The Graham City Council will have a proposal on its February agenda to rename Sesquicentennial Park to Wyatt Outlaw Park.
“Given the history of the city and culture of the present community, it would be a gesture of reconciliation to rename the park after the man who was hung by the neck from a tree,” wrote Barret Brown, president of the Alamance County Branch of the NAACP in a letter to the city council. “Given the increasingly negative attention the city has been garnering nationally, a unanimous vote on this issue in the affirmative would be viewed as a commitment that you represent all of the citizens of Graham.”
Outlaw was born into slavery in Union Ridge, according to local historian Walter Boyd. While on a detail to build earthworks outside Petersburg, Va. in 1864, he escaped slavery with several others and joined the 2nd Regiment Calvary, U.S. Colored Troops. In 1866, he returned to Alamance County to find it devastated in the aftermath of the Civil War and stewing in poverty and resentment.
Outlaw started a carpentry shop in Graham, and became a target of the White Brotherhood, a local Ku Klux Klan-like vigilante group, over forming a local chapter of the Union League. He was also appointed an officer of the law and blamed for firing shots at a White Brotherhood demonstration in Court Square in 1869.
A year later, a large force of the White Brotherhood dragged Outlaw from his home late at night and hanged him.
It led to a year of strife called the Kirk-Holden War, historians say. White vigilantes assassinated Caswell County Republican state Sen. John Walter Stephens. Gov. William Woods Holden sent in notorious Union guerilla Col. George W. Kirk from Tennessee thinking his reputation for terrorizing western North Carolina would quell the insurrection.
It was a disaster, and the political fallout helped make Holden the only North Carolina governor ever impeached and removed from office. The men charged with Outlaw’s murder were freed in a general amnesty in 1873.
Many have talked about some Outlaw tribute being due, from protesters of the Confederate monument on Court Square to state Sen. Amy Galey. Those ideas include a statue on the square to the name of the new high school now in the planning stages.
Graham Mayor Jerry Peterman said renaming the park was a good request, but there could be some complications and resistance. Council Member Ricky Hall asked about structural problems that could mean the end of the park.
“Why rename something that’s going away?” he asked.
Peterman said there is an old basement under the park, which is roped off now for repairs. If it is someday demolished, Peterman said, any plaque would be moved to the Graham Historical Museum.
The park has been the site of many demonstrations over the years, particularly in the past year. Some, like the Occupy Graham protesters this month, have been calling the location Wyatt Outlaw Park for some time.
The council’s next meeting is Feb. 9.
