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As the Confederate monument in a North Carolina town crashed to the ground Sunday evening, Mayor Mondale Robinson remembered learning its unspoken message as a boy and thinking about it every time he walked past the marble column: You are supposed to be owned by a White person.

And he thought about his mother being forbidden to use the Whites-only drinking fountain that was built into that monument, driving home the message of the Confederate flag etched into the marble.

A generation later, Robinson — who was elected mayor of Enfield, N.C., in May — was overseeing the destruction of that monument and live-streaming it on Facebook.

“Yes sirs!” he hollered as a man driving a tractor pushed over the main column of the 10-foot monument made of Georgia marble and bronze. “Death to the Confederacy around here!”

Six days earlier, the town’s board of commissioners voted 4 to 1 to remove the memorial from Randolph Park. On Sunday, Robinson decided to execute the decision himself, a move that might have violated a state law outlining procedures for such monuments to be taken down. The irregular removal has thrust the town into the ongoing debate about the proper place of Confederate statues and memorials in American life.

Mondale Robinson, the mayor of Enfield, N.C., live-streamed a wheel loader pushing over a Confederate monument in the town’s Randolph Park on Aug. 21. (Video: Mondale Robinson/Facebook)

The town’s police chief, James Ayers, told the mayor that he had asked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to investigate, according to Robinson. Ayers told The Washington Post that the bureau is looking into what happened to the monument but declined to say whether he requested that investigation. The state bureau did not respond to a request for comment from The Post on Tuesday but confirmed to WNCN that an investigation was underway.

Robinson told WNCN that even with the specter of a state investigation, he had “no regrets” about toppling the monument.

The monument, built in 1928 to honor service members who died in the Civil War and World War I, was sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which helped erect similar markers across the South.

A North Carolina law enacted in 2015 prohibits the removal or destruction of state-owned Confederate monuments or any other such “object of remembrance” if it is located on public property. It allows for several exceptions, including when monuments are privately owned or “a building inspector or similar official has determined [an object of remembrance] poses a threat to public safety because of an unsafe or dangerous condition.”

Enfield’s monument posed just such a threat, Robinson said. It could attract white nationalists, especially during one of the events celebrating the town’s role in the Underground Railroad, he said. And as a reminder of slavery and the Jim Crow South, it was a daily torment for the majority-Black city of roughly 1,850 residents that he leads.

“You cannot believe in a Constitution that says we are all equal and also believe in the Confederate constitution,” Robinson told The Post.

Confederate statues: In 2020, a renewed battle in America’s enduring Civil War

A renewed effort to remove Confederate statues, monuments and memorials flared up after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. That push followed similar efforts in the aftermath of a 2015 mass murder at a Black church in Charleston, S.C., and in 2017 after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

More than 100 Confederate memorials came down after the massacre in Charleston, The Post reported. Then, several Southern states added or tightened restrictions. South Carolina required a two-thirds supermajority of its legislature to approve a Confederate monument’s removal, a bar that the state’s Supreme Court overturned last year, the Associated Press reported. Virginia’s legislature initially made it illegal to “disturb” war monuments until Democrats won control and passed legislation that let cities and towns decide what to do with them.

Defenders of Confederate statues and monuments claim that they honor Southern heritage and the soldiers who died fighting in the Civil War. Those pushing for their destruction or relocation note that most of the statues and memorials were not erected immediately after the Civil War but some 50 years later in the early 20th century, during the Jim Crow era.

“The White Southerners will always say this is about heritage, and the Black Southerners will always say that the monuments are an insult,” Karen Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who wrote a book about Confederate monuments, told The Post in 2020.

Robinson is clear about where he stands. He said the Confederate flag is “the same as the Nazi flag is to the Jewish home.”

“I don’t understand how some of my White neighbors are trying to tell me the Confederate flag is about Southern heritage. That is a re-creation of history. That is someone being as creative as ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or Walt Disney,” he said.

As Enfield’s statue came down, Robinson said, he recalled its past but also considered its future — or lack thereof.

“I’m also thinking about, ‘Now I can walk out my front door. Now, little Black kids could come in this park and not have that conversation about the Confederate flag ever again,’ ” he said.

Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/24/mayor-livestream-removal-confederate-monument/