I’ve talked about Wilson County’s courthouse monument before. There’s renewed pressure to remove it, but its apologists claim it’s not a Confederate monument at all. Rather, it commemorates veterans of all wars.

I’ll let y0u be the judge.

Does the deceptively simple motif below seem familiar? It’s a Saint Andrew’s cross, a notable element of Confederate national and battle flags.

It’s engraved an astounding TEN TIMES around the monument, including the two locations below. (The rough indentation on the front of the plinth? It’s where the word COLORED was gouged out in the early 1960s. There was a water fountain where that little pyramid now sits. Isn’t that reason enough to get this thing out of the public eye?)

Two more. And so on.
The monument went up on Veterans Day 1926, paid for by the John W. Dunham Chapter of United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Thomas Hadley Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It’s on public property, steps away from the county courthouse, a building symbolizing the power and authority of local government.

Recent North Carolina law makes retiring these relics difficult — but not impossible. I urge Wilson County Commissioners to find a way.
Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, July 2023.