial Day was resurrected and commemorated again last month with a wreath-laying and roll call of the rebel dead.
And the town council, which had formed a Human Relations Commission in 2020 to consider steps for racial reconciliation, last year came up with a novel way to handle the statue of a generic Confederate soldier: Take it down from the waterfront. Add it to the courthouse.
Facing north, the green-patina figure of the soldier – one of many that were once found throughout the South – stands atop a stone column on a grassy traffic median where the town market once stood. Enslaved people were bought, sold or offered for hire on that spot.
The civil war is a small part of the long heritage of Edenton, a town of about 4500 located in Chowan County near the western end of Albemarle Sound.
Today the town thrives on tourism, its streets an Americana confection of pre-revolution colonial homes next to Victorian fantasies next to 1920s cottages.
Broad Street is lined with shops and restaurants, a promenade of quaintness leading straight down to the water and the Confederate monument.
Now mired in legal challenges, moving the monument would be the first time in a decade that any locality in the US has added a Confederate statue on courthouse grounds, according to a study published last month by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a legal advocacy organisation specialising in civil rights and public interest litigation.
At a moment when the Trump Administration is scrubbing prominent black historic figures from US government websites and condemning Smithsonian exhibits on race as “divisive ideology”, the Edenton statue drama – community activism, followed by a resurgence of the old order – seems to embody America’s pivot from the reckonings of 2020 that were prompted by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
States and localities removed or renamed 169 Confederate memorials in 2020, according to the recent SPLC study, the fourth update of a survey originally conducted in 2016.
Removals have declined every year since, plummeting last year to two, the study found through an analysis of federal, state and local data.
Head researcher Rivka Maizlish said the slowdown is at least partly attributable to the revival of ‘Lost Cause’ sentiment by President Donald Trump, who has called for reinstating Confederate names on military bases and has issued an executive order that could restore Confederate monuments to federal property.
The tone from the White House gives an extra sense of empowerment to those who have come out to defend the Edenton monument every weekend for the past three years.
On a recent sunny Saturday, Ron Toppin, 80, and two helpers set up a canopy over tables neatly lined with trays of Confederate information sheets and hit the footpath two hours before their opponents arrived.
Trump’s election “made the country a whole lot better”, said Toppin, whose late wife used to organise the informational materials for the group and who said his great-great-grandfather was a rebel soldier captured by the Union in 1863. “We’ve got America back.”
Mike Dean, commander of the Edenton Bell Battery of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, roared up on his Harley – dubbed “Traveller” after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s horse – and took command of the outpost.
When a few protesters began marching up the pavement, Dean gestured to a woman walking by with a sign that read “Remove this statue”.
“Understand,” Dean said, “these are Marxists. Marxists want to destroy history.”
He was referring to Debra Miller, 66, a retired human resources specialist who grew up in Edenton.
Miller is white but remembers protesting as a teenager when officials fired her high school’s black band teacher. She recalls white people saying the Confederate statue – completed in 1909 but moved to its current spot in 1961 – would remind black people to stay in their place.
Decades later, there are no black-owned businesses along South Broad St, the main downtown thoroughfare. Only two members of the town council are black, and the community has never had a black mayor.
Removing a statue that glorifies the Confederacy wouldn’t be destroying history, Miller said. It would be correcting it.
“With this statue, there’s so much prejudice that I’ve seen through the years that I’d rather just see it gone,” she said.
Settled in the mid-1600s, the town was the first colonial capital of North Carolina and at one point rivalled nearby Norfolk as a port.
In 1774, Edenton resident Penelope Barker – whose husband was away in England – heard about the Boston Tea Party and rallied the women of Edenton to stage a tea dump of their own.
The act drew ridicule from Britain but is remembered as arguably the first example of social activism by American women.
Half a century later, Edenton was a maritime stop on the Underground Railroad. Over the centuries, some of its residents have earned national prominence for their roles in fights for freedom and civil rights.
Among the enslaved population of Edenton were Harriet and John S. Jacobs, a brother and sister who escaped to the North and eventually wrote about their lives.
Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is considered a classic narrative of the enslaved experience, while her brother’s more incendiary work, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, was forgotten until being republished last year.
The tradition of resistance persisted into the civil rights era of the 1960s, when town resident Golden Frinks became a top lieutenant to Martin Luther King jnr and spearheaded protests known as the Edenton Movement.
His efforts to integrate the local high school, library and theatre started shortly before town leaders decided to move the Confederate statue from a side street to the more prominent waterfront location.
“The statue was put up with malice,” said Andrean Clarke Heath, 62, who is black and moved to Edenton in 2020 to take a job as a teacher at the high school.
She didn’t pay much attention to the monument at first, she said, but decided to do an experiment, meditating at the base of the statue on Sunday afternoons and watching people’s reactions.
“I got some very hostile, curious looks,” she said. “Black people were like, don’t you know you’re not supposed to be there?”
Many black residents drive about 30 minutes east to Elizabeth City for shopping and dining, said the Reverend John Shannon, 70, who lives in Elizabeth City and has pastored at Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Edenton for 20 years. He was named to the town’s Human Relations Commission in 2020 and spent more than a year studying the town and its racial climate.
“Black people, you know, have been kind of told where their place is at,” he said.
Shannon belongs to an informal “racial reconciliation group” that still meets every week in a local church. The diverse group discusses books and brings in speakers to help the members understand how Edenton and the nation have been shaped by issues of race.
