The Alamance County Board of Commissioners has no authority to remove a Confederate monument from in front of the county courthouse because of a state law barring the removal of monuments, the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday.
The ruling upholds an Alamance Superior Court judge’s decision in 2022 to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and others seeking to force the monument’s removal. The lawsuit argued that the county’s “maintenance and protection” of the monument was unconstitutional.
The Court of Appeals disagreed.
In June 2020, County Manager Bryan Haygood suggested the county consider removing the monument out of public safety concerns because of protests taking place at the monument, but the commissioners took no action. Their decision led to the lawsuit being filed in 2021.
County officials have cited the state’s Monument Protection Law, passed in 2015 in response to nationwide protests and the damage or removal of some Confederate monuments. The law prohibits removal of monuments that commemorate an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.
The Court of Appeals agreed with that reasoning.
Because the U.S. government has recognized service in the Confederate forces as military service that qualified spouses of Confederate veterans for pensions and because North Carolina recognizes Confederate Memorial Day as a legal holiday, “we conclude as a matter of law that the (Alamance) Monument was of the type intended to be covered by the General Assembly when it enacted the Monument Protection Law,” the appeals court wrote.
“We conclude that ... the Monument Protection Law as applied in this dispute is constitutional. We, therefore, affirm the order of the trial court granting Defendants summary judgment,” the appeals court wrote.
