City manager: Confederate memorial Fame is on public property
Published 4:55 pm Friday, September 29, 2017
- The Confederate Memorial statue of Fame, the winged muse holding a fallen soldier, was dedicated in 1909 by the Hoke Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It was a fundraising project that was a decade in the making. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.
SALISBURY — The Confederate memorial statue Fame does sit on public property, City Manager Lane Bailey said Friday.
In an emailed statement sent late Friday afternoon, Bailey said that “after much discussion and further research,” the city made that conclusion about the statue at West Innes and Church streets.
Bailey said the statue is on a state-maintained road — Innes Street — but “how much control the North Carolina Department of Transportation exercises over the median is uncertain.”
“The issue of relocating the statue Fame has been a frequent topic of discussion over the past few years, particularly in light of the tragedies in Charleston, South Carolina, and more recently in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Bailey said in the statement.
He said a 2015 law passed by the General Assembly prohibits local governments from removing or relocating “objects of remembrance” on public property.
“What is clear, however, is that the Hoke Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which is the owner of the statue, was given an easement for the statue and the easement is still in place today,” Bailey said.
He said that in order for the statue to be removed, the state would have to give either the city or the DOT permission to relocate it. He said the United Daughters of the Confederacy would also have to give up its easement and “grant its permission for the statue to be changed in any way.”
The issue of whether the statue should be moved resurfaced this week when Salisbury Indivisible, a local advocacy group, wrote to the City Council and asked that it consider relocating the monument.
“It is time for this remembrance of an oppressive and bloody misadventure to move aside,” the organization said in a letter emailed to council members. “The heart of Salisbury must stop looking back to the 19th century and instead cast its gaze forward to the 21st century and beyond.”
The letter said the statue should be put in a museum or cemetery, “where all artifacts of the Confederacy belong.”
Similar calls to move Confederate statues and monuments have come across the nation in the aftermath of the August protests near a monument in Charlottesville that turned violent.
Contact reporter Jessica Coates at 704-797-4222.