They learned about the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the displacement of Native American tribes. One speaker, historian David Cecelski, spoke about the white supremacy clubs that formed in North Carolina around 1900 with the express purpose of amending the state constitution to eliminate the black vote.
When white-supremacist leaders were elected to statewide office and the constitution was amended, the historian said, the Edenton newspaper editor proclaimed in 1900: “White supremacy now and forever”. The Confederate statue began going up four years later.
Shannon said the information he learned as part of the racial reconciliation group helped him understand his own childhood: the shabby textbooks before schools were integrated, the way his parents would have the kids wait in the car when they ventured into downtown Elizabeth City. “It brought it fresh to us, man,” he said.
Armed with that knowledge, he and the town’s Human Relations Commission returned with several recommendations. No 1: Remove the statue from the waterfront.
“I grew up as a child kind of oblivious to it,” said Susan Inglis, 69, who is white and worked with Shannon on both the commission and the reconciliation group.
The eighth generation since 1786 to live in her family’s Edenton home, Inglis said her ancestors were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who raised money to build the statue.
But the family’s views changed over time. Her mother was “bothered by the glorification of the civil war that she learned in her [primary] school,” Inglis said. “I learned from her to abhor the statue in our town.”
The town council spent a couple of years mulling what to do with the recommendation to move the statue. Under a North Carolina law passed in 2015, options were limited.
A locality can’t simply remove a Confederate memorial or any other public-owned “object of remembrance”; if it wants to relocate one, the memorial has to go to a position of “similar prominence, honour, visibility, availability, and access”. And the answer can’t be a cemetery.
When Confederate heritage groups filed suit to block any move, the public process seemed to come to a halt.
In November, though, the town council caught statue opponents off guard by revealing a plan to transfer ownership of the statue to Chowan County, which would then move it a few blocks over to the working courthouse. Edenton’s original 1767 courthouse is now a historical site.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice responded with a lawsuit of its own, claiming among other things that putting a statue at the courthouse violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by intimidating black people who show up for legal proceedings.
Both cases are mired in procedural delays.
Edenton Mayor W. Hackney High jnr declined to comment, citing pending legal matters, and the other members of the town council did not reply to emails seeking comment.
In the meantime, Clarke Heath – whose Sunday meditations at the statue were joined by others until they morphed into the weekly protests – said she began to feel unwelcome in the town and moved north to Virginia.
Now Rod Phillips, 79, a white retiree from Raleigh with Confederate ancestors of his own, organises the Saturday gathering.
He loves Edenton, he said, but believes it’s hiding its true identity.
“All the shops are run by whites, most visitors are white, so you don’t really get a good feel for what this town is really all about,” he said. “There’s a lot of black history here, but you have to get further away from the waterfront.”
Physical reminders of that black history can be hard to find.
A vacant lot behind a bank is the site of the home of Molly Horniblow, an enslaved woman who bought her freedom but could not do the same for her offspring.
That included her granddaughter Harriet Jacobs, who hid in a garret at Horniblow’s home for nearly seven years to escape the sexual advances of her white enslaver and the jealousy of his wife before heading north.
The state of North Carolina sponsors a tour of Harriet Jacobs-related sites and put up a historical highway marker. It also is renovating the home of Frinks, who died in 2004. But neither historic figure is prominently recognised downtown.
Dean, the battery commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said he believes the town should consider putting a monument to Harriet Jacobs alongside the Confederate statue, which he reveres as a tribute to dead soldiers.
“This is a collective memorial, if you will, to 47 Chowan County boys who never came back,” he said, adding that their battlefield deaths left “no head marker for their family to grieve over, no remembrances for their families going forward in history”.
That’s more memorial than exists for thousands of enslaved people who toiled in Edenton, an unknown number of whom – including Horniblow – lie beneath a grassy lot in a residential neighbourhood on the edge of town. But Dean said it’s not fair to compare that to the soldiers killed in battle.
“The way I see it is, their people did not see to it that [the enslaved] had that Christian burial,” he said.
“Now, whether their owners were required to do that, I can’t say … But that doesn’t have anything to do with this; it’s two separate issues.”
Any attempt to associate the statue with slavery makes Dean angry. He says the figure isn’t even technically a Confederate; it’s a generic soldier “made by Cincinnati Iron Works. And in the 1890s to 1910s, these were put up all over the South”.
Yet the wording on the base makes its intent plain: “Our Confederate Dead”, along with a poem that in parts reads, “Gashed with honourable scars, Low in Glorys lap they lie.”
On a recent Saturday, Shannon, Phillips and about a dozen opponents of the statue took turns standing in the shade and then striding past Dean with their signs. Police Chief David LaFon stopped by, as usual, making sure everything was calm. It usually is, he said.
The idea of the Human Relations Commission was to bring people together, Shannon said.
And here they were, this Saturday and every Saturday, together but still very much apart.
“It’s a good town, man, but you have some stuff that’s been embedded in the hearts and minds of the people,” Shannon said. “They ain’t looking for no change, you know what I’m saying?”
He’ll keep coming, he said, as long as the standoff endures.
“It’s a struggle, man. I mean, I prayed so much for my children and my grandchildren,” he said.
“When I think about our own history – I mean, we kept coming or kept doing for a long time before we saw some change.”